Everything else in the city is in a hurry. The house is not. You have settled the fare once, before you flew; from then on the delay, the queue, the slow carousel and the one bag that comes out last are ours to absorb, not yours to explain. Your sarathi is inside arrivals with a board in your name, and he is not looking at his watch.
Ninety minutes of waiting, complimentary, counted from the moment the aircraft reaches the gate — not from the time you booked, not from the time the airline said. Terminal 1 or Terminal 2, Mumbai or Navi Mumbai.
Two full hours. Immigration at Terminal 2 on an evening can take most of that; the house knows, and has already counted it in. No message from you is needed; the car is simply there when you are.
Fifteen minutes at a door, a hotel, an office, a restaurant — and on an hourly journey, no clock at all: inside the hours you reserved the car waits wherever you are, as long as you are.
Tell the house the flight number and nothing else. We follow it from the city it leaves: a delay re-times the car at no charge, an early arrival brings it forward, a diversion is handled before you have switched your phone on. The clock the house keeps starts when the aircraft reaches the gate — the one honest moment — and the first ninety minutes, or two hours, are already yours. You will not be asked to hurry through a queue you did not make.
The car does not leave. If the queue runs past the complimentary hour, your sarathi stays where he is and the house writes to you — once, before any minute is charged — to say that waiting from here is at the published rate for your car, by the minute, and to ask whether you would rather we waited or came back. Nothing is added quietly. Nothing is added at all until you have been told. A car that leaves an airport without the house having spoken to you is not a car of this house.
Inside every written figure: the car, your sarathi, fuel, every toll, parking at both ends and GST. Nothing is added on the day, and no meter runs.
A board with your name, held, not propped. The car brought to the kerb only when you are through the doors, so you never stand beside it in the heat. The boot open before you reach it. The cabin cooled to the temperature your room on this site remembers; water, cold and at room temperature; a charger for your phone before you ask. If you would rather be met at the kerb than inside, say so; if you would rather no board at all, your sarathi sends his photograph and the car’s number instead and finds you by your own description. However long it took, the greeting is the same: your name, and nothing about the time.
It happens rarely and it is written down when it does. If your sarathi reaches the pickup point more than ten minutes after the booked time, a fifth of the fare comes back to you; after forty-five minutes, half. That is the house’s promise, and it runs the other way too: your time is worth the same as ours.
Reserve an airport carFlight number, terminal, where to. The figure is written before you fly; the waiting is already inside it.