Our First Wheels and Other Tales of Woe – Part 1: How the Car Came to Be

The Husband and I bought a car, a month back. The buy primarily stemmed from the need of convenience, and the luxury of, well, just having our own car.

For years I had dreamed of having my very own set of wheels. I haven’t yet fathomed why, but there is this certain mystique attached with driving one’s own car. It oozes a sense of power and control from every gleam of its metal body.

Then there are these car chase movies one grows up on. So it IS pretty avant-garde, wanting to drive it Fast and the Furious or Transporter style - like a cowboy on wheels! It is very, for lack of a better word, cool. Corny but true.

Anyway, here I was, grown-up – minus a ride.

I had had a couple of completely avoidable experiences previously, where I thought that I nearly had my machine, but then I got scammed by the Father and the Husband respectively. Had I been more susceptible of my family’s nature, I could have avoided the disappointment!

The first one was at the rash young age of 18, when I enrolled into a proper driving school, learnt how to drive and got myself as license. It was then that my beloved disciplinarian of a father categorically refused to let me so much as to touch the family car. And that put a sorry end to my tender dreams of whizzing down the highway with loud music blaring. What was the point of making me go to driving school when the plan from the beginning was not to let me touch the car?

The second one was when the Husband and I shifted to Calcutta. The Husband said, learn how to drive and then we will get a car. Thus, like an obedient wife, I signed up for training classes, I got up early each morning, and drove a battered Alto for half an hour, with a driving instructor who would talk about everything, except what he was paid to teach.

We would drive down the lanes the instructor was comfortable with, and I never really learnt anything, except steering the wheel. Everytime I made a mistake, the instructor would slam down his breaks and start screeching at a high decibel, scolding me. It was like being stuck in second grade, with Simon Cowell, and no clue as to how I got there.

After 10 days of classes, I realized that I would not learn driving if it wasn’t in my own car, where I was in control of where I had to go and what I had to do. Without further ado, I stopped taking further classes and told the Husband to start hunting for the car.

It was then that the Husband mysteriously started having a heavy workload. He started travelling and just didn’t have the time to go car hunting. When I thought of buying an Alto from a friend, whose condition was pretty good, the Husband made noises that he was too tall to fit into an Alto – this after I had learnt driving in an Alto because I would eventually go on to buy one! If this isn’t diabolical, pray tell me what is?

Then he threw the trump card – we might be shifting cities, he said, so there was no point in investing in a car for a few months. The new car would come after we made the move. I was stumped – there was no logical comeback to this one. So we were not buying a car in the near future. And that was it.

Seasons went by, we grew older, and I reconciled to my fate of an eternity of travelling at the mercy of others.

Then one day the Husband again brought forth this painful topic of buying a car. I thought, What the heck! and decided to humour him. No way was I going to fall for this and get disappointed again. Twice bitten thrice shy.

The Hubby, put forth arguments on buying a used car. We would learn how to drive on it, he said. So I decided to play along, pretend that we were buying a car. I knew that in a few days, he would change his stance and we would return to our days of public transport and taxis.

I made some perfunctory enquiries on how a car should be – longer and more indepth research had gone into buying my laptop. I hawed and hummed for a few days before I gave the nod and said Yes it would be OK to buy it.

Little did I know that this time it was for real, the Husband was not in jest. Before I could say Hot Wheels, the deal had been stamped and signed.

So one bright (read sweltering hot) Saturday afternoon in March, our sky blue ride was wheeled into our parking lot. We became the proud owners of a brand new third hand Santro.

It came with a music player, cushioned seats, no stepny and an auto locking system, which when used, set off the alarm.

What more could I say? The cup runneth over. My first car. Our first car.

Except that in the moment I sat in the drivers seat, I had my epiphany – I realized that I would never like driving.

To be continued in Part 2.

Advertisement