The Couple in the Backseat
It was a regular Tuesday afternoon. Midtown was jammed like always — delivery trucks double-parked, cabbies leaning on their horns, 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.
Normally, 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 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 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… 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.