Activist, actor Priya Guns’ debut ‘Your Driver Is Waiting’ is ‘almost as much manifesto as novel’

There is only one real character in Priya Guns’ propulsive debut novel “Your Driver is Waiting,” but whether or not she’s the author in light disguise, Damani Krishanthan certainly makes up for all the others.

A 30-something, queer, weightlifting, insomniac and angry Tamil ride-share driver, Damani is a contemporary Travis Bickle, the anti-hero of Martin Scorsese’s iconic “Taxi Driver.” But Guns, a Sri Lankan-born and Toronto-raised activist, actor, writer and educator, hasn’t simply flipped the gender roles, even if both drivers do shave their heads into Mohawks at key moments. Guns has endowed her protagonist with more than a few un-Bickle-like attributes, including friends and family. Damani, in a novel that moves intermittently in and out of satire, even has a sense of humour.

Yet, despite Damani’s bleakly amusing commentary on the worst parts of her life — ex-lovers very much included — “Your Driver” is almost as much manifesto as novel. It’s a dead serious attack on economic, racial and gender injustice and what can be called “performative allyship” among the privileged.

It opens with Damani driving around her unnamed city — the place feels American, but the presence of a wad of currency “in different colors” should give Canadians pause. She’s barely making a living, given the red-in-tooth-and-capitalist-claw nature of her employer. Her beloved and overworked father has recently died on the job, while her mother, wracked with grief and depression, cannot be left alone for long. And the anonymous, ominous city is starting to rise in anger against a litany of evils.

Damani’s only refuge is the Doo Wop Club, an abandoned warehouse turned utopian bar-restaurant-dance club, the one place she can breathe. The same goes for the rest of the city’s many and varied marginalized.

When she hears police sirens in the distance, Damani rushes inside to warn undocumented wait staff, plus a friend “who had a knife in his pocket, as did I, as all the drivers had too,” as well those who had “a crumb of cannabis lining their pockets,” and those on probation or who had had other run-ins with the law. Some, who could hazard the chance, and “who knew from the bottom of their hearts that they were doing nothing wrong,” continued dancing in hopes their presence would slow down the cops enough for others to escape.

Inevitably, the novel’s central event unfolds in the Doo Wop, after Damani, allowing herself to be vulnerable in the bloom of a whirlwind romance, brings her new lover there. Jolene, the very definition of white privilege, says and does all the right things and seems an ally, until a tense political discussion with Damani’s friends leaves her frightened and disorientated. Damani has empathy for Jolene’s shock, but no sympathy at all for her response, as the novel — and the city — careen into an explosive series of events.

It all adds up to a remarkable piece of writing. “Your Driver is Waiting” is jaggedly uneven. Mostly flat characterization and long swathes of didactic righteousness mark one side. On the other, though, there’s a fast-paced narrative with bite and, above all, Damani — smart, funny, brave and feral — a character not soon forgotten.

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