Small encounter, but this archive says document everything, so here it is.
January, around 1:30 a.m., I booked a ride home from a birthday dinner in New Manila. Driver accepts, I watch the little car icon on the map... and it stops at the corner of Balete Drive. Doesn't turn in. Sits there for a full minute. Then he cancels and, unusually, calls me.
'Ma'am, sorry, I'll take the booking if you walk to the corner of E. Rodriguez. I don't enter that street after midnight.' I was tired and annoyed and I said something like, sir, it's one street. And he said — I'm translating from Tagalog — 'Ma'am, I know it's one street. Last year I picked up a passenger on that street. When I looked in the mirror to ask about the aircon, there were two.'
He waited for me at the corner with his windows up and his radio on, and he drove me home the long way around, adding fifteen minutes, and he did not charge me for it, and he checked that rearview mirror the way a man checks a wound.
I walk past Balete Drive most weeks in daylight. Old trees, quiet money, nothing amiss. I have no sighting to report. I'm filing this because of what struck me after: he lost money to that detour, calmly, the way you pay any toll. Whatever he saw in that mirror, it converted him completely — and he was the fourth driver friend to tell me some version of the same policy.
The street has a rule now. The rule didn't come from nowhere.