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Our 2000 AD model of blue Maruti has a trick lock. There are two different ways of locking the driver's door and exiting. One is to come out and use the master ignition key to lock the door. The other is to lock the door without the key by just banging it holding the handle up. And every lazy driver like me uses the second...and I have seen many.
The trouble with this facile method is that, while gathering wool, you tend to switch off the ignition, pick up your bag and cigarettes, don't bother to remove the key from its lock, exit, and bang the door shut.
And you are firmly locked out with the key inside safe in its slot. Everyone who drives this model must have landed in this soup at least once...and many repeatedly.
And most have this other habit of keeping the duplicate key supplied by the manufacturer safe in a secret place that they eventually forget.
I kept the duplicate car key inside our home Godrej almirah and its two keys safe with my wife...who was mostly at home.
Within a month of buying my car, my friend and I drove to Gole Bazaar, a distance of a cool 5 km. And found ourselves locked out of our car with its key inside the ignition slot. And mobile phones were not yet popular at KGP. So, I had to request one of my shopkeeper-friends and use his landline to ring up my wife and explain our predicament to her. She could of course retrieve the duplicate from our Godrej, but not our son that easily.
Eventually he arrived home and brought the duplicate key to our spot in Gole Bazaar on our Chetak...but he wasn't too pleased....young freshmen at IIT have many pleasanter things to do...
Then on, I made it a habit to always carry both the keys, one in each of my pant pockets...they often got stuck in the washing machine...
One noon I was driving my blue Maruti into the Main Gate of our Institute and was stopped by a gentleman who was standing beside his parked car which happened to be another brand new blue Maruti...the model became very popular at KGP. The gentleman was a stranger to me and I parked my car in the kerb and asked him what I could do for him.
He then put on a shameful face and said that he was locked out of his car with the key inside and asked me to lend my key so he could try and pry his door open.
Of course I refused and told him that not all blue Marutis come with the same key...like, as we used to say in our youth at Vizagh:
"Not all red-saried ladies are my wives"
And told him that if he forces my key into his groove, both my key and his lock would get damaged. And he looked at me as if I was a damned escapist. I then offered to drive him home wherever it was in the campus so he could fetch his duplicate.
And then he said that he lives in Gole Bazaar but his duplicate key was with the Indian Bank...he had taken a car-loan and they confiscated one of his two keys as an indemnity. I told him that I could drive him to the Indian Bank and fetch the duplicate for a while explaining his predicament. He wasn't too happy...maybe he didn't pay his installments...
Since he had no other go, he agreed to come to the Indian Bank and we talked to the Manager who turned out to be our ex-student. And he ordered his locker-assistant to hunt the duplicate and accompany us with it...
Problem solved.
Another lunchtime I was at Harrys gossiping with Timir who parked his blue Maruti car behind mine at the kerb. And we found meanwhile that Sastish entered Harry's parking his blue Maruti behind ours and bought a packet of cigarettes and went back.
And he absentmindedly started pushing his car key into the door-slot of Timir's car trying it without success.
That was when Timir showed off all his footballer skills and skipped and jumped and ran and caught Satish by hand...to the merriment of onlookers...
After settling down in Hyderabad, somewhat, we were three drivers using our single Maruti car for a while...myself, my son and my D-i-L. And as Hyderabad was no KGP, the first thing I did was to get three sets of original Maruti keys to our old car made by Baba's copying machine. So we have six keys in all for a single car...
...Still one of us got locked out once in a while.
There is a moral there that I can't figure out right now...
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