Babu - The Auto Driver in Chennai

On a tight string budget, I had an urgent trip to make to Chennai, the capital city of Tamil Nadu, one of the most crowded place that I have so often travelled. I was on a 5-day business trip as was I told by the person who had invited me to the city for a business. As I boarded the bus, I booked the return ticket, with the help of dispatch guy who had come to examine our tickets. Five days later it would be the weekend for harvest festival ‘Onam’ in Kerala. All Keralites working in Tamil Nadu would be returning home for celebration with family and friends. I was happy to be handed over a return ticket at preferred location on the bus for such an eventful weekend.

Large cities these days keep changing its look and feel in a matter of couple of years and I was revisiting the city after about four years. Chennai being a metro city will have many corners that you may not have travelled even if you have stayed there for a year or two. Chennai looked more crowded even on the city outskirts, the bus I was travelling was moving slowly even at six in the morning. As I looked out of the window, I could see people queuing up for water with their pots. Soon memories returned of a year-and-a-half long stay in the city about ten years back. The crowd, the heat, the humidity and mosquitoes. It was terrible when I had come back temporarily to the city about seven-and-a-half years back with my little daughter. We had rented a good apartment at a seemingly good locality, but when it was evening, the swarm of mosquitoes almost seemed would carry her away if she was left unattended. Today, I had arrived at one new corner called Arumbakkam.

My three-year-old technological assistant, a Lenovo A536, mobile was no longer reliable, with a rapidly draining battery, I could only dream of starting Google map for assistance. I had to rely on God’s best creation, my fellow human beings. As I climb down the bus that I took from Kerala, here comes one among them, an autorickshaw driver, introducing himself as best guide to the city.

I shared with him information and told him that I wished to go to Sholinganallur and find a temporary accommodation there. He came up with the most wonderful plan for my stay in Chennai. He told me that the place that I had landed up was the best place to stay. Not only was the Kallada bus office nearby, but also it has the Arumbakkam metro rail station right next to it. He said, I could take the metro and reach Sholinganallur in half-an-hour. Any other means would mean hours of travelling in the heavy traffic of the city roads. He added, that a hotel nearby was just walking distance away and that it has fresh water running in its pipeline all 24 hours. I could not but concur with him when he added that there was water problem everywhere more so when I had already witnessed it through the glass window of the bus I had just alighted. To boost up his convincing power, he added that I could easily plan or re-plan my return journey staying right next to my preferred bus service office. He had witnessed my arrival and certainly had a clue on my preferences. He concluded his chit chat saying that as a Muslim he will not cheat and that I could trust him.

The hotel ‘Chennai Park Inn’ was just about 500 meters away and looked decent. It offered AC/non-AC rooms. Being on shoe string budget, I opted for the non-AC. The uncertainty of the choice I had made guided by the auto driver who got engaged in a chit-chat with hotel caretaker in Tamil being another reason. The auto driver had promised to leave his contact number and wrote it down on the receipt the hotelier gave for the payments I made. He wrote his name as Babu on the slip, an unusual name for a Muslim. Babu left and I checked with the hotelier if mosquito repellants would be needed. His ‘No’ was a surprise that made me feel he was misleading. I was guided to my room and it looked neat, and I could also feel the heat. However, all I looked forward to being was to freshen up and start for the business that I had arrived for in Chennai. There was no towel, or toiletries on offer and had to get them from a shop nearby. As I was returning from the shop I recollected information that was given to me by the person whom I had come to meet. I check with the hotelier if there was a metro station at Sholinganallur. The answer in the negative concurred with my invitee.

I got ready and left to meet the guy I had come to meet. I took a bus to get the feel of the city, it would have been a long tedious travel had the business guy not called me right after my journey began. He now wanted a change in the location and it was in a direction opposite to the one earlier. I got down from the bus and as I inquired, I began to realize that goodness that God had in plan for me even though I had been misguided wishfully or not. The new place was closer to the accommodation I had landed up and I could reach there in 15 minutes. The guy who had invited me to the city could not meet me and he had arranged for others to meet to make the deal workout. These other guys seemed to me the people that I wanted to deal with for the phase, and we soon arrived at a timeline of working things out. It also meant that, I was no longer required to stay in the city until a few more days had gone by.

By evening we had finalized on all aspects to push things forward and I returned to the ‘Kallada Bus Service Office’ to cancel and reschedule my earlier booked return ticket to that evening. The staff then available at the office did not have access to rescheduling part of the software they used on their computer. They asked me to return one hour later. To my delight the hotel I had booked was just a five-minute walk away. Had I booked an accommodation at Sholinganallur I would have had to travel more than two hours one way and may have never made it back to the Bus station in time to catch the evening bus that day. I would have had to extend my stay one more day with nothing recreative or profitable to do on a shoe-string budget. But here now I could go back to the hotel, freshen up again with a tummy that seemed to have got a bit upset, return to the bus office one hour later and reschedule, go back to hotel, rest a while and then take a bath before boarding for the return travel.

This incident brought back to memory a WhatsApp message on an African woman who had, been praying for supplies to feed her starving family. An atheist who learnt about her decide to mock her God and had sent her a huge quantity of supplies and wanted the courier deliverers to let her know that the devil had sent her the stuff. The woman was overjoyed to receive the parcel and thanked her God for the parcel. When the courier deliverer asked her if she wanted to know who had sent her the ration, she just responded that she was not bothered, as when her God acted even the devil would work to make her prayers heard.

For believers, such faith, makes them feel the presence of a God who can make work every adversity work for the good in the life of a faithful. Atheist and devil worshipers would keep the world in dark making them run after scientific proofs. In these times we see, that many of the scientific proofs that people linger on to make their life better push them in the wrong direction, when science begins to study the missing parameters that lead to proofs that were misleading in the first place. Depending on God to make wrong things right, give us a more joyful and a life of thanks giving.

Babu, the auto driver may have not had the bad intention, to mislead. He must have assumed the existence of a metro station at Sholinganallur. However, his dependence on good deeds to declare the victory of him in his faith as a Muslim may not be enough to help him in the good he assumes he is doing. However, faith in the true God, would make all bad situations that man may perceive he is living in to work for the benefit of him. That true God has given us his word that need no correction, it remains true and relevant for all ages. That true God has also transformed the word into flesh and dwelt among us to be called ‘Immanuel’ meaning ‘God with us’. The fruits of the His spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance; against such there is no law. That helps us free ourselves from the laws of science too J.


Romans 8:28 And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.