Foreign Drivers

I got a call from my driver at 7:45 this morning. Whatever he said, he said it in such a thick accent that it might as well have been in his native tongue. I said, “What?” and he repeated what he had said, and I somehow deciphered that he was saying that he would pick me up at 8:30. I had been awake all night watching movies and was just getting to sleep, and I had already decided that I wasn’t going to be going to group therapy again after today; the others in the group talk too much and too stupidly, and then we fill out worksheets that look like they’re designed for children with emotional problems; so I put my phone on do not disturb so as not to be bothered with a call when the driver was outside, and I went to sleep. I didn’t want to ride all the way to the appointment with some Nigerian talking to me in an accent that I can’t understand, or to be picked up by an overexcited Indian again.

The Indian who picked me up last time shouted about his kids eating too much and his wife being “crazy”. I said, “Well, she is a woman,” that too oft-repeated chauvinistic joke. Then went on a rant about Muslims and Hindus in his homeland of India. He said that the Muslims make attacks on Hindu temples, and the Hindus attack the mosques in retribution.

“You hit me, I hit you!” He shouted. “What’s the difference between Muslim Allah and Christian Jesus? Both say that you can’t eat pork but you can eat beef. We say that you can eat pork but you don’t eat beef; cows are for milk, pigs are for meat! Why do Muslims and Christians say that you can’t eat pork?!”

I said something about how Islam and Christianity are both Abrahamic religions like Judaism, so it probably has something to do with cloven hooves and the pigs not chewing their cud. Or it could have something to do with the scab carried by pigs, for which the Egyptian priest Manetho would have it that Jews were driven out of Egypt over — but in any case, I didn’t want to have this conversation again when all I really wanted was a ride home from my therapy appointment.