I ride cabs here a couple of times a day. Going to work. Returning from work.  Whenever I go to or come back from anywhere I can’t walk … I’m in a cab.

That gives me two opportunities per day to interact with people for whom English is not a mother tongue. I wouldn’t call these guys (and they are 99.9 percent guys) “local” because they aren’t local. They live here, but they aren’t from here. Not in the sense of being native Arabs. Emiratis, as they are known.

These gentlemen come, overwhelmingly, from “the subcontinent”, as it is sometimes still known in the West. That is, India, in particular, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. With the stray guy from Nepal.

Anyway, these are the expats who do the heavy lifting in this town.  In construction, small businesses, janitorial jobs, service jobs of all sorts. They work hard, they scrimp and save to send money home to family, and they also always seem to be thinking about how they can better themselves. They aren’t slackers or idlers; they wouldn’t be here, far from friends and family, if they were. If you want to sit and watch the world go by and maybe not eat … you can stay home and do that.

But they usually don’t have quite enough English (and I have zero Urdu or Hindi) for us to converse. And most drivers pretty much give up,  once we have established where we want to go and,  sometimes,  what country we are from.

But one guy the other day … he was giving us his best shot.

He wasn’t a young man. Maybe 40, 45? Thick head of straight black hair. Looked as if he had shaved more recently than some of the gold-taxi guys. A bit of a twinkle in his eye. A jovial feel to him, as if he had laughed recently and would again soon.

Oh. And he was driving one of the “gold” taxis that we almost never ride in. The ones that cost next to nothing. And I mean really cost next to nothing because they are about half the cost of the “silver” taxis — the newer,  slicker ones we normally ride, to and from work, for about $4 each way. The gold taxis …maybe $2 each way. Shockingly cheap.

The pressing issue for the guys who drive the gold taxis … is that they are being phased out. I don’t know how this will work exactly, whether they will just be told by the government to leave their cars parked … but it’s coming.

The gold taxis are the ones that rarely stop for Westerners. Mostly, we believe, because the drivers speak very little English. Significantly less than the silver-taxi drivers, and sometimes I have trouble making myself understood to them.

Some Westerners aren’t all that keen to ride with the gold-taxi guys because the gold taxis are even tinier Japanese cars, and they tend to be older, and battered, and just kinda rough.

We were standing out in front of the hotel, at the taxi stand, waiting, and here came a gold taxi.  I could see the driver looking right at me, which was odd, because usually we are invisible to gold taxi-drivers. As he approached, he held out a hand, palm up. As if he were asking, “Like, are you serious about a taxi or not?” So sure, I waved at him, and he pulled over, and we squeezed into the back seat of his battered and vaguely odiferous cab, and off we went.

He almost immediately introduced himself as Imran Khan. From Pakistan. Yes, he has the same name as a famous Pakistani cricket player. (He seemed pleased when Leah noted this.)

He began chatting. He asked us where we are from. If we were going to work. At the first red light, he already was volunteering his services any time we needed a cab ride. He pulled out a slip of paper, and wrote his name on it, and his cell number. He also recited it the cell number, and Leah punched it into her phone.

“Any time you need taxi, you call me, right? I am speaking English now, yes? No problem.”

He was so enthusiastic and confident. It’s the sort of “can-do” attitude we often encounter here, especially among the subcontinent expats. “What do you need? We can do that.”

And, actually, several people at the office have ongoing relationships with taxi drivers. One co-worker has an arrangement with a guy … to go pick him up before work every day (when traffic is bad, and taxis are hard to find) … and in return for this daily dependability, our co-worker pays the driver double the meter total.

It’s a pretty good deal for the cabbie, and for our co-worker, too. And if/when we move to an area that doesn’t have a hundred cabs pass by every 20 minutes, we might need to make the same sort of arrangement.

Leah asked “Mr. Imran” (it is common here to use “mister” with a man’s first name) if he would start driving the silver taxis, when the gold taxis are parked/banned/outlawed a year from now. “No,” he said. “I don’t like the silver taxi. I own this taxi. I park it.”

Leah asked, “So, what will you do, Mr. Imran?”

And he said, “Start a business, maybe!” Then he looked at us in the mirror and said, “Maybe I work for you!”

Well, maybe he will. Perhaps he’s thinking of some sort of private service, catering to enough Westerners who will tip or pay higher prices, and he can still make some money, and do it legally, and maybe work a few hours less.

Maybe. Anyway, we have his name, and his phone number, and we may actually be giving him a call sometime soon. He certainly seems up for any assignment. He was speaking English, yes? No problem.