Your Driver is Waiting book review: A debut novel influenced by Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver

Robert De Niro in 'Taxi Driver' (Screenshot/Columbia Pictures via YouTube/Sony Pictures)

Paul Schrader’s script for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver opens with an arresting description of Travis Bickle, the main character. He “seems to have wandered in from a land where it is always cold”. Behind the smile, around his dark eyes, and in his gaunt cheeks, “one can see the ominous stains caused by a life of private fear, emptiness and loneliness”.

Doubleday; 313 pages; $21.47

This could well be a portrait of Damani, the protagonist of Priya Guns’s debut novel, Your Driver is Waiting. The correspondence doesn’t end there. Damani drives a taxi day and night, picking up passengers whom she views with disdain or sympathy. She looks out at the world with anger and despair, lifts weights with savage dedication and, at one point, shaves her head.

While Taxi Driver may have been an inspiration, Your Driver is Waiting is much more than a retelling. If the trauma of the Vietnam War was the filter through which Bickle viewed the world, Guns’s heroine is a product of contemporary times. Her environment is that of inequality, liberal activism, and corporate greed.

The Jaffna-born and Canada-based author’s novel is set in an unnamed city, many elements of which are only too familiar. This is a place where “a few people have a lot, some are just fine, most are struggling”. Both the circumstances and the air are polluted, but “there we were, breathing in every bit of this manufactured life and asking for more…The city thrived on the dreams of the smothered.”

The driver tries to make ends meet, get over her father’s recent death, and care for her despairing mother. Driving for a ride-hailing company means long and demanding working hours. She returns home long after midnight, struggles to sleep, and rises again at seven the next day.

Damani deals with her anxieties by being prepared. There’s a switchblade in the glove compartment, a can of pepper spray by the front door, and a pair of scissors near the pedals. Items in the trunk include bottles of water and bleach, a baseball bat, paper towels, antiperspirant, condoms, tampons, and diapers.

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Some passengers are kindly regulars, others are nasty; some are chatty, others are silent. There are “soul-spillers, secret blurters, conspiracy theorists gone wild”. A few go on about how she is being exploited by “the devil of all companies,” but they “had to use my services just this one time”.

When not behind the wheel, Damani finds sustenance in YouTube self-help videos and the company of others like her. There’s a former classmate who is a tutor by day and a dancer by night, and another friend who works as a mechanic and moonlights as a driver. They live in times when “most people in the city got paid to do one thing, but did something else on the side”.

The Doo-Wop, a club-cum-community centre, is where they drink, dance, and try to organise for change. Among the campaigns of this underclass are demands for ownership, to make “all these rich folks step down, and we flip their scheme into a cooperative”.

It's when Damani bumps into Jolene that her life takes a dramatic turn. Jolene could be from a different planet: a blonde, white, social worker who is well off, to boot. There are instant sparks between the two -- even if the character can seem underdeveloped, and their initial meetings coincidental.

As the relationship blooms, Damani thinks: “If Jolene was anything, she was the sun. Perfect at a distance, but up close, she could hurt my skin.” Those words turn out to be prescient. Class interests collide, as they tend to do, and Damani muses: “I’m not sure which is worse, being broke or being broken. Being both was definitely the worst, though.”

The novel’s social commentary is timely, such as when Guns lampoons middle-class activists who ally themselves with progressive causes. “I’ve been to twenty-five protests in the past two weeks,” says one. “I am literally exhausted.” Such skewering, however, is sometimes accompanied by didacticism that shows the author’s thumb on the scales.

Much of the book’s appeal lies in its defiant first-person voice, a combination of sarcasm and sincerity. She comments on the unbalanced way we live today, mocks performative liberal sensibilities, and captures the hopefulness of a budding relationship. This makes Your Driver is Waiting a dark satire that is also often bleakly funny.

The novel’s epigraph is a quote by Sri Lankan-British novelist and activist Ambalavaner Sivanandan: “If those who have do not give, those who haven’t must take.” Your Driver is Waiting spotlights the potholed journeys of have-nots to take what they need.

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