Charming jalopies on the road to nowhere
OLD cars hold a special charm. Back in the day, they liberally littered the backyards of my beloved Bangladesh Market district in Chatsworth.
Often described as “needing TLC”, “minor attention” – or indeed halfway to the scrapyard – they were fascinating weekend projects.
Legions of friends and relatives rallied to get an old piece of junk back on the road. Everyone talked up their mechanical skill. We had supposed gearbox specialists, conceptual auto electricians and virtual panel beaters.
My own expertise was limited to telling long, short and tall stories.
I can picture Victor wideeyed at my revelation that the VW Beetle was designed by Ferdinand Porsche.
He was an orderly at RK Khan Hospital who sported a doctor’s white coat and a stolen stethoscope. He also made house visits to charm unsuspecting misses.
Some men rock up at the front door with flowers, others with boxes of chocolates. Victor pitched up with a dangling appendage around his neck.
But let’s get back to the cars. Pride of place belonged to my godfather Ken’s powder blue Datsun 160U which, though never having clocked any mileage between the backyard and Road 328, remains the stuff of legends.
We spent all our time after school hunting for spares, extorting money to procure the said spares, or waiting for the cloak of darkness to liberate trimmings from similar vehicles.
The mission was to get the mean machine running in time for the Glenover matric dance. That pleasure was not to be had as we eventually piled the dazzling damsels into the back of Thiagaraj’s panel van, with paint gallons for seating.
We were too poor to be petrolheads and we were a generation behind the laaities who make nuisances of themselves in their souped-up Citi Golfs.
I hope that somewhere of Indian South Africans. Portrait in Bangladesh there is an aspiring author who will weave the celebrated Datsun 160U into a storyline.
Better-known cars in literature include the smashing Rolls-royce in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which is also a sorry tale of careless drivers.
Stories of car crashes and fatalities also find their way into Joyce Carol Oates’s Black Water and Andre Dubus’s A Father’s Story.
In Richard Rive’s short story Elvis, John O’grady tells Pretty Boy: “I brought dad tonight in my jalopy. It’s a Volksie.” For John Kerouac in On the Road, the car represents Dean Moriarty’s escape from mundane New York life: “I took over the wheel and… drove clear through the rest of Illinois, to Davenport, Iowa, via Rock Island. And here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River.”
Young readers will remember Mr Weasley’s flying Ford Anglia in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Poet Langston Hughes crafted the elegant lines: “If I was a rich boy, I’d buy myself a car, Fill it up with gas, And drive so far, so far.”
The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci questioned American society and its “mechanical attitudes” in Americanism and Fordism.
Closer to home and most striking for me is the quaint black and white picture in Professor Fatima Meer’s seminal Portrait of Indian South Africans with the caption: “Old cars that seldom go, but provide a constant hobby.”
• Higgins promotes #Readingrevolution via Books@antiquecafe in Windermere and #Hashtagbooks in the Shannon Drive Shopping Centre in Reservoir Hills.