After Bug, Who?

The moment we saw her, my wife Bunny and I decided to call her Bug. She was cute as any cute bug can be. She was our first Maruti (pronounced M’rooti) 800. More, she was our very first brand-new car. It was 1987, and we had just moved to Delhi from what was then Cal­cutta. In Calcutta the preferred mode of automotive transport then was the Ambassador, the only vehicle—apart from the hand-pulled rickshaw—that could navigate the city’s monsoon-flooded streets.

But Delhi was Maruti country. A couple of years previou­sly Khushwant Singh had in one of his columns composed a paean of praise for the little ‘people’s car’ which he saw as a herald of India’s coming of modern age. And—thanks to the Maruti 800—all over the country, middle-class India was taking the high road. The newcomer to India’s autoscape was affordable and mechanically reliable.

The little 800 changed the way middle-income India lived. Apart from dropping off and picking up the kids to and from school, commuting to work and back and doing the weekend grocery shopping at the local ‘supermarkets’ which were just making their tentative debut, the Maruti was useful for another thing which it seemed to have invented for itself: the weekend getaway to a scenic spot within motorable reach.

The 800 created a new adjunct to India’s fledgling leisure industry, which so far had largely been dependent on LTA or leave travel allowance, which came with its own government-dictated set of rules and regulations: you could take LTA only to go to your ‘native place’, you had to go for a minimum of such-and-such days, blah blah, bloo blah. The Maruti threw the rulebook out of its roll-down window. If you had one of these zippy little things—and who didn’t?—you could take a holiday break on any weekend you wanted. To cater to ‘Maruti tourism’, hotels, motels and dhabas for the new breed of motorised pilgrims sprang up all over the country, generating revenue and employment.

The 800 gave another stimulus to the national econ­omy: sho-sha. Bir Singh, the young guy who drove our recen­tly gotten Maruti, as neither Bunny nor I can drive, introd­u­ced us to it by taking us to a neighbourhood shop in the ‘urban village’ of Lajpat Nagar II (lpn-ii), a border zone bet­ween the city and the rural boonies, where we’d rented a barsati.

“What’s sho-sha?” we’d asked Bir Singh.

“You don’t know what sho-sha is?” Bir Singh had said, shaking his head at the ignorance of supposedly educated people. “Come, I’ll show you sho-sha.” He took us in Bug to the automobile accessories market in lpn-ii.

I’d always believed that all that was required, car-wise, was four wheels, an engine and a steering wheel. But no one had told me about sho-sha, which was as integral a part of a car as the internal combustion thingummy that powered it.

“This is sho-sha,” said Bir Singh. There were day-glo bumper stickers which read ‘I’m a Gujjar cowboy’ or ‘Frisky after whisky’ or ‘Jai mata di’! There were small, plastic mannequins—little naked baba-log—who did fluorescent pee-pee at the push of a button and which you stuck on the rear window. There were fake tiger and leopard skins to cover the dashboard with. This was sho-sha. But the most important part of sho-sha, Bir Singh told us, was to never, ever remove the transparent plastic seat covers that the new car came with. “Never take those off,” said Bir Singh. “Otherwise how will everyone know that your new car is new, no?” he said.

So Bug was suitably sho-sha-ed, though I drew a line at the bumper stickers and the fluorescent pee-pee. With her shining plastic seat covers, Bug looked like a bride on her wedding night. And that’s what it turned out to be. A rumbling, lowing noise woke me in the early hours of the morning. It was the resident lpn-ii bull, a massive creature of midnight black. The beast had snuggled up to Bug and was licking her bonnet with great slobbery slurps. “Go away! Get away from her!” I yelled. But it was no use. The huge beast was in the throes of uncontrollable passion. And was it my imagination or did Bug reciprocate with a coy simper of her grille? Was I witnessing the conjoining of primeval Bharat and modern India? As the father of the bride, I gave my blessings to the union.

Bug has been gone a long time now. But as her sister M’rutis are phased out, I’d like to believe Bug left behind a legacy of that honeymoon night in LPN-II. It took over 20 years in coming, but at last it arrived. Maruti’s successor, Bug’s baby.

Where did you think the Nano came from?