Windows and Doors

"Don't you want to open the window?" I asked.
The woman sitting next to me pushed out her arm from between her body and the side of the taxi and gave the cracked plastic handle a little tug. Nothing moved. She shrugged. "It's broken."
My neighbour to my left was a man giving life advice to, presumably, a friend. "You will know when it's right," he was saying, "you will know when you are ready." He mmm'd, he aaah'd and had I not been sitting bent forwards in the only open space between me and the heads in front of me, I probably would have heard the otherside of the conversation too. We were packed in see, and packed in a little tighter than usual. Our gaaitjie was clearly well-versed in the science of overloading.

A few minutes earlier he had antagonized some fellow passengers by scrutinizing their body shapes and playing Tetris in the crowded van.
"Get up brother," he'd ordered the guy in the football jersey, "you are too fat to sit there."
We were in this predicament because the man who had come to sit on the laptop (fabric-covered piece of plank) between me and the football jersey was himself quite a hefty guy and together the two of them were crowding both the rest of our row and the seat in front of them. There were complaints. The gaaitjie assessed my fellow passengers and tried to persuade the slim woman sitting behind me to move onto the laptop but she refused. After some furious negotiating and further "you are too big"-ing the gaaitjie managed to rearrange us into what he felt was the best position and we were off.

As we left our row in the deck, the woman he had expelled from the taxi because of her incompatibility with his Tetris game screamed and smacked the window and the gaaitjie's face with her handbag. I looked at him disapprovingly from my perch.
"No look," he defended himself, "she diddin wanto sit there!" He pointed to some vague and occupied area.
I continued to raise my eyebrow.
"No she's crazy, who hits a person?!"
So we sat, the taxiload of us, stewing in our neighbour's sweat and cursing the feeble window latches that wouldn't open.

The driver, unaware or uncaring of the existing levels of passenger discontent, stopped off at Rochester to put in petrol. He seemed to know the pump attendant and they chatted until the man in the football jersey, already thoroughly upset, started a chorus of "huh-aaaah's". The woman sitting next to me still had her arm pinned against the window from her unsuccessful attempt to open it: when she had raised it we had all--unintentionally--shifted a minuscule amount to the right and filled up the space between her and the taxi wall and now she was stuck. I smiled apologetically, but I knew from the stink-eye she gave me that despite the disproportionately small slice of the seat I was taking up, she blamed me for her salute.

As I sat with someone's knees pressing into the back of my chair, with someone's backpack at my feet, with someone's elbow on my thigh, I thought, YOH, I will be glad when I can drive again and at least have the option of an airconditioned 'one bum to one seat' trip. Although, I remember now, one of the very first conversations I had at the Wellness Centre, which lead to one of the very first moments of ok we are going to be friends, was about the general unpleasantness of sitting in a crowded taxi on a hot day. It was an emphatic conversation. There were gestures, there were reenactments. There were laments and there were speculations. Yes, we all decided, shaking our heads: mmm, it was bad.

Never-mind closing windows and opening doors: when it comes to making friends with people you don't know, I'd argue that when you open a window, sometimes you close a door. Flipping the adage script, yo.