Read it Live
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In the early 90’s Suzuki-fx was the car. It wasn’t a good car or a bad car; it was the car everyone had. Amongst all the reasons I had to love mine, the most important was that it was an 87 model, always as old as I was. For a girl, I’ve always been more interested in cars than usual, probably the effect of growing up with brothers only. I had decided at a very young age that I would get married to a guy who owned a Ferrari F-40, a demand that I recently reduced to a black Honda Accord, seeing that no one in Pakistan has a Red Ferrari.

Our Suzuki-fx was where I got my first notion of ‘family.’ My father in the driving seat, my mother beside him, and us three kids in the back. My elder brother behind my father’s seat, I behind my mother’s and the middle one in the centre. Our positions were mutually agreed upon without any debate. My location always gave me an added advantage of being able to secretly communicate with my mother, a practice most often used when we wanted something from our father. I would bend forwards a little and whisper into her ear, “Amma, please ask Abu” for one thing to another. Sometimes, when I was caught doing this my father would affectionately admonish me for not talking to him directly. At his direct inquiry, a feeble “Kuch bhee nahi,” would escape my lips, a cue to my mother that it was time she spoke up for me. The car had its own life, which, coming to think of it was not too different from our home.

Our car seemed to have been custom made for us. The space in the back seat was just adequate, not too tight nor too luxurious for us three. I also used to take special comfort in the fact that we siblings would almost always sit age-wise. To a trained eye, traces of obsession for order and categorization in my personality would have been very apparent back then too. I liked the way our family would just fit into this mechanically moving body that could take us anywhere.

I loved my car, pretty oblivious to the fact that others owned better ones. For me mine was always the best. To a certain age I remember believing in that completely but then around 10, I started having doubts. Just believing it truly was not enough anymore. With cousins I had to prove that my Suzuki was better than their Corolla. It’s amazing how children can go to absurd extents in forming the most illogical arguments to prove their point. “Smaller cars are better than bigger cars because they are less accident prone and can get into smaller spaces” - that was always my argument.

For me, cars always had genders and personalities, they still do. My Suzuki was a girl, so were all smaller Swifts, Mehrans and Charades of those times. My cousins’ Corollas were guys, so were all the jeep-types, van-types and truck-types. There were cars that looked innocent, and cars that looked thuggish, cars that smiled and cars that scowled. Cars were pretty animate objects; ours even had a name - Betsy.

I have learnt a lot from cars in my life, for example, Math. I was never good at Math, especially mental Math, that seemed like a whole other branch of rocket science. But I always wanted to be good, because I had a crush on a cousin who was brilliant at it. That’s when I realized we had Math on the roads everywhere. I was pretty good at memorizing license plates; I had even made a song out of ours, MNK 9246. I asked my brother what MNK meant and he said that our car belonged to Multan, which seemed odd because we did not. So with license plates, I started to play mental Math. I would, by adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing the numbers on a plate, make numbers that already existed on that plate. Like 9246, 2 + 4 = 6, or 2438, 2 x 4 = 8. It was usually pretty easy but with some tricky plates you just couldn’t do it! I never let myself lose though, always bent the rules a little, thinking its all in my head, I’ll make myself forget afterwards and no one would know. Soon I was mathematically analyzing every plate to a point where I could concentrate on nothing else on the road. After a while I had to make a conscious effort to stop doing it and look somewhere else instead. But it paid off; at least I improved considerably at Math.

We only had one car and we had had it since forever. It was a constant of my life, like my house, like my family. I could never imagine owning anything other than MNK 9246. But life is full of changes, the realization that things can never always be the same no matter how hard you try. With increasing age our car started to visit the workshop just too frequently for affordability. Meanwhile my elder brother had out grown the car and his legs didn’t fit in the meager backspace any more. He also started to drive often which displaced my father into the seat beside him and my mother in the back with us. The order of the universe had started to change. As growing children, just like outgrowing clothes, we had outgrown our car too.

So after much deliberation we decided to sell our car and buy a bigger, second hand one. Mitsubishi Lancer 1300 CC, model 87 became the resident of our porch. But second hand cars can never be fully yours; they always carry in them the aura of the previous owners, something lingering in there that no amount of cleaning or remodeling can get rid of. I associate the hardest period of my life with the dull silver paint of that car. In my database of number plates, I don’t find its number either, in my car-family associations I find the most broken link in that three years time.

In 2001 my father left for England in search of better employment opportunities. My mother being unable to bear with the car’s frequent break downs and ever increasing engine problems, all on her own as my brothers were away from home for studies, decided to buy a new car finally. I had never in my life owned a new car. The Suzuki was new but it was there when I was born, I never got to see a 000000 meter. Bless the easy lease system that allowed us to buy a new car. A shiny off-white new Suzuki Baleno was brought home on July 2nd, 2003, my mother’s birth day.

I remember never wanting to take off the plastic covers, not wanting to replace ‘Applied For’ with an actual number or getting out of the car once I was inside. I thought about richer people who bought and sold cars yearly, if they felt the same way about a new car too. Probably not. I remember writing about it my journal, once even hugging the new resident of our porch when I was out locking the gate at night. I loved my car, I still do. Its one of those smiling, innocent, feminine ones, the kind I’ve always liked.

My life still has to do a lot with cars. I don’t attach notions of limitless adventure with them anymore. The idea of sleeping in it and waking up somewhere else, as if on a bed with wheels, doesn’t fascinate me now. But they still help me to understand life, its chain of events and changes. Life does not follow a set pattern now; the driver’s seat is not occupied by my father. In fact we have not had a chance to sit in it as a complete family of five. My brothers have taken over the steering now, sometimes pushing me to do it too, though I adamantly refuse to take on that responsibility. Life refuses to be neatly categorized either. There are no fixed places in the car. The order of the universe has changed, introducing into it new people, my brother’s wife and his child.

I halt a little during this drive through life. Twenty years have passed since I got into a car, sometimes as the driver but mostly as a passenger. The people traveling with me have changed, some coming on board, others getting off, the scenery outside has shifted considerably, and I’ve had to change vehicles thrice. Shifting gear, I look beyond the bonnet of my pearl-white Baleno and see a line of cars that I still have to ride in.