Some days ago our dusty, rusting Ambassador was towed away for use as scrap metal.
My earliest memories of the Ambassador are from my days as a blathering toddler in Baroda when the car, large, sturdy, a dignified grey, greeted us every morning in its little garage by the side of the house. Our days began with the familiar roar of its engine and the bold, bass horn that I would recognise anywhere for years afterwards. It was a sound as individual as the ‘Parp parp!’ of Noddy’s car or the neigh of the legendary Chetak. Some winter days, we would have to coax the engine a little to get it going. My father explained that the Ambassador had a sore throat. On holiday mornings, we would go for a drive to feed loaves of bread to the cattle on the roads – I still remember one eager cow that stuck its head into a window.
Large, powerful, majestic, yet benign and kindly in aspect, our grey Ambassador reminded me of an elephant. Travelling in it emphasised the likeness: you towered above the road as the front of the car loomed ahead – something which, my father maintained, gave the driver a feeling of comfort, of defence. And yet it was more than its shell that impressed me. I grew to love the interiors too – the little glove box with the springy knob, the one I pushed so many times as a curious child; the circular plastic case hanging inside the windshield, road tax and other details within; the steel door handles and window rollers; the dashboard with its row of dials, the ones that later cars placed behind the steering wheel. I was fascinated by the signs that lit up in the little rectangular display below: a red bolt of lightning when the car started, a green flicker when the indicator was on. The gear was attached to the steering wheel, at the centre of which sat the original indicator knob. You pulled it to one side, and it beeped until the turn had been taken, when it sprang back into position. I remember the light on the ceiling, and the yellowing switch on the wall beside the driver’s door, the large, comfortable seat where we used to fasten a small chair for my sister when she was an infant, and the grey seat cover, below which there were two older layers (one of navy blue cloth and another of rexine). Most exciting of all was the little hooked lever below the glove box which you had to pull to release the bonnet of the car. There was an air of magic about the mechanism.
Where we went, our Ambassador followed: Baroda, Chennai, Pune. It carried my sister and me to our schools. In it I was ferried to the grounds where I played cricket and to the centres where I wrote my Board Exams. In it, too, my mother first learned to drive, a slight woman of thirty throwing all her weight behind its stubborn steering wheel. Inevitably though, as it got older, its parts began failing or slackening. It was taken to the doctor’s a number of times, and received a fresh coat or two of paint (sometimes, to my chagrin, emerging a slightly different shade of grey). At several points I fought to prevent its disposal. My parents indulged my sentimentality, not least because they shared it.
But twenty-six years is a long time in a car’s career. There came a point when keeping the Ambassador running was no longer practical, and it simply sat downstairs under a crinkly khaki tarpaulin, visible from our third-floor balcony. Slowly it passed from object to relic, from instrument to symbol. One sunny morning, my father and I went down and took some photographs of ourselves with the car. I turned on my heel and left, determined not to prolong the goodbye. Some months later, when I had returned to my temporary abode several thousand miles away, the Ambassador quietly exited our lives. I have only one regret: I never got to drive it.
