CAR STORIES

CAR STORIES 1

My fascination for Ford must have started in my early days. The memory of the first car I rode was a ford 1946 vintage run as a taxi.

I must have been 5 or so. We used to hire it to drive to Trivandrum from the place near Kanyakumari where my father worked at that time as a doctor. The driver had a funny name, Adima - literally translated, slave -. He must have been a good driver since my father was a terribly short tempered back seat driver and we never heard any shouting matches.

Later on I lived with my grandfather in Kerala when my father moved to Nilgris. During this time we used to hire the newly introduced Ambassador driven by Mathai.

He was a good driver; the only problem was that the maximum speed was 25 miles even if there was an emergency. But then during those times it must have been a good speed. For the Kerala monsoon the wipers were of no much use. So chewing tobacco will be smeared on the windscreen when the rains got bad (the water will drain away fast with tobacco)

It was also the time when my father decided to buy a car. I do not know the reasons but we landed up with a Vauxhall Wyvern of the 1950s vintage.

It had a flying horse on the bonnet with red plastic wings which could be lit up in the night. It also had turn indicators on the B pillar which will pop out as a hand when you put the switch on; of course hand indication was mandatory with various signs for left turn, right turn, u turn etc. Air conditioning was unknown and so we drove around with windows down or up as the weather condition demanded. If I remember correct, the glasses had to be manually pulled up.

My father I think had a pathological fear of driving himself even though he had a driving licence (he used to say that he had seen umpteen motor accidental deaths and injuries during his time in Shillong with the British army during the world war and this really scared him). However once in a while he will take over the wheels and most of the times we had close shaves. The one I still remember is when we were on the way to Coonoor for the weekly shopping and were going up hill through the tea gardens. The driver realised that my father had to change gears which he was not very adept at. So the driver told “clutch and gear change” to remind my father. But my father only heard “clutch” and promptly pressed it with disastrous results. The car lost the momentum and started to roll back. The driver shouted brake but my father in the confusion continued to accelerate; so we went on going backward with the engine roaring and all of us in the car screaming. Luckily for all of us the car landed in a small ditch and did not roll over. The driver got a mouthful from my father for not advising him correctly (he would never accept that he made a mistake). The aftermath of this incident was that he never drove when we children were around.

We used to make our annual holidays in Nilgris from our boarding schools in Kerala. My father will drive down with the driver and pick us up. The drive was over 300 km and with the road conditions it used to be a whole day trip or some times two days with visiting relatives on the way. One memorable drive was when we left Palghat at 9 in the evening and drove late night through the Nilgiri ghats with fog making the drive difficult. We had Thomas as our driver who had a huge Jesus on the Cross tattooed on his arm. I think Jesus was with us all through.

We graduated to a standard Ten and later on to Standard eight (even though it was an older vehicle it was well maintained) which was exactly similar to Standard 10.

Only problem with standard eight was that luggage had to be kept from inside by folding back the back seat since there was no dickey opening at the back. Standard 8 also took me to my college in Calicut the first time. It was a drive of around 200 km from Nilgris; almost a full day. Midway the front wheel started to make rubbing noise. The driver had a look and said there was too much grease in the bearing and so he cleaned up the bearing. But he or none of us realized that the wheel bearing was damaged and the grease was running out due to over heating. The car must have run nearly 100 km in this condition through ghat roads till we reached Calicut. After dropping me at the college, they went to a garage where they found that the bearing had seized and it took the whole day to get it out. Imagine being stranded in Nilgiri ghats in the night; we escaped that.We had this car for five years. When my father retired I pleaded with him not to sell it so that I can drive around; we had good fights but it was impossible to win. He got Rs.6500 for the car.

I wowed to buy my car when I got a job (not a two wheeler which has a side story. While in the engineering college I tried my hand to learn to drive a scooter; I already could drive the car but scooter was another kettle of fish. My brother in law had left his Lambretta scooter at our house during a holiday and I decided to try my hand. The ride started with all the village children running after me shouting… see…see… isaacachayan on the scooter…. the scooter landed in the paddy field and I on the road. That was the last time I rode a two-wheeler).

It was the late sixties and jobs were hard to come by even for an engineer from a Regional Engineering College. I helped around in my father’s dispensary, taught in an ITI and looked around. When I got my posting under government of India training scheme for unemployed engineers in 1970 I moved over to Hyderabad and that is where part 2 of my car stories unfolded.