Family loyalty and obligation are deeply rooted within South Asian culture. Children, especially the eldest, are expected to support parents, grandparents and other family members who might need help, whether with caretaking or financially.
While this attitude helps create strong ties and a supportive community, it can also be deeply isolating — especially if all the burden falls on one person.
Family, isolation and late-stage capitalism are just three of the themes Priya Guns explores in her debut novel, “Your Driver Is Waiting,” out Tuesday from Doubleday. Pitched as a “gender-flipped reboot of the iconic 1970s film ‘Taxi Driver,’ ” the book follows the days of Damani, a queer Tamil woman working as a ride-share driver.
Underpaid, badly treated by passengers, grieving her late father and under constant pressure to take care of her bedridden mother, Damani is barely surviving each day. Her lifelines are her friends, a repurposed community space called the Doo Wop and a new but hotter-than-hot romance with a White woman, Jolene, who reciprocates Damani’s passion nearly to the point of aggression.
But the realities of Damani and Jolene’s lives are very different. When Jolene forces that tension into open conflict at the Doo Wop, the result is chaos for Damani, her friends and her very sanity.
A writer, actor and student, Guns explains how she drew from her own background to create the world of “Your Driver Is Waiting.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q As a fellow South Asian, the scenes around Damani’s parents resonated very strongly with me with regard to understanding the “rules” of family loyalty and responsibility.
A I feel like there’s no escaping it. It’s our reality, right? There’s just so much that you’re brought up to believe. I was told by my grandmother: Study, take care of yourself and do well so you can take care of your parents. My mom was a cleaner, and my dad is a security guard. We’re very working class. Being first generation, you’re trying to understand things like when the bins go out on garbage day, little things that a kid isn’t supposed to really think about. It was just so natural to make Damani a carer from the beginning. Through writing, I understood more of Damani’s relationship with her mom, and it made me think a lot about my relationship with my mom as well.
When you sit down and you talk to your friends who are brown, this is what we talk about. It’s like, I have to do this, I have to do that. When I left my parents’ house in 2009 because I wanted to see the world, that was a huge deal. Being children of immigrants, it’s part of our lives.
Q So how much inspiration did you end up taking from “Taxi Driver”?
A It’s inspired by “Taxi Driver” in that I really thought about the film while writing, but the book is very different and stands alone in its own right. Travis Bickle, for instance, deals with alienation and loneliness just as Damani does. But that alienation and loneliness exists on a completely different plane. Unlike Travis Bickle, Damani has friends, people she can rely on; her isolation comes from financial pressure and family obligations.
The root of their anger is also very different. Damani works in the gig economy, under late-stage capitalism. It’s a very different time from 1976, when the movie came out. When I started to plan this novel, it was in 2020, and we all had a lot to be angry about.
Did you pick up on my little homage to Travis Bickle? I made him a small character in the book after wondering, what would he be like at 80?
Q Are Damani’s friends based on fictional characters? Or maybe on real people?
A Her group of friends are slightly based on my own friends but also on what I wish I had more of. I’ve lived in a lot of different places, moving around on my own. And when you’re moving around constantly, you make connections with a lot of amazing people — but then you leave. I was thinking about what I was missing and what I really want more of in my life. I might have it in doses when I go back to Toronto, or if I visit people, but it’s just a dose.
Q So what inspired the Doo Wop? It’s a very interesting place in how it supports people.
A I’m very interested in this idea of reimagining just about everything — reimagining how we tell stories, reimagining how we dismantle systems of power. In the novel, I wanted to create this utopia of what could be possible. If I’m thinking about reimagining society, what does it look like in this industrialized building that people have taken over and remade?
What we don’t often see is what happens in organizing spaces. What happens when people who are a part of a union come together and they discuss what it is that they need? We don’t see that or hear about that often enough, I think. The Doo Wop showcases how that all exists within this one space.
Q Through Jolene, you kind of explored the tensions of race and class … was she also part of the story from the beginning?
A I wanted to write something where there was a woman of color and a White woman, and I want there to be an obsession. At first I was like, oh, I’m gonna have so much fun with this, even though I was also trying really hard to make sure Jolene wasn’t just a caricature of a White liberal, rich woman.
But something interesting happened while I was writing, and when I was drawing on my own experiences. I felt like Jolene, and I didn’t expect that to happen. I realized that we can all be Jolenes. People who don’t stop to question their own actions might have Jolene tendencies. Just because you’re a racialized person or a working-class person or a queer person doesn’t mean you’re incapable of saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing, right? We’re all very capable of committing a microfascism, if you will.
Q What are you hoping people will take away from reading your book?
A At the very least, I hope I make people laugh. I hope people think more about class and race and have conversations about class and race. And that when we talk about change, perhaps it’s more than just saying we have to do something.
The protests that happened in the book, for example, aren’t disruptive for the most part. But what happens at the Doo Wop is direct in that they are actively doing things to make a difference, or at least trying to, and equipping people with knowledge.
There have been moments in my life when people have come together with a common goal while maybe being very clueless of how we can get there. But still, we just know that we can come together and feel something, share our stories, share our highs and our lows and move towards something better.