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Venkat drove me and my friend N in our new Maruti 800 from Calcutta to KGP in February, 2000. We started at Cal around 6 PM and reached our Qrs at KGP by 2 AM...that was how long it took us to cover a measly 120 km. That was before the Golden Quadrilateral 8-lane highway came up. In 2000, there was just a strip 2 trucks wide without the pretense of any divider. And the whole Bombay Highway as it was called was one terrific traffic nightmare.
Venkat left the car in the garage attached to our Qrs B-140 and left...it was he who drove it in 2005 all the way from KGP to Hyderabad in 24 hours...with a night halt at Vizagh to boot.
When I went up, I found both my son and my wife waiting and awake. By then my son was a freshman at IIT and he had his own sweet dreams of driving a car, in company maybe. And as soon as he saw me, he snatched the key from my hand and ran down to inspect the new arrival in our family. It took a mere two days for him to learn driving and commandeer my car and ride it on all the 4 roads of our campus.
But it was a surprise to me to find my wife awake...she generally hit the pillow by 11 in the night and slept like a child come hail or hammering. And I gently asked her to come down and see her new car...and to my surprise she was willing...generally the expected answer is:
"Tomorrow"
And I gently led her in the dead of the night to the front seat of our Maruti and snuggled her in. And she adjusted herself, touched the dashboard lovingly and opened the glove compartment and closed it and was quietly beaming...To me, who was born and brought up in a village without cars on its roads, it was a touching moment.
The next day I opened the Maruti User Manual and found it more forbidding than Weinberg's QM Field Theory. It was glossy, bulky, too full of diagrams and WARNINGS in the red...it was scary.
So I appealed to Venkat to come down and give me a short lesson on the dos and don'ts of the damn thing.
He duly arrived and quickly showed me all the dashboard controls. The most tricky one was the panel with warning lights on it which were supposed to glow and keep glowing when something or the other was dangerously wrong with the engine...it had icons that are till now a mystery to me to decipher...one for the battery, one for lube oil, one for brake fluid, one for parking brake and so on. When one of these started glowing, one had to take steps urgently.
And then he opened the front bonnet and showed me how to check the engine oil level by pulling a long stick and reading the oil level on it...a thing I can't do even now...I could never see the oil mark on steel.
And then he rapidly showed me the jar for coolant, the cup for brake fluid and the jug for windscreen washer.
And he opened the hatchback and took out the pouch that had an assortment of tools and the long lever rod and the stepney and explained what to do when I had a flat tire...and left me in more gloom than ever. Before leaving, however, he assured me I won't have to bother for all of 2 years...nothing would go wrong till then...Maruti 800 is a workhorse...
But within a week, I had a flat tire, the brake fluid warning light started glowing, the throttle pedal went in and refused to come out...raising an infernal noise that woke up everyone around, the hard plastic lever that opened the bonnet came into my hand when I tried it, the horn stopped tooting come what may... and a dozen other mishaps that made me kick myself for buying the blessed thing.
But in retrospect it was all for good since I knew what all could go wrong, and became an expert in car-fever diagnosis.
When I asked Venkat if it happened to all new Marutis, he shook his head and said it was my danta siri...a cute idiom for the 'unlucky guy'.
I had heard of danta siri in my childhood when a dozen of us were all squatting on the floor for our meals and the hasty half-blind lady-cook knew that a pebble went into the sambar...and she was in too much of a hurry to hunt for it but left it quietly there.
And suddenly one of the dirty dozen would howl catching his cheeks and scream...
And the cook would smile and announce:
"It is all his danta siri..."
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Venkat left the car in the garage attached to our Qrs B-140 and left...it was he who drove it in 2005 all the way from KGP to Hyderabad in 24 hours...with a night halt at Vizagh to boot.
When I went up, I found both my son and my wife waiting and awake. By then my son was a freshman at IIT and he had his own sweet dreams of driving a car, in company maybe. And as soon as he saw me, he snatched the key from my hand and ran down to inspect the new arrival in our family. It took a mere two days for him to learn driving and commandeer my car and ride it on all the 4 roads of our campus.
But it was a surprise to me to find my wife awake...she generally hit the pillow by 11 in the night and slept like a child come hail or hammering. And I gently asked her to come down and see her new car...and to my surprise she was willing...generally the expected answer is:
"Tomorrow"
And I gently led her in the dead of the night to the front seat of our Maruti and snuggled her in. And she adjusted herself, touched the dashboard lovingly and opened the glove compartment and closed it and was quietly beaming...To me, who was born and brought up in a village without cars on its roads, it was a touching moment.
The next day I opened the Maruti User Manual and found it more forbidding than Weinberg's QM Field Theory. It was glossy, bulky, too full of diagrams and WARNINGS in the red...it was scary.
So I appealed to Venkat to come down and give me a short lesson on the dos and don'ts of the damn thing.
He duly arrived and quickly showed me all the dashboard controls. The most tricky one was the panel with warning lights on it which were supposed to glow and keep glowing when something or the other was dangerously wrong with the engine...it had icons that are till now a mystery to me to decipher...one for the battery, one for lube oil, one for brake fluid, one for parking brake and so on. When one of these started glowing, one had to take steps urgently.
And then he opened the front bonnet and showed me how to check the engine oil level by pulling a long stick and reading the oil level on it...a thing I can't do even now...I could never see the oil mark on steel.
And then he rapidly showed me the jar for coolant, the cup for brake fluid and the jug for windscreen washer.
And he opened the hatchback and took out the pouch that had an assortment of tools and the long lever rod and the stepney and explained what to do when I had a flat tire...and left me in more gloom than ever. Before leaving, however, he assured me I won't have to bother for all of 2 years...nothing would go wrong till then...Maruti 800 is a workhorse...
But within a week, I had a flat tire, the brake fluid warning light started glowing, the throttle pedal went in and refused to come out...raising an infernal noise that woke up everyone around, the hard plastic lever that opened the bonnet came into my hand when I tried it, the horn stopped tooting come what may... and a dozen other mishaps that made me kick myself for buying the blessed thing.
But in retrospect it was all for good since I knew what all could go wrong, and became an expert in car-fever diagnosis.
When I asked Venkat if it happened to all new Marutis, he shook his head and said it was my danta siri...a cute idiom for the 'unlucky guy'.
I had heard of danta siri in my childhood when a dozen of us were all squatting on the floor for our meals and the hasty half-blind lady-cook knew that a pebble went into the sambar...and she was in too much of a hurry to hunt for it but left it quietly there.
And suddenly one of the dirty dozen would howl catching his cheeks and scream...
And the cook would smile and announce:
"It is all his danta siri..."
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