The Weight of Waiting: Suspended Mobility and Deferred Aspirations Amongst Cab Drivers in Hyderabad

Abstract

In this article, I explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of migrant cab drivers in the Indian city of Hyderabad. Drawing on ethnographic data collected before and during the pandemic, I unpack how cab drivers who have migrated to the city in the hopes of a better life for their families make sense of waiting as an experience that constitutes and undoes the notion of upward mobility. I analyse how my interlocutors relate to time in differing ways through the day and how the pandemic has altered their expectations around the mundane activity of waiting. Building on scholarship that pushes us to apply a temporal lens to migration along with a spatial one, I argue that the uncertainties and precarities created by the pandemic have reconfigured migrants’ aspirations, their relationship to work, their imaginaries of the future and their articulation of hope and despair.