The Couple in the Backseat
On a regular Tuesday afternoon, when Midtown is usually jammed with delivery trucks double-parked, cabbies leaning on their horns, and pedestrians playing Frogger with the crosswalk. I had just dropped off a finance guy near Bryant Park when a young couple flagged me down on Lexington.
They looked freshly married, not in tux and gown, but in the way they kept glancing at each other like something new and delicate was still unfolding between them. The woman wore a soft pink salwar kameez, the man had a clean-pressed shirt, and that awkward, nervous smile newlyweds sometimes have.
“JFK, please,” the guy said. Indian accent, polite. He double-checked the terminal on his phone. Then they both settled into the back seat, speaking softly in Hindi.
Usually, I don’t pay much attention. But something about their energy felt different. So calm. So intentional.
After a few minutes, the woman leaned forward and asked, “How long does it take to reach the airport from here, uncle?” She called me uncle, that alone warmed me. I smiled and said, “With traffic, maybe an hour. You on honeymoon?”
They both laughed. “Yes,” the man replied. “Just married. Arranged marriage. We met three months ago.”
I raised my eyebrows in the mirror. “Three months? And now honeymoon?”
“Yes,” she said, beaming. “We met through a website, mudaliyarkannalam.com. My parents uploaded my profile. His family found it. I wasn’t even looking.” I asked them to go to that website on my phone.
I laughed. “That’s how it goes sometimes. You’re not looking, and boom airport ride.”
They told me how they had chatted on video calls for a few weeks, met once in person in Chennai, and then things moved quickly. They weren’t pretending to be in love at first sight. It wasn’t a rom-com. But it was warm. Honest. Steady.
“I used to try dating apps,” the guy said. “Swipe, swipe, ghost. I was tired. This felt somewhat more serious.”
By the time we got to JFK, I almost didn’t want the ride to end. They thanked me, tipped generously, and rolled their suitcases away, hand in hand, into Terminal 4 off to start their new life.
I sat in the cab for a moment, engine humming, watching them disappear into the crowd.
People joke about arranged marriages. They don’t understand that love can grow, not just erupt. That sometimes, algorithms don’t know your soulmate, but your mother might.
Only in New York do you meet a couple married by a matrimony site from Chennai, heading to Cancun, in the backseat of a yellow cab.