Cars that shaped character

Cars that shaped character - Times of India
My article

Cars that shaped character

Times of India 

5 March 2017

 He loved to bring home neglected old beauties. He kept his eyes out for these abandoned ladies. They could be found in unused sheds or under a large tree. They sat on stones, disheveled and covered with bird droppings. They had not been washed for several years but one look at them and you would know that they were beauties in their younger days. Their smooth flowing voluptuous lines, their proud stance, their demeanor all screamed out to those who cared. “Take me home honey, look after me”, they seemed to say, “Fix me up and take me for a spin … and I will show you my true colours.”  He could see beyond the tired façade and knew that there was a seductive promise here. He had to own her! My late father loved old cars.

Citroen, my childhood sweet heart

Sometime in 1961 he purchased a 1947 model Citroen in Calcutta and drove it home. She was a black beauty with a body that will make any man, young or old, go weak in the knees. You see these cars in old war movies; they have these two inverted “V”s on the front grill and a sloping back on which the spare wheel was mounted. It had certain path breaking features which were radical for those days. The aluminium cased gear box was ahead of the engine and two propeller shafts on either side went straight to the front wheels. Due to this feature the car was low slung, the floor was comfortably flat and the car had exquisite handling ability.

Innovation and resourcefulness

Like any old beauty – the car needed attention some times. Spare parts were difficult to come by and the car was old. When a bottom end connecting rod bearing liners cracked, we had to cast them at home. Luckily a dredger was deepening the area near our port channel and was pumping the sea water along with clay to nourish our beach. We collected some clay and fashioned a mould with it by using the existing worn out bearings as a sample.  A crucible of white metal was melted with three blow lamps and the molten metal was poured into the clay moulds and soon we had the basic bearing and our neighborhood lathe shop turned it into a precise shape. It was a grand success but my mom complained half seriously that our home looked and smelt like a foundry!

Cigarette paper gasket

Those were adventurous days and we took many long family drives in the Citroen. One night on the way to Parvathipuram the car sputtered to a halt.  We discovered that the gasket in the carburetor flange had started leaking. Night had fallen and we were miles away from any workshop. So a Charminar cigarette packet was used. The flattened pack was pressed against the flange till the marking became visible on the cardboard. Then under torchlight, using a scissor borrowed from a nearby tailor, it was carefully cut to match the flange. We reached the next town late that night and the next morning we got the appropriate material for the flange and she was in fine running condition again.

Saturday night fever

We would go for the Saturday night movies at the CORIL Club every week. Before going we washed and polished the car till it shone. Problem was that the battery got discharged quite easily and my brother and I were pressed into service to crank-start the car. Some days it would start easily and on other days we would struggle hard till our biceps and triceps ached with the strain. My dad encouraged us saying that is how we built our arm muscles. Once she started she ran like the wind. Cars had no AC those days and the open window with a wind deflecting glass served to cool us down after all that cranking.

Old cars, new cars

Cars were simple those days. You opened the hood and you could see it all laid out. The engine, the battery, the distributor, the spark plugs, the fuel pump, the carburetor, the cut-out, the self-starter, stuff like that, honest and uncomplicated.  Each in its place. Cars now days are different. You get in start the engine and drive a thousand miles without incident.  If something goes wrong there is nothing we can do. If you open the bonnet you are confronted with a mysterious bunch of components which says nothing to us. It is all electronics and microprocessors. The only thing we can recognise is the battery. When you take it to the service centre for a check-up they hook it up to a computer and print out a report, like taking an ECG. You don’t really repair anything now days; you just replace the whole assembly. Recently on a drive I found my car losing power; it felt like one cylinder was not working, I thought I would just clean the spark plug and confidently opened the bonnet. I peered underneath for some time and could find nothing that looked like spark plugs. Apparently the humble spark plug had become a sealed assembly deep inside the engine somewhere. I was numbed by the realization that I could not recognise my once familiar friends under the bonnet. I lowered the bonnet sheepishly and drove on three cylinders to the nearest company service centre.

The magnificent men and their fickle machines

The old cars matched a generation of folks who did not mind getting their hands dirty and reveled in wearing an over-all and getting under the car. I have visions of my old-man with his specs, wrench in hand, peering at some part under the car with a hand lamp. Nothing could match the excitement of opening up the engine and seeing all those tappet valves, rocker arm, pistons, crank-shafts, the oil coated glistening components inside the belly of the beast. It was a man’s world down there, as long as you had a box of tools, with socket wrenches, ratchets, filler gauges, calipers and such like, you could do anything under the sun, or at least anything under the car. The “newer old cars” those days; Ambassadors, Fiats, Heralds were all unpredictable.  Yet you knew that in a pinch you could fix a problem yourself. Owners of cars had some rudimentary understanding of the working of their vehicles and most did not mind taking out a tool box to fix the problems themselves.

The cars that shaped our characters

The era that produced fickle machines also produced a generation of bold men who could fix things.  As I get on in years, I am happy driving cars that are reliable. But at times my mind goes wistfully back to my old sweetheart. After we purchased our next car, a Ford Consul sometime in the early seventies, the Citroen was retired to our garage where it remained for many years, perhaps dreaming of the days it raced through the English countryside or on the Vizianagaram highway. Eventually she was sold as scrap. We stood silently with teary eyes and bowed heads, as the scrap merchants came and took her away. Steel was recyclable and we consoled ourselves by believing that it would be reborn in a different avatar again, perhaps a Ferrari. And perhaps in a different universe my dad is driving her like the wind!