Farewell to the Little Yellow Bug of My Youth
Learning to say goodbye to my first car is also, at least for the moment, about saying goodbye to the city I grew up in and the people and experiences that shaped me.
Somewhere 7,721 miles away, a tiny yellow car is no longer cheerfully bathing under a dazzling tropical sun, and I am no longer standing on a balcony across green slopes and stretches of concrete to catch a glimpse of it. I am thousands of miles away, but I know the spot is now empty.
***
I never thought I would live in India forever, but I didn’t know I would one day live in New York. On my list was the England in which I had relatives, the snow-logged spaces to which my father’s company took him in Switzerland, lakeside spots in the Finland of my mother’s musician friend. Now, here I am, enamored by every snowflake in my backyard, watching to see who flinches first, me or the bold deer across the street.
I remember the moment it hit. Not when I quit my job or when my visa arrived, but when I was in the car I had not been able to drive for several months after my severe spinal stenosis diagnosis. I slowly circled my building, relishing the familiar click of the gear stick, hoping my clutch leg wouldn’t cramp midslope again as it had during those first hints of nerve damage, wondering whether this would be the last time my feet would be on its pedals.
***
My first car was also one of the first of this particular car. The Tata Nano, the most Parsi car a Parsi could buy, was also the world’s cheapest car. At around $2,000 dollars, the “People’s Car” that my grandfather decided at its launch at Parsi Gymkhana would be my first, in its flagship bright yellow, a color I would never have picked, on a tiny car I never imagined I would love.
If it hadn’t been the cheapest, I would not have had my own car at nineteen, but the first few weeks, I loved and hated it. It was an imposter on the streets and everyone wanted a look. For a new driver, a woman driver in Mumbai, this attention was terrifying. Every time I was stopped by policemen I thought I had taken the wrong turn, forgotten my blinkers on, accidentally run a light. No, they just wanted to examine this strange yellow creature. What was the battery doing under my seat, where was the fuel door (the front, if you’re wondering), could a six-foot person really fit (my own five-foot height was not a good sell of its surprisingly spacious interior), was the spare tire really in the front and why was there no trunk? At gas stations men patronizingly insisted I look for the fuel door on the side where it should be, refusing to believe it was under the hood. As I tried, with novice driver nerves, to steer through man and machine in crowded lanes, little children held on to, jumped on, crowded around the car yelling, “Nano! Nano!” and motorcycles with families of four too proud to buy this “cheap piece of crap” tried to cut me off, because how dare a woman do anything, especially in this abomination. In some ways, this made me a more confident driver.
The attention never died, but it did let up, and that’s when we bonded. Late nights alone, when I would usually be confined to the four walls of my bedroom, I could now take long drives on the (more or less) empty streets with my windows rolled up (doors locked!), music blaring. My friends and I could drive across state lines without having to worry about getting robbed or felt up on a crowded train or spending money we didn’t have on private transport, thanks to the car’s extremely generous mileage. Parking anywhere was a nightmare, but this fit into the tiniest spaces, so I could drive to work and not spend an hour circling the suburb to find a spot. There were only four gears and a cutoff speed, but it zipped satisfyingly across highways for hours without overheating, and for seven years gave me no hint of trouble. It held my hand through lonely breakups and bumpy new relationship rides, it took me up the mountains to waterfalls and trails and down to pretty promenades and lakes.
***
Still, I did consider upgrading; the lure of a shiny new “real” car was tempting. But after my grandfather died, I couldn’t bring myself to give up this little connection to him that followed me to work and helped me find a degree of independence and safety in a city often unfriendly to a woman on its streets. I held on to it as I held on to the friendships beginning to fade, the trips people no longer had time for, the ability to sit, stand, and drive for hours without pain that my spine no longer allowed, staying up drinking all night and working early the next morning without feeling like death, and doe-eyed adolescence giving way to the jaded miasma of adulthood.
When most of my friends and then my brother left and it was just Nano and me, it kept me company, helped me feel like they were all still there blocking my view in the backseat, falling asleep in the passenger seat, singing out the window, fiddling with the settings on my stereo.
***
Even when I moved to New York I held on to the car now kept alive by my dad, its plastic interior chipping, seats sinking, edges letting in too much of a heavy monsoon.
This year, we decided it was no longer financially viable to keep the decade-old Nano sitting outside my building. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve driven it, but I still mourned it like you would a person. I mourned it because in its presence I felt connected still, to my grandfather, to my friends, to my youth. I’m learning slowly to leave behind not just a car I was attached to because it was my first, but the city, experiences, and people who helped shaped me. I’m mourning, but I am also readier than when I first moved to accept and move on from the twinge of separation from things and people left behind.
My little yellow bug is no longer standing, but like my grandfather, its presence persists.
-Rhea C. Dhanbhoora
Rhea worked for close to a decade as editor and writer in print and digital content for a variety of clients, before quitting her job and moving to New York to get her master’s degree, and finally writing the stories everyone told her no one would ever read. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in publications such as The Hindu, Quint, The Apeiron Review, Sparkle & Blink, Awakened Voices, Five on the Fifth and JMWW. She’s currently working on a collection about women based in the underrepresented Parsi Zoroastrian diaspora. Instagram: @ree4509. Twitter: @ReeWritten.