Image Credit... The New York Times

Mr. Khan ate lamb karahi as he watched Geo News on the TV overhead. With disgust, he regarded the image of Nawaz Sharif, Pakistani’s former tycoon prime minister, who was ousted in July.

Mr. Sharif had been under investigation after the so-called Panama Papers leaked last year, revealing that three of his children bought luxury apartments in London using offshore shell companies. Between forkfuls of lamb, Mr. Khan said, “They take money from our country, take it out of the country, live in another country, and as a people we are poor, poor, poor, poor.”

Seven days a week, Mr. Khan drives his cab, from 5 p.m. to around 2 a.m. He makes $4,000 to $4,500 a month depending on the season, which is really more like $1,400 to $1,900 after he’s subtracted payments for his medallion lease and money sent to his ex-wife and three children in Lahore. This has been the arrangement for almost 15 years: them there, him here. (Though, happily, he reported a new marriage here.)

Dispatching about 64,000 cars every day, Uber and other ride-hailing apps have squeezed the taxi business (more than 17,000 yellow and green cabs are on the road today). But Mr. Khan, as an old-school yellow-cab driver, said he can keep up with the competition because he intimately knows the streets, compared to drivers who use ride hailing apps, who often depend heavily on GPS.

“If I’m going from downtown, uptown, then cross uptown, east to west,” he said, “I take First Avenue to uptown, then cross at 93rd Street, where there’s less traffic, and the light is open, one by one by one by one.”

Lahori Chilli, Brooklyn, 3 p.m.

The week before, on a bright Friday afternoon, double-parked black cars clogged Coney Island Avenue during prayer at Makki Masjid. After services, men streamed out of the mosque. Many of the younger ones did not linger, filing straight to their Uber-stamped black cars — they had children to pick up, undergrad I.T. classes to get to, likely customers in Park Slope.