*************************************************************************************************************************
The couple of old buses that plied between our village Muthukur and the Nellore town, a distance of 12 miles, were affectionately called Benz Buses...they came with the star.
And the driver I was friends with was an equally old man named Mastan. He was short and permanently spectacled with glasses that had as many scratches as could hold without breaking apart.
Mastan allowed me to sit in his driver's seat once in a while when he took a short nap between 'duties'. And I tried my best with all my vigor to stand up and squeeze the rubber pom pom horn outside the door...in vain. All that came out was a puss-puss. I guess there was a technique that Mastan didn't teach me in his wisdom.
...Posted by Ishani
****************************************************************************************************************************
The couple of old buses that plied between our village Muthukur and the Nellore town, a distance of 12 miles, were affectionately called Benz Buses...they came with the star.
And the driver I was friends with was an equally old man named Mastan. He was short and permanently spectacled with glasses that had as many scratches as could hold without breaking apart.
Mastan allowed me to sit in his driver's seat once in a while when he took a short nap between 'duties'. And I tried my best with all my vigor to stand up and squeeze the rubber pom pom horn outside the door...in vain. All that came out was a puss-puss. I guess there was a technique that Mastan didn't teach me in his wisdom.
Our Benz Bus had a front bonnet half the size of the bus itself...or so it looked to me. It held the engine and the works. The two parts of the engine that I often heard spoken with awe were the radiator and the fan belt. The Cleaner Boy was paranoid about these two devils. Often enough Mastan would halt his bus on the kerb beside a decrepit pond and the Boy would take his iron Jerry Can (we were in the pre-plastic age) out from under the seat of Mastan and run to the pond, fill it up with dirty water, and pour it in style into the unscrewed radiator; and adjust the fan belt with a flourish...I guess the fan belt had this tendency to slip like a school boy from his drill class.
The dashboard instrument I liked best was a wooden rod with a rounded groove on one side and a fork on the other. When Mastan was done with the start up and was racing his steel horse @ 30 mph entering what I now know as the top gear, he would pull out his Holy Rod of Moses, slip its groove into the gear-shifter staff and push the other end tight engaging it in the notch on the dashboard. This was a routine I loved to watch without knowing what it was all about...the gear-shifter staff had a vicious tendency to kickback into the neutral when eased into the top gear.
Whenever I was seated in the front beside Mastan I used to watch with great curiosity three round holes in front of my feet in the body of the bus. And I was too shy to ask him till one day I couldn't control, and he replied enigmatically:
"This was a left-hand drive body converted into right-hand drive"
That was too much for me to understand and I let it go at that like I did in my QM class in my university when our professor talked with awe about 'matrix mechanics' which I guessed he didn't have a clue of.
And then there was this knob on the dashboard he would pull and push whenever the Cleaner Boy failed to rev up the engine by cranking it to his heart's content. It had the tiny letters spelling BOSCH engraved on it. I asked Mastan what was so bosch about it and he kept quiet. And then I asked my English Teacher, Prasad Rao, what BOSCH meant and he told me he would look up his pocket English-Telugu Dictionary and revert to me....which he didn't.
I didn't ask my HM Father because I had a hunch he didn't know; and then he would be cross with me...kids have a great sense of self-preservation...
****************************************************************************************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment