From Two-Wheeler to Three

Am I fascinated by cars?
Well! Peeping from the sides at the complex inter twining of mechanical and electrical gadgets that the open bonnet of my car reveals definitely answers this question in the negative. That is, if fascination with or at least a familiarity with the inside of a car bonnet is a pre-requisite to fascination with the four wheeler.
My car has been standing at a petrol pump for the past hour with another one of its smaller parts broken, which has caused a not-so-small problem. The car I own (or rather my dad owns) is a seemingly uncomplicated Maruti 800. And although everyone in the family drives it regularly, it chooses to screech its choicest of grievances to me and always in the not so early hours of the evening when I am at least a good 20 kms away from home.
So standing at this petrol pump, still in my fitness pants (thankfully, a mechanic to my rescue) and blinking unwittingly at the carburetor (or is it the radiator ... err!!) I wonder how fascinated I am with cars. Which also reminds me, I still havent figured out where my car would support its jack, though am sure it will never trouble me with something as cliche as a flat tyre.
Coming back to my dilemna- I don't exactly love my Maruti 800, but then again I don't hate it either. I like better looking cars but I haven't put every single detail about them to memory. At times I cant put a model to its manufacturer. I dont own scrap books with glossy pictures of motors cut out from newspaper supplements or magazines. The walls of my room are not adorned with posters of the poshest Porsche or the coolest sports cars. If I have to buy a car it would be more a choice of looks than miles per litre. In any case, obsession with cars is categorically a male prerogative. And I do not intend territorial transgression (so much for anti-feminism).

But What do I like about cars?
Essentially, the wheel, the accelerator, the speedometer and the break.
What I do like about cars...is the mere fact that they facilitate driving.
I dont know when driving got to me but it was in a very early age. I remember the first time I asked my father to teach me how to drive was at the ripe old age of 8. Needless to mention, my legs still dangled from car seats (or every other seats, for that matter). Reaching the break, the clutch or the accelerator was going to take a good many years and lots of Bournvita (my mother assured me). The denial was polite and I in my 8 year old's wisdom saw the reason for what was being denied to me and let it rest.The question, however, was repeated anually, year after year. And every year I was asked to ask the following year.
Finally I was 15. It was decided that the time had come that my sister, almost 18 and therefore legally fit to drive, must start learning how to drive. It was arranged that she get up early every morning to take driving lessons from my dad. When I got to know about this I could not bear to think that I was already 15 and as yet untutored in what I wanted to learn so badly where as the privilidge was extended to my sister who did not even look half as interested, only because she was a few years older to me. I threw a massive teenager tantrum. This time they had no excuse. I was tall enough- taller even than my sister...which meant no more dangling legs, I had already asked some 7 times (on an annual basis) and age- I rubbished that argument with a wave of my hand.
The result of my brattish behaviour was that each morning my dad took my sister in his office car and my mom took me in our maruti to teach us both how to drive. Personally, I was happy that I had got my mother to teach me, considering I even forgot what 2+2 was whenever my dad lost his patience with me while teaching. The only problem however was the new found concept of the clutch.The word wasnt absolute greek to me. I knew it was part of a motor and knew exactly where it was situated but what it did was something I had bever bothered to find out. For me, the break and the accelerator were the only two existing entities, important and necessary to drive a car. I remember as a child, at times when I sat in the front, on the passenger seat of the car I played a game with myself. Looking straight ahead out of the windscreen and gauging my dad's (or whoever was at the wheel) style of driving, I pretended to press my foot on a non-existent break and accelerator according to the motion of the car. So dealing with this trespasser named clutch in my happy world of the break-accelerator duo turned out to be a slight problem. However, I picked up well and ended up feeling flattered when both my parents exchanged notes (read boast) about their respective students at the breakfast table everyday.
My fascination with driving did not stop at just learning. I experimented, Perfected my reverse gear on my own, sometimes, slyly nicked the car keys from the key hanger, slipped down to the parking lot and drove out into the traffic by myself (of course, without a license). I drove faster and faster as I grew more confident with the wheel. The many years I had spent playing my little break-accelerator game in the passenger seats of cars made me realise I had a pretty good idea about the dimensions of my car.
My car too had potential for discovery. For one, I discovered driving a Maruti above 70 is very much like sitting in a plane about to take off. I couldn't fathom how people with black spotless and elegant Honda Citys could drive at 40 and be content. What was even more bewildering was the fact that people with Mercedes and BMWs actually wasted that much money and never drove the cars themselves. Ideas of a skid had enchanted me but I wasn't going to put my Maruti through that much and especially when my dad was short-tempered. I tried all of that at the go-kartings where I banged into tyres and other cars, skidded at my heart's content at the cost of grease stains on my favourite denims.
I realised I loved to drive. In time, it began to work for me as a breather, something that could lift my spirits. It came to such a state that if I did not drive for a week I began feeling incomplete, amiss.
I was branded rash very soon, considering I took on unspoken challanges of a car-race with absolute strangers at the peak hours. My friends knew I loved driving and readily handed me their car keys in order to sit back as I drove. Some of my other friends wanted me to teach them how to drive.As for how many times I collided into stuff- once, that is once in a major way.I was lost in thought when I banged into the tyre of a Fiat. The silver rim above the Fiat's tyre came off. I dared not step down to see the damage to my car. By the time I got home I didn't need to step down. I could see one end of the bumper hanging on its hinges awkwardly, even from where I sat.
Eventually, I got my license. Not that I thought I needed it. I lamented it more because the photograph on the license is the worst I have ever looked in any picture (imagine looking like a cauliflower painted golden).
My parents weren't (or I should say aren't) very happy with the way I drive, although I normally take it easy when I'm not alone. But its understandable, after all they are parents. My mom still claims she is on the verge of a heart attack every time she sits next to me when am driving and I can't bear to sit with my dad because he wouldn't stop shouting instructions at me.
My obsession for driving hasn't ebbed but it has matured- the way love for a spouse you spend lot of years with does.
Now, since I have spent so many years with the four wheeler I feel I'm prepared to graduate to the three.
By three, I mean the planes.
It was one thing yearning to learn how to drive. It was another to feel the rush just by looking or hearing a plane take off or a fighter jet somersault in the sky. I have wanted to fly ever since I have wanted to drive, maybe even before that.
Its funny, that although I want to fly so badly, the number of times I have sat in a plane totals up to a huge 5, the first being on my 14th birthday. But then again, am sure its not the same thing as flying the machine or for that matter even look at it taking off from close proximity.
So,Am I fascinated by planes? The answer is the same.
I wouldn't know one from the other. A certain huge Air Japan passenger plane has imprinted itself in my memory but I don't know which Airbus it was. And however politically incorrect it might be to like a movie like Air Force 1, I couldn't help liking it (there were so many in air combats and of course Harisson Ford).
Watching planes land and take off is something I can do for a whole day The number of bikes and cars standing with flashing parking lights on the sides of the road next to the airport's runway and the number of heads craning out of buses and other moving vehicles tell me its not abnormal to like watching that.
Watching a plane preparing to land, many times I have jammed my foot on the accelerator, so that I could zoom across the length of the underpass and emerge onto the road in time for the plane to pass right over my head. How many times have I slowed down, even stopped my car to sit and watch planes. And now I have started playing the same games sitting in a plane- my hand on the hand rest pretending to pull the lever as the plane tilts at an angle or lifts its nose to the sky. Just watching the third wheel disappear and appear is fascinating enough.
How I want to fly!

The bonnet has finally closed. I have learnt names of more gadgets- timing belt!!! Finally I can go home. The mechanic quotes an exhorbitant amount for his labours. What does he think he has been repairing- a Merc?
He argues- Its night. He was on his way back home and worked only because I am a Ladeez.
Ladeeeeez? How many did he see in me?
Its fruitless to argue. He's adamant and I am cold, eager to get back home.
The roads are relatively less crowded now. I love driving on certain roads at this time. The new Delhi-Gurgaon toll bridge has come up and its cut down the time I take to reach home. I have my first go at it. Its a beautiful fly over sloshed in a million flashes of orange and yellow lights. I turn towards the airport and from the height I see the two rows of bright yellow lights marking the runway. Just as I turn the bend, to make my descend to the road beneath a plane emerges next to me, a little higher, flashing white, yellow and red- gradually descending to the run way marked by two rows of bright yellow lights.