It’s okay being carless and Carlos

Durban - My old boss Trevor would always call me “Carlos” when I was without transport after my car had broken down.

It doesn’t do one too much harm to temporarily leave the car class and start using public transport and your feet. Being “Carlos” puts me more in touch with the world.

Learning patience once again while waiting for a bus, not knowing the timetable and not knowing whether the bus service sticks to it anyway, is an exercise of transformation: from frustration to meditation.

When I give up on waiting and head for a few stops further on foot, it makes up for the exercise I put off all the time except for my weekly beachfront cycle with my friend, Chris.

What one learns from walking the streets is that robots are often not programmed to give enough time for pedestrians to cross. I hope I don’t forget that when I am no longer “Carlos”!

E-hailing is the most expensive form of public transport I have used as “Carlos”. I rapidly started using the service when my radiator packed up a couple of Saturdays ago on my way to lunch with friend Liz in Umdloti; a monthly routine for which I cook my trademark mango-flavoured bobotie.

I had hardly downloaded the app when a car was waiting for me, hooting. Cuisine and I had to load up in a hurry or face a surcharge for every minute the customer keeps the driver waiting.

The driver told me he used to have a food and veg outlet in Merebank, which he lost during the July looting.

“I just took the insurance money and started driving,” he said.

“Much better life,” but not without its costs. He and the next and the next and the next driver told me about how they had survived hijacking attempts. One told “Carlos” he was even put into the boot “so I couldn’t see anything”.

Checks and balances for security need to be watertight in a country like ours. From my side, it’s a little unnerving when the car that picks me up has a different registration number to the one the app tells me is on its way.

The regular bus is the cheapest option. A minibus taxi is three bucks more expensive on my route home.

Once, I was the only passenger in a minibus taxi. The driver cursed “that bloody bus that came before me. It always takes my passengers”. And he went on to say how unfair it was that the company his father had faithfully served for 40 years coldly dismissed him for once being drunk on duty.

“After 40 years and just because of his illness!”

Intercity minibuses aren’t as colourful. In fact, they’re like flights out of King Shaka. No one says much. Everyone’s eyes are on their devices and they have earphones in their ears.

When on the N3, do as the N3 minibus passengers. So, I scrolled Facebook on a trip to visit my adult kids in Pietermaritzburg. On to my page came a post about the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra and the Durban Symphonic Choir performing Handel’s Messiah at St Joseph’s Cathedral in Mariannhill. A concert at Mariannhill had been on my bucket list for years but, even when not "Carlos", I hadn't got off my bee-hind to attend one.

I would have missed the FB post had I not been “Carlos” and I'd been driving to the provincial capital rather than scrolling on my phone, minibus and airways style.

On the return trip I yelled “Hillcrest”, the standard way of requesting a minibus taxi driver to stop, and I e-hailed from Winston Park Garage down Stockville Road into a valley of corrugated iron farmsteads that bring one’s mind back to Natal in the ’60s.

Then on to the grounds of Mariannhill Monastery filled with an atmosphere of the turn of the past century when the “silent monks” of the Trappist Order established a string of mission stations through KZN, Mariannhill being the mother ship.

The concert under a ceiling decorated with powerful Biblical scenes and slogans in Latin, was a cracker.

Energy, harmony, atmosphere.

The Hallelujah hit hadn’t happened by interval. I asked a woman behind me, “is that it?”, well believing that it would have been fair enough for the performers to have given us all their energy had allowed them.

But there was more to come. In an atmosphere more electric than Eskom could ever deliver, everyone stood up for Hallelujah. When the music stopped, the rain was pelting down on the roof and the smell of braaivleis was wafting through from the boerewors roll stand outside.

It was their first performance since lockdown and dedicated to the memory of Heather Brandon, who founded the Durban Symphonic Choir in 1966 and was its director until 1987.

She died during lockdown, we were told.

Her choir and its accompanying orchestra have a huge new fan in “Carlos”.

The Independent on Saturday