Raj Kumar

It’s a typical Monday morning in Kampala. Arrive at the office and find the internet is down. The internet is also down at the Educate! compound and has been for the past week. The Educate! ATM card isn’t working properly so I can’t get money out to pay salaries to my employees. So I hop on a boda boda to get to the bank in town, helmet sweating on my head, mobile clutched in hand for when the incompetent MTN technician calls me back. At the bank, the systems are down so they can’t fix my ATM card. But thankfully they have cash (unlike my last trip to the bank) so I manage to get enough money out. On my way back to the office (still no call from MTN), the traffic is bad. Real bad. At one point, we get stuck behind a car with two muzungus in it. The husband sits in the front seat with glasses and pressed shirt. The wife is behind with manicured nails and a massive ring on her finger. Their driver is Ugandan. Of course. It’s a normal every day sight for a developing country. But this morning, it hits me differently, and I find myself thinking of Raj.

Raj Kumar was one of two family drivers my father employed when we lived in New Delhi. He had these round, somber eyes and a rather weak smile. Always reticent, his main method of communication was the Indian head tilt where you were never sure whether it was a “yes” or a “no” or a “maybe??”. The only time I ever saw him really joyful was the day after Holi, when he would show up to work with a sheepish grin and a large patch of pink staining his hair. He drove me and my sister everywhere – to school for class, to school for swim practice, to school for track practice, to friend’s houses, to go shopping, to go to parties… He’d drive us wherever we wished, wait in the shade somewhere for as long as we needed, and then drive us home. He was our Indian driver who drove two young foreign girls around the city of New Delhi for 3.5 years.

He hated me, of that I’m sure. My younger sister was the cute one with tom boy short hair and a genuine smile. I was the bratty teenager, constantly at war with my mother, always fighting with my sister. Delhi was hot, very hot in the summer. I’d wear short shorts to school, and strappy tank tops. Highly inappropriate in the Indian culture but in my little bubble of the American International School I fit right in. Never mind the Indian men idling outside our school gates for a glimpse of our pale limbs. He drove me to parties at night where there was plenty of alcohol and drugs. In fact, he drove me home drunk many a time. The other driver, Sompal, he liked me. If my curfew was midnight, I’d stumble out at ten to, and he’d speed me home as fast as he could knowing my Mama was waiting. Raj? He would drive slowly, stopping at all the red lights.

Over a decade later and I wonder, how did I end up here? I’ve switched tuk tuks for boda bodas, nimbu pani for fresh passion juice. I’m inhaling Kampala fumes instead of New Delhi fumes and I’m working long hours for very little pay at a nonprofit, trying to empower Ugandan youth to become the future leaders of Africa. How much of what I do today is because I used to be driven around in an air conditioned car by Raj in a land of beggars and poverty? 12 years old and smack, suddenly I’m surrounded by very hungry eyes and grimy fingers.

If he despised me then for being an immature spoilt teenager with no respect for his culture, what would he think of me now? Would he understand my work? Would he be proud that he knew me? Would he have some understanding as to why I do what I do?