Putting Things to Good Use
The taxi driver pointed out the round camera hanging next to the traffic light. He said that they were being installed all over the city. “They are trying to make us into Europeans. But we’re Asiatics,” he told me. Red light cameras are meant to motivate people, through punitive measures, to think twice before violating this very basic rule of the road. My taxi driver seemed to be implying that running red lights was an essential characteristic of an Asiatic temperament. And not to be fucked with. “Look at that,” he said while we were waiting at the traffic light, “A man, and he’s driving a red car. How about that?” I said I thought that anything was possible. But what I really meant was that it didn’t seem at all strange to me that a man would be driving a red car and that, for Europeans and the like, red cars might even be seen as an expression of fiery and untamed masculinity. But I was too tired to get into this kind of conversation. And then the light turned green and we made a left onto Fizuli Street. A few minutes earlier I’d asked him whether he would be taking this street to my neighborhood and he had replied in the negative. I could have pointed out that this was, in fact, the Fizuli Street I meant and asked why no one in this city bothered learning street names anymore. But I just told him to take a right after Az Dram. As we drove behind Besh Mertebe, the eponymous landmark of my neighborhood, he asked me if I knew why this area was called that. “Because this was the first five-storey building in Baku,” I answered. And he seemed satisfied that I was learning things about the city.
