Zooming on a red scooter
K S S Pillai
The other day I saw a Facebook post on a young friend’s profile page. The caption was, ‘My First Car’. There were a few photographs of him and the proud members of his family, posing in front of a new car, smiling broadly. One showed the staff members of the showroom with him, and another a saffron-clad priest, who would perform puja, invoke the blessing of God for the car and its passengers and keep a lemon under its wheel to ward off evil spirits when it rolled out of the showroom.
That reminded me of a period when owning a car was possible only for the rich and the powerful. There were only a few imported, large-bodied cars on the roads. The case of scooters was no different. There were only a couple of brands available in the market, and the waiting period was up to ten years after you registered your name.
The showrooms would announce the date of registration well in advance. To accommodate a large number of aspirants, the location used to be places like stadia. The aspiring crowd would assemble well before the appointed time, many of them taking leave of absence from their workplaces.
The registration fee was a princely Rs.500. As there was no restriction about transferring the registration to another name, many used to make a fast buck that way. Government servants had a separate quota, and they could expect to own a scooter a little before the ordinary folk. Naturally, owning a scooter was a status symbol.
I bought my first scooter much later. That was the time when a few more manufacturers had entered the field. Those who did not want to wait for popular brands could go for the new ones, whenever they were available. While manufacturers of vehicles spend large sums of money on advertising their products today, and banks are after you offering hassle-free vehicle loans at competitive rates, the procedure for getting a loan of 9500 rupees for a scooter those days was very cumbersome.
The showroom was in another city fifty kilometres away. Since I did not know driving, a friend offered to accompany me to the showroom. What was offered to me was a 150cc Vijay Super scooter, manufactured by the public sector Scooters India Ltd. It was blood-red in colour, quite different from what I had in mind. When I asked the manager to give me a scooter with another colour, he expressed his helplessness and advised me, “Buy it now, and change its colour any time you like.” Scooters of red colour were so rare in the small city where I lived that I soon came to be known as ‘the guy with the red scooter’!
Another friend offered his services as my driving instructor. My wife and sons were impatient to ride on the scooter and urged me to learn driving immediately. The next day being a Sunday, I was woken up much earlier than usual by my smiling wife, holding a steaming cup of tea.
As soon as my first day’s learning lessons were over, they demanded to be taken on a round of the college campus where we lived. There was no stalling them with excuses like the absence of helmets or a driving licence. My younger son stood in the front, while my wife and the elder son sat proudly on the pillion. I am sure my wife must have been furtively looking for envious eyes peeping at us from behind curtains.
I am told that our industries were in their infancy at the time of independence and we had to import even paper pins. That is, happily, a thing of the past and we have become an industrial giant and a force to reckon with.
Even now, when roads are chockablock with all kinds of two-wheelers and swanky cars, we fondly remember our first ride on a red scooter.
(The author is a retired professor of English. A regular contributor to The Kashmir Vision, his articles and short stories have appeared in various national and international publications)
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