Balwinder Singh, Rookie American

In New York, unusual cab driver names are something of a collector’s item. You can tell the people who just moved to the city, because they will sit down at the bar and excitedly tell you that they were just driven there by Muhammad Ali. They don’t realize that Muhammad Ali is the Harry Johnson of New York cab driver names: kind of funny, yes, but also too common to remark upon. After you’ve lived there for a few years, Muhammad Ali becomes just another fixture in the background of the city, like the Empire State Building or human suffering. To impress the true connoisseur of foreign cabbie names, you need something genuinely weird—like a Sherpa Sherpa, say, or a 45 year-old man named “Ball-winder,” who has unwittingly immigrated to a country where that is completely hilarious.

Wind your own balls, asshole.

It helped that Balwinder Singh was really, really angry. Midway through our trip down Fifth Avenue, an elderly woman in a fur coat* crossed in front of us, leading her Pekingese on a leash, and stopped in the middle of the street to check her Blackberry. “Look at this [biscuit],” Balwinder Singh said—shouted, really—to me. “That [biscuit] is a stupid [biscuit.]” I agreed that she was indeed a stupid biscuit, and added that Balwinder Singh was an unusually perceptive person, in part because I was locked in the back seat of his cab. “You stupid [biscuit]!” he yelled out the window. “A dog [fudges] your [apples]!” That seemed like information Balwinder Singh could not possibly have, and the old woman looked at him in confusion. At that point, he made a noise deep in his throat that I assume is pretty common where he comes from, although I have never been able to successfully replicate it, and drove the cab up onto the sidewalk to get around her. “This is good, right here,” I said, and got the fudge out of there.

Because I am a bad person, I immediately told as many people about Balwinder Singh as I possibly could. No one believed me, which was weird. Normally when I tell made-up stories, they’re really convincing and I am the object of universal admiration, so I just assumed that it would be even easier to relate an anecdote that actually happened. Something about the Balwinder Singh story lacked the sterling gloss of absolute truth, though. People had a tendency to wait patiently while I told it, the way you respond to the guy at the party who has decided to work his stand-up comedy routine into your conversation. I discovered that there was something about the Balwinder Singh story that reflected poorly on its narrator. To the outside observer, I appeared to have constructed a comic tale about an angry foreigner with an amusing name, who yelled broken English out his cab window while he drove me around the wealthiest neighborhood in America. It was a story of privilege smugly amused.

  A story of privilege smugly amused.

When I lived in Brooklyn, my landlord was one Manilal Ramnanan—a name we used to say three times fast in order to determine whether we were okay to drive. Ours was the kind of place where you paid the rent in cash, and when I finally wrote Ramnanan a check, my name completely blew his mind. “Dan. Brooks,” he said, punching the air. “You could really do something.” Manilal Ramnanan owned an entire building in Brooklyn, whereas my air mattress had a hole in it, but when he tried to sign up for cable the customer service lady took three cracks at spelling his name and then just hung up. “Dan Brooks,” he said. “It’s incredible.”