Languor Management: Words fall out of my head

Words Fall Out of My Head

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake
— Rabindranath Tagore

“Greenpoint!” I didn’t say it, the cabbie did. I had just hailed a taxi on Ninth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street and before I could follow through with “I’m going to…,” the man behind the wheel finished my thought.

“Excuse me?”

“You want to go to Greenpoint…in Brooklyn!”

“Yes. But how did you know?”

“When I saw you flagging me, I said to myself, ‘Ahmed, this guy wants to go to Greenpoint!’” He was excited. His voice was raised and he smacked the steering wheel with delight. He was obviously proud of himself. It was as if he put all his money on guessing my destination and his bet had paid off handsomely.

“That’s amazing,” I said, truly amazed. “What’s my tell?”

“Your ‘tell’?”

Yes. What gave me away?”

“Oh! Well, sir, you look like an artist of moderate success, so I thought Brooklyn…but not Williamsburg. You look too successful for that, but not Manhattan successful. So I said to myself, “He’s young, not quite established, but he’s on his way. Definitely Greenpoint! You are an artist, aren’t you, sir?”

“Well, I’m a writer—.”

“See! What do you think of that?”

“Amazing. But I wouldn’t consider myself ‘moderately successful,’ but I try—”

“Wait! Now, what do you think of that,” he nodded toward two young women on the corner of Waverly Place and Broadway.

It was mid-July, so they were, of course, wearing more or less nothing at all. But they were very young, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old. I took a neutral path, “I’d say they’re N.Y.U. students.”

“Bah! That’s too easy! I’m talking about their bodies!” He smacked his lips with the same delight he had exhibited upon guessing my destination.

“Oh, Niiiiccce.”

“I see a lot of that driving around here.

“I bet,” I said and quickly changed the subject. “You know, about a month back, I was attacked in a cab.”

“Attacked?! By who, the driver?”

“No, a drunk Irishman jumped in the car and, not knowing what else to do, punched me in the face.”

He grew very serious. “What did the driver do?”

“He came to my rescue and fought him off. He was an Uzbek—“

“Well, an Uzbek…. They’re tough! But it was his duty to protect you! I’m from Bangladesh and I would do the same!”

“I appreciate that.”

The ride and conversation continued in much the same fashion as we proceeded to the Williamsburg Bridge. I learned that Ahmed lived in Patterson, New Jersey, and that he had a degree in engineering, but he enjoyed driving a cab, going so far as to suggest that every man should be made to drive a cab for two years so as to better understand life, “especially if he wanted to be an artist.”

I asked him if he knew William Carlos Williams’s epic poem “Patterson.” He didn’t, but he would look it up. Then he asked, “Listen, do you know the writings of Rabindranath Tagore?”

“Of course! He was a great poet.”

“My god! How did you know that?”

“I studied literature in school, mostly Russian and American but…”

“Russian? Why Russian?”

“Just curious, I guess.”

We had just exited the Brooklyn Queens Expressway when he pulled over at a Mobil station, switched off the meter, and handed me a small, yellow notebook and a stub of a pencil.

“But this isn’t my stop.”

“Sir, would you please write down your five favorite poets? I wish to make a study of them.”

I jotted down the first names that came to mind: Osip Mandelshtam, Sasha Chernyi, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Andrei Voznesensky, and Marina Tsvetaeva.
“Now, write your name at the bottom and then sign it, please.”

“Sign it? Why?”

“I want your autograph.”

“My autograph? But why?”

“Because, one day, I have no doubt that you will be very famous, and I will have this page as a memory of you. Your penmanship is terrible!”

“Wow, you have more faith in me than my mother!” I said, truly touched, if embarrassed. After all, all that I had told him was that I had been beaten in a cab by an Irishman and that I enjoyed Russian poetry—and my penmanship is indeed terrible.

“Ah, what do mothers know? Listen, I wanted to be a writer but my English is terrible.”

“You’re English is fantastic,” I assured him. It was excellent.

“No. Words fall out of my head. I can’t remember them.”

“I’m sure you must have hundreds of stories after driving this cab.”

“Oh, I do! But I can’t write them down in English.”

“What about in Bangladeshi?”

“Who reads Bangladeshi? This is my country now.”

“Well, I think you’d make a great story teller. Now give me your autograph.”

He laughed and signed a page in his notebook and handed it to me. “Ahmed Paloub!” He shook my hand enthusiastically and pulled out of the Mobil station parking lot, but not before turning the meter back on.