Bangalore auto and the philosophy of maybe

The 8:47 auto-rickshaw, idling outside Brigade Road, did not say no when I asked for HSR. It did not say yes either. It tilted its head by perhaps four degrees, looked at a fixed point above my left shoulder, and made a small movement with its hand that could, depending on the kind of day I was having, have meant anything between come on, get in and go away, I am thinking.

I have lived here long enough to know that there are five distinct varieties of this gesture. There is the gesture of ambient unwillingness, in which the driver is, in principle, available, but would prefer that you find someone else. There is the gesture of conditional acceptance, in which the destination is fine but the meter is not. There is the gesture of weather, in which the auto exists in some abstract sense but the driver, today, does not.

I cannot reliably distinguish between any of these.

Bangalore traffic is mostly weather; you don't ask the cloud whether it intends to rain.

— a working theory of urban planning

I have come, over the years, to a small, quiet peace with this. The auto is not the obstacle. The not-knowing is the obstacle, and the not-knowing, it turns out, is the city itself.

You learn, eventually, to live inside the maybe. You learn to ask twice, gently, and to walk away without rancour the third time. You learn that the auto that finally agrees to take you, at 8:53, is not the same auto you tried at 8:47, and that the difference, somehow, is not just statistical.