The Cro-Magnon Car

Ambassador from Hindusthan Motors, lovingly called Amby, is a car I hate. It is bulky, obnoxious, and belongs to a museum. It is the first car for many Indians, definitely the first Indian car for many Indians. The design is a based on the Morris Oxford of England. The Landmaster was how it was christened when it was first introduced in 1948, a year after the bloody Indian independence, or call it partial independence. Later on it became the Ambassador with versions called Mark 1, 2, 3, 4, and I think that is how far it has gone.

It is the Midnight’s Children of Indian cars; inextricably linked with the Indian nation, it’s psyche, it’s bourgeoisie, and it’s bureaucracy. It still remains, in this age of Japanese, Korean, American and French cars, a favourite with the Indian government, who somehow have a fetish for the colours white and black, no shades of gray here. My dislike of it started as an aesthetic issue and then, later, as I grew older, aware and mature, the dislike’s flora and fauna spread to engulf other issues of economics, politics and ideology. Let me clear the stigma from the word ideology, which really scares and scars me. The ideology I mean is something very personal, it is more like a principle that I have imbibed, inculcated from my assimilation as a political animal, that has changed with times, with knowledge, with emancipation of the soul, one could say cheekily. One more clarification is becoming unavoidable as I am taking the braves of Virgina Woolf to use these purloined words in their unhistorical contexts. I am a political animal and I would argue who isn’t? How can anyone who is a part of a nation state not be an implicit political animal? I can choose to be tacit with the way I dispense with my political thought and ration, but I can’t impinge on my self the word apolitical however distant fence sitter I choose to be on the issues of politics that touch my life every moment, that invade my personal spaces every now and then. Ironically, if this ideology of mine were to be poured into any set-in-stone moulds of ideological isms it would be incongruous, it would either sediment in the block or evaporate in the free air. I am a political animal without my asking or accepting. I am a political animal circumstantially.

Now, with that tricky part out of harm’s way I can continue with my rambling account of that unique car called the Amby. I was saying that my initial dislike was of an aesthetic nature; even a low priest of beauty like me couldn’t buy into the cult of the Amby. From the outside it looked like it had a permanent scowl of an ill-tempered man with a mid-life crisis. So many things about it doesn’t sit well with me: it belches (oh, even with its Bharat II or Euro III, or whatever environment clean chit it has got now, it still does); it groans; it stutters; it abuses; it bullies; it curses. In sum it is so unsavoury that my soul refuses to romance it. And this is not all, inside, the Amby has two once-in-the-living-room-left-in-the-garage-to-rot type sofa sets that are supposed to be the front and the rear seats. A 1920s Grundig valve system radio set looks more modern than the dashboard it sports. You have to wrestle with the wheel to go left or right and once you have done that you have to wrestle it back again to ensure going onward with your journey or it will keep going in a circle. The switch for the interior light looks like the designer ran out of his mediocre imagination, or maybe in a sudden burst of inspiration he was bitten by the White House being modeled after a middle class American home Americanism, and plucked a switch out from a domestic switchboard and stuck it there. In all, the incongruity was so congruous that it was a caricature for everything that the normative India stood for, in spirit—the bedraggled post partition confusion, the desperate search for an identity, the coming to terms with a new form of governance called democracy, the dousing of parochial identities that were raising their heads, especially in the North East, the unsure and the hostile borders with China and Pakistan (on both east and the west), the nascent Nehruvian Non Aligned foreign policy definition, the saner all-encompassing secular identity in favour of a mindless, bloody, partisan communal bigotry, the eagerness and haste of a debutante nation—they were trying times. The economic reality was like the sound of a paisa on a tin plate. In spite of the gyre that India found itself in it took some graceful defeats and bold decisions: the humiliating loss to China and the decision to develop its own mixed economy model (a little private enterprise and a more than little government owned enterprise, a little capitalism and a lot of socialism). A wise choice one should say for an agro-based, non-industrial, and largely poor country. It had decided to set sail on the course of self-reliance. And the Amby was the most visible icon of that self-reliance, a belief in a little private enterprise and a lot of government control. It gave rise to one of the biggest, the ugliest, and the most corrupt bureaucracies of the world and the found the Ambassador as its perfect motif. Much like India’s reality the Ambassador shed its colonial Morris Oxford Landmaster image to become the totally desi-bred Hindusthan Motors Ambassador. As India changed its gears from self-reliance to self-sufficiency to self-confidence so did the Ambassador from Mark I to II to III to IV. It clearly was the metaphorical wheels of the Indian nation in motion but more than just a metaphysical one. It is till date the perfect symbol of Indian protectionism that allowed its saplings of enterprise to flourish without being under the shadow of the foreign behemoths that would have killed the struggling sapling with lack of light or limelight. This went on till the 1990s when India cut loose from its my-well-is-my-ocean mirage or doctrine call what you may and invited the world to open their factories and shops. By this time the sapling of Indian enterprise had grown into strapping young tree with a head full of swaying ambition. The Ambassador too, irrespective of my irreverence, clung to the asphalt of the Indian roads with a dogged determination.

Born in the age of the flower power and Woodstock which had some of its strings attached to the mercurial ascendancy of Indian spiritualism, which was so much about the soul and the beauty and the peace, that no wonder I didn’t take well to that lump of a car. But, don’t get me wrong my pride in what it stood for is still not tainted or overshadowed by my eclectic euphemisms of beauty. It played its role in coming of age of a little boy back then in that 70s show. We, my family, never owned a car. Even now, technically, we don’t own one. I have a car but that is company provided. But some of our richer relatives, back then, did own cars and, you guessed it, they were mostly Ambys. The first time I got into a car, that is if I don’t include the taxi rides in Calcutta that I took with my father during the vacations from my suburban convent school, which were all, of course, Ambys, was during one of the Durga Puja festivals.

One can’t go further without talking a little about the grandest festival of the Hindu Bengali. It is a time to celebrate. It is a time for new clothes, new shoes and a long vacation from school or college or work. It is a time to bond with cousins near and far, with uncles and aunts hated and loved, and friends favourite and distant. It is a time for laughter and eating. It is a time when Calcutta, albeit the whole of Hindu Bengal, leaves its concerns on the shelves and chooses new clothes and smiles, instead, to cover them shortcomings and miseries. It is a rare time, especially for children, when joy knows no bounds. All curfews are lifted. They can roll in the bed and go to sleep as late as they want. The pre-winter sky dazzles brilliantly with torn white clouds sailing merrily along. The sun is slippery and aslant. The long-stalked and white kash flowers, that challenges the clouds their whiteness, sways from every patch of green that the city offers or guards. The sticky monsoon gives way to chilly evenings and chillier nights. It is excuse enough for Bengalis to be out with their woolens and monkey caps. The mornings smell different during these four days of the Durga Puja. That fragrance that I first smelt when I was a school-going boy still swirls in my nostrils. It smelt like all the flowers of the world had blossomed together. I don’t know whether I imagine this but there is a perpetual mist in the mornings and evenings, a mist of expectation, a mist of mirth. One lungful of those magical Puja days from my childhood has lasted me three decades. It is the smell of memories. It is the smell of love. Calcutta is one whole carnival. Everywhere you go there is rejoicing, there is the dancing drummers called dhakis, there are beautiful girls in white saris with red borders, there are flowers, there are incense sticks, and there is laughter.

As the golden twilight dims and the evening darkens, the city lights up in garlands of lights. The pandals, the temporary cloth and bamboo temples of worship, buzzes with the drumbeats calling life to come and join the revelry of the gods. People having rested the afternoon wear their new fashion for the world to see and they pour into the streets to harvest the night. It is time for visits to the pandals where the goddess Durga stands resplendent in her silk sari hitched on her mount, the lion, her ten hands fanning out, in each a different object, her big kohl-lined eyes opened wide with the sparkle that determination brings, to conquer the evil of evil ashuras, the Mahishashura, who lies bloody and defeated at her feet with the spear piercing his toned and muscled heart. The frenzied drums echo the mythological war cry like an incessant reminder, as mesmerised devotees stand in front of the Mother Goddess in reverence, deference and effervescence. This was Mother Durga’s annual visit to the home and abode of her father from the heavens, the earth.

Back then it felt as if I was walking through heaven. Our extended families gathered at my aunt’s home late in the evening and after a feast of the best Bengali cuisine we trooped out in a caravan of Ambassadors to hop from pandal to pandal to see the various artistic renditions of the Mother Goddess. Every pandal themselves were renditions of the great structures of the world: the Taj Mahal, the Sistine Chapel, the Blue Mosque and other such man-made structures. It transcended religion, culture and civilisation. It was one big human celebration. I sat in the darkened interior of my uncle’s Amby as it tediously wove through people and potholes of Calcutta shimmering with light, drowned in the drone of people. I looked out of the window and basked in the envy in the eyes of the less fortunate that trundled the streets with dusty feet; I felt privileged like some maharaja on a tour of his kingdom. I fell in love with the smell of the leather seats, the glow of the meters on the wooden dashboard, and the deep guttural groan of the car. I fell in love with the hand gear, the metal horn which was like a smaller steering within the steering wheel. I fell in love with the warmth of the bodies packed in. With all of this I also fell in love with my cousin Jhinuk, whose name means seashell. And though I never lifted the seashells to my mouth to whisper my love, it stayed with me for years. It mingles with all those memories and especially the memory of the ubiquitous, undaunted lump of a car lovingly called the Amby. For years after that Puja she was my favourite cousin number one, but sadly the Amby, as you must have realised fell from grace.