Ercan

By Ashok Shenolikar

“What’s your name?” I asked the taxi driver after my wife Bharati and I settled in the backseat. 

“Erjan,” he said. 

“You want to visit the Hagia Sophia?” he asked.

When we agreed he said there would be a two-hour minimum charge. We thought that was reasonable. And we didn’t have any other options.

We were so glad that we were finally going to realize our dream of visiting this famous mosque in Istanbul. It was late October 2022. We were on the verge of a major disappointment, very close to having to return home to Maryland without visiting it. 

Our flight from Cappadocia to Istanbul was three hours late. The Viking cruise line had planned an excursion to tour Istanbul on a chartered bus. That was canceled due to the late arrival of the plane. We were left to ourselves to plan our tour. On the last day of our vacation, we were pressed for time and didn’t know how to navigate a city unknown to us.

 The concierge at the hotel recommended we hire a taxi to take us around town and to see the Hagia Sofia. He said to just come down when we were ready and one of the hotel employees in the main lobby would be glad to help us.

We returned to our room to rearrange stuff in our suitcases to prepare for our flight early the next morning, showered, put on clean clothes, and went downstairs.      

The doorman walked us to a waiting taxi. He spoke with the taxi driver in Turkish and told us to sit in the back seat. The driver appeared to be a forty something      man dressed in jeans, a light blue shirt, and a dark jacket. We asked him if he spoke English. He replied that he did, not well, but enough for us to understand. 

As we took off from the hotel, the driver was quiet for a while. I asked him his name again.

“Erjan,” he replied.

The roads were crowded. I asked why there was so much traffic. He said people were going to clubs to dance or to restaurants after work. 

A few minutes later he asked where we were from.     

“America,” I said.

“How long have you stayed there?”

“I came to America when I was 23 years old,” I replied. “That was sixty years ago.”

Erjan seemed to calculate my age in his mind and his body language changed instantly.

“Mashallah!” he shouted. “In Turkey, people your age cannot walk.”

We asked him why. He mentioned his parents who lived with him were frail in health and had difficulty walking.

“How old are your parents?” I asked.

“My Anney is 78 years old and my Baba is 80.”

Now we realized why he was so excited to know my age and to see that I was okay           traveling from a long distance.

He told us about his family. We were surprised he would be so open with strangers. We learned that he enjoyed driving. He had started at the age of 20 and had worked with the hotel for the last 20 years. He had a wife and two children who were eight and six years old. His wife didn’t work because she took care of the kids and his parents fulltime. 

He suddenly became excited. 

“My sister is in America!” he said. “I’m going to call her.”

Before we knew it, he tapped his phone and called his sister in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on WhatsApp video. 

“Look who is riding in my car,” he said to his sister. “They are from America. Say hello to them.”

It was afternoon in America. We made small talk with his sister. We spoke about where we lived and the weather in America. 

As we rode through the crowded streets, Erjan kept talking. We noticed several small mosques and small stores and restaurants of various types. 

“Too many mosques,” he said. “We have too many mosques.”

The elections in Turkey were approaching. We asked Erjan if he would vote for the current President. He didn’t respond directly.

“We have democracy in Turkey,” he said. “But it is okay as long as you follow the wishes of the President.”

At one point I noticed a restaurant with a large neon marquee saying “Biryani Palace.” When I visited Hyderabad, my hometown in India, my brother knew of a place in Secunderabad, a suburb on the outskirts of the city, that was famous for its biryani. Upon looking at this marquee in Istanbul it reminded me of this restaurant in Hyderabad. I became nostalgic.

 We saw an interesting building and wanted to stop and take a picture. Erjan pulled his car over to the curb, asked us to remain seated, borrowed our camera and took the picture. 

Deep in conversation, we didn’t realize that we had reached the Hagia Sophia. It was tucked away behind a park and wasn’t visible from the street. It was getting dark. The street was narrow and crowded with pedestrians and vehicles. There was no place to park. Erjan stopped in front of a carpet store, got out of the car, and chatted with a man sitting on the stoop. He came back and said we should get out and walk to the mosque. The man he had spoken with was going to keep an eye on his taxi and prevent getting a ticket from the police. 

“We should make him happy when we come back,” Bharati said.

I agreed that a tip was a good idea.

We climbed a few steps and walked through the park. Erjan extended his left elbow toward me to help me climb the steps. Whenever I lagged in walking, he waited for me to catch up and made sure I was okay. The area in front of the mosque was tiled with patches of well-manicured grass and lined with trees. There were families with children who were running around, laughing, and playing. A few carts were selling what looked like giant pretzels, like on streets of New York City. The mosque itself was brightly lit and beamed in yellow and pink. It looked spectacular in the evening. 

We walked to the entrance and saw a long line of people waiting to get in. It was getting late so we chose to not go in. To our left was the Blue Mosque, another famous monument. It was under reconstruction. As we walked toward the Blue Mosque the Mullah started chanting the evening namaz. It was broadcast on a loudspeaker. The mullah in the Hagia Sophia also started the namaz at the same time. It was a duet. First, the Blue Mosque mullah would say a verse and keep quiet, then it was the turn of the one in Hagia Sophia. The whole atmosphere was serene. I asked Ercan if the namaz was recorded in advance. He said no, it was delivered live in person.

Bharati wanted to taste some local food. She asked Erjan to recommend a place where we could try the Turkish kebabs and the baklava. He took us to a restaurant in a busy shopping arcade with rug stores and travel agencies. The restaurant was large and bustling. It was rectangular with tables and booths that were covered in burgundy over white stripes. Erjan enthusiastically introduced us to the restaurant host as visitors from America as if we were his relatives. 

To the left of the entrance was an open kitchen. We could see and smell meat being grilled. To the right, on a raised platform were two musicians playing instruments I had never seen before. To their right, on the same platform, a tall man wearing a white robe and an Ottoman Fez was the whirling dervish’s dancer. He kept twirling right and left. I wondered how he didn’t get dizzy. A few men were with their wives and smoking hookah. Bharati asked a young man carrying a hookah to pose for her. He did and at the same time blew out a cloud of smoke that filled the area in front of his face. Occasionally, a restaurant employee would walk around with a tray of piping hot coal to replenish the one in the hookah. An elderly woman sitting along the wall opposite the musicians rolled dough to make large bread that she cooked on an inverted wok.      

The chicken kabobs and the baklava were amazing. Erjan ate with us. At one point we asked our server to take a photo of us with him. Erjan asked us to send it to him on his WhatsApp number and we did. He showed us his driver’s license when we asked him how he spelled his name. We saw his name was actually spelled Ercan. I remembered our Turkish neighbor on Long Island years ago had a name that was spelled Hatice but pronounced Hatije. 

Whenever we said something that impressed him, Ercan would say “Mashallah.” 

He asked us if we would return to Istanbul again. We said we would consider it.

“Inshallah,” he said. “When you visit next time, stay longer. Call me and I will take you wherever you want to go.” 

I asked Ercan what the two words meant, Mashalla and Inshalla.     

Ercan explained that Mashalla is used to express a feeling of awe or beauty by the grace of God and Inshallah is used for a future event that would happen God willing.

When we returned the taxi was where we had left it in front of the store. We tipped the man who looked after our taxi in American dollars. His face glowed in surprise and appreciation. We were told inflation in Turkey was running at the rate of 80 to 100 percent. On that day a US dollar equaled 19 Turkish lire. No wonder the man was happy to get paid in US currency. 

As we drove back to the hotel, Ercan started singing loudly to a song on the radio. I didn’t understand the words, so I didn’t know if it was a love song or a devotional hymn. He would start on a high note, then lower it and then become soft. He would move his head this way and that and tap the steering wheel with his right thumb. When he stopped singing Bharati asked       him to sing again and he obliged with a different song. He seemed to be a different world. 

As we entered the hotel parking lot, Ercan parked his car and walked up to the doorman with us. We told the doorman that Ercan had provided us excellent service. Ercan smiled. I asked how much we owed him. 

“Mashallah,” he said. “No charge. You both are like my Baba and Anney.”

We said that in America even parents pay their kids for work. He finally agreed to charge us for three hours, which was close to the amount of time we had spent with him. It was an amount less than what it would cost us for airport transfer to our home. We were so happy to meet someone as colorful as Ercan. We would’ve been happy just to get a glimpse of the mosque. Instead, we got to spend a few hours with a local. Any other taxi driver probably would have just taken us to the mosque, waited for us until we finished our visit and brought us back. Ercan not only took us to the mosque but provided a tour of the local culture, the food, and the neighborhoods. We thanked him for making our day.

We went to a rooftop restaurant for a glass of wine to celebrate our trip. The hostess gave us a table in a corner. The night was cool, and we could see the bright lights illuminating the city scape. It was late and we had to get up early to catch our return flight to America. But we didn’t care. 

Any time we had mentioned our plan to visit Istanbul, the first question our friends would   ask was whether we were going to visit the famous mosque. It would have been a shame if we had come all the way and left without seeing it. Just saying that we didn’t have enough time would’ve been a lame excuse. 

Now we could cross it off our bucket list and also have a good story to tell.

Ashok Shenolikar is an Engineer turned writer. He is a novelist, short story writer, and
essayist based in Ellicott City, Maryland where he lives with his wife Bharati. His writing can be read on his blog, ashokshenolikar.com. His essays have been published in The Pilcrow & Dagger and India Abroad. When living in northern Virginia, Ashok managed the Northern Virginia Writer’s Guild Meetup from 2013 through 2019. His book Choices They Made, is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle versions.