Opinion From a late-night cab ride, a story of hope and a reality check — feeling safe should not be a luxury
The footage inside Mollick’s car also makes us ask something: Why do we always imagine stories involving a vulnerable woman and a man in control to have a horrific end?
For his part, Mollick, who has found himself in the centre of unlikely fame and hero worship, chooses to wear his knight-in-shining-armour crown lightly A teenage girl, drunk, in the back seat of a stranger’s car, alone, at night. What could possibly go wrong? Depends on where you live, actually. In a society where women in a far less vulnerable state have paid the price of daring to be out and about, and where instances of violence among women multiply by the minute, one can’t really be blamed for imagining the worst.
This story, though, has a happy ending. The woman is dropped safely home, reassured throughout the commute that she is in a safe space; the stranger even advises her mother, worried sick on the phone, to rest easy. She will be home.
The scene played out recently, not in a short film but in real life, inside a taxi in Kolkata. The protagonist of the story is a cab driver, Munna Ajij Mollick, doing his nightly rounds when he finds himself in a tricky situation — being in charge of the safety of a girl completely off her face. Mollick puts on the car’s dash cam and records everything that unfolds over the next few minutes.
“Uncle, I am so drunk. Can you help me with that?” says the girl, tapping the driver on the shoulder.
“I know you are drunk, beta… please, please, please keep quiet, keep quiet. I will take you home.”
The conversation quickly assumes the shape of a banter between two siblings, with the mature, older one assuring the younger, footloose one, of not letting the parents know of the drunken stupor while also indulgently taunting them for being a “spoilt brat”.
During the conversation, the vulnerability in the young woman’s voice shines through: “How will I go back home?”
And then, the reply, “I will take you home. I will take you home.”
Being a woman in India has never been easy, but the last few years, with 24×7 news cycles becoming a way of life, have made women acutely aware of how unsafe they are, with strangers and people they know alike. Only a few days before the Kolkata reel went viral, a woman on her way back from an office party in Udaipur was raped inside a car — in the presence of a female colleague, in case you wanted to ask what she was doing there all alone. Around the same time, another woman, who had stepped out of her home after a tiff with her mother, was raped by two men who had offered her a ride in Faridabad.
Kolkata itself, barely a year ago, had witnessed the horrific rape and murder of a medical student inside her workplace. Her fault: Taking a nap inside an empty room after a long and hard shift at work.
One reason Mollick’s gesture touched a chord was that we all saw ourselves somewhere in that young woman who was his passenger that night. Getting sloshed on the farewell night, having a private moment with a partner in a thicket, finding oneself all alone on an empty road after a vehicle breakdown — we have all been there.
And even as it makes us smile, the footage inside Mollick’s car makes us also ask something: Why do we always imagine stories involving a vulnerable woman and a man in control to have a horrific end? How bad have we gotten as a society that this has become the default setting? That a cab driver driving a woman, drunk or not, safely home becomes an act of heroism as against simply being his job, as Mollick reminds his passenger more than once: “It’s my job. I will drop you home.”
Women should not have to pay with their life or live with lasting trauma just because they wanted to get home after an office party, step out for a New Year celebration, or return after catching a late-night show with a male friend. In the aftermath of the 2012 Delhi rape-murder, I remember reading somewhere that “being safe in the city is a full-time job.” While reassuring his passenger, the Kolkata cab driver seems to reassure the rest of us, too, that it does not always have to be the case. That we can relax. And that we can safely get home.
For his part, Mollick, who has found himself in the centre of unlikely fame and hero worship, chooses to wear his knight-in-shining-armour crown lightly.
“The woman wasn’t fully conscious. So, I just had to tolerate her tantrums and ensure her safety, which I did. That’s my duty,” Mollick, a 31-year-old teaching aspirant, told The Indian Express recently when asked about the moments that catapulted him to fame.
Almost as amusing as the banter inside the car was Mollick’s mother’s reaction to the frenzy that followed his son’s heroic act. “She just said, ‘Why are people praising you? What else are you expected to do? Dropping her home safely was your duty, not an extraordinary feat,” shared Mollick.
Maybe here lies the trick: Raising our boys right. Here’s to Munna Ajij Mollick, his wonderful mother and that awkward encounter between two strangers, a 31-year-old man and a drunk teenage girl, inside a cab in Kolkata. May every woman who finds herself in a situation like this get home just as safe.
The writer is an assistant editor, The Indian Express. deepika.singh@expressindia.com
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