cars

I was thinking of cars. Specifically car models that were common in India in the early 2000s. At some point all these cars that were so common in Indian streets were replaced by newer sounding names. Names that you might hear in the streets of any city anywhere in the world. The change was subtle. You look back now, and you realize an entire generation of cars has vanished. Here are some of the forgotten names: Daewoo Matiz, Opel Astra, Mitsubishi Lancer. Names that I'd learnt from our first driver when I was six or seven or eight years old. In hindsight, his ability to navigate the foreign syllables of these names was quite remarkable. Perhaps because I was the age that I was, I tended to attach personalities to these cars, which were a product of their general design and their names -- all rather euphonious combinations of make and model. The Matiz had a sort of quirky Luna Lovegood personality, evident in its headlight design, as well as in the sound of "Matiz". Opel Astra was quiet and reserved -- its taillights looked somewhat wan.

 

Don't get me wrong, these were all shit cars most likely, but remembering them brings back memories of a lost time. I often daydream about the repairs I might make to my past if I had the ability to go back in time. Make my life history better, more exciting. Perhaps I might choose to get into this or that sport early on so that years down the line I could tell people that this was one of my defining characteristics. Maybe I would have been more diligent about tennis on the three separate occasions when I enrolled in tennis classes. I had a lot of opportunities that I didn't make the most of, and I also didn't have a lot of opportunities that I wish in hindsight I'd had. I'm an avid runner now, but there was very little chance that I would have become a runner in India in any organic way. My environs simply weren't conducive to such a thing. As a result, when I started running in college, the obvious question one might have asked was why. A student of history would look for the events that precipitated this seemingly random development. Sometimes I feel like my life is a haphazard pile of many very short strings instead of a ball of yarn that unravels into a single length of string that you can trace through the years.

 

I have a lot of regrets and some resentments. For many years I was subjected to Hindustani classical singing lessons, which I disliked and often credit semi-ironically with my aversion to singing today, even in the shower. I wish I'd taken piano lessons instead so that I could have developed a solid child prodigy-like technique before the muscles and tendons in my hands became set in their ways. I recently asked my mom why she put me through those singing lessons, and she said I used to love singing when I was little, so she thought the lessons were something I would enjoy. That hit different. My parents also enrolled me briefly in an art class around the same period because I liked drawing. So it seems they always had been attentive to the things that I wanted to do growing up and were not just trying to relive their childhoods through me, as I sometimes felt. Or foisting some weird dream of their own on me, as I felt all the time at FIITJEE. (Indian parent things, basically.) FIITJEE, of course, was a destroyer of all dreams, and its founder D. K. Goyal is scum. The day that tapeworm dies will be a day that I and other FIITJEE survivors will forever remember with joy and perhaps a drink.

 

I can't really find a point in my past where I can point to some obvious mistake in my upbringing and say, "This is where we fucked up." At every point everything was quite idyllic (except at FIITJEE). Even still, I would probably change a lot of things unabashedly if I ever wrote an autobiography. There would be clear antecedents in my life history to the things that I chose to define myself by -- the adoptive tastes and hobbies of my later years. They wouldn't just be random things I picked up one fine year because I wanted someone to think of me in such and such a way, or because I wanted to create a mutual interest with someone I wanted to be interested in me. You know? My formative years would be just that: They would set me up for future experiences rather than rob me of them or peter out before they amounted to anything. I wouldn't be a shape-shifting ghost -- unrooted, blown around by the wind, trying to fit in with real people. I would be a real person. I would leave out the Daewoo Matizes of my life -- the queer stuff, the stuff that doesn't fit anywhere but still gives joy -- and save those memories for myself.