a man is known by the company he keeps but i will be known for the company i do away with.

over the years that i was growing up an only child who moved cities every 11 months, i made a fairly motley assortment of imaginary friends.

the first one i remember is lucy the station wagon who came home when i was eight. she was painted ashes of roses and was a grand old lady by the time we met. though my father often complained about her being temperamental, lucy and i got along famously. her boot was the cocoon that i spent many joyous evenings, weekends and holidays in until i was ten.

then my father got a new car, a monstrous white ambassador that didn’t have a whit of lucy’s charm or grace. i hated it at first sight and never bothered introducing myself or asking for its name.

i never made friends with a car again until many years later, when i bought my first car and christened her malaika. she had me swooning on our first ride from worli to bandra, the way she slipped and slid, smooth as butter, through the narrow passage ways of mumbai. she was as vivacious as an auto rickshaw and zippy as an RX 100. she was the love of my life that day.

the next morning i parked her at phoenix mills and returned to find her bonnet crushed in.

after a depressing week driving her around with a busted bonnet i decided to cheer us both up by getting her a new hi fi. about 15 minutes into the fitting, an empty glass bottle came flying out of a window in the building we were parked under and shattered malaika’s windshield.

so there she was, a week old chevy spark that looked like an elephant had raped it.

neither malaika nor i ever recovered from the let down.

i grit my teeth and patched her up, but she just kept getting herself into trouble. she cracked her fender on a pothole next. then someone backed into her at a wedding. a cabbie crashed her side on carter road. her engine developed a hacking cough. her roof wept persistently in the rain. last year we bumped a speed breaker and her rear view mirror fell off the roof, just like that.

clearly, malaika had had enough.

she came back from GM with her mirror fixed upside down.

that’s the day i gave up on trying to be friends and rechristened her the bitch.

in august 2010, the financial contract that binds our unhappy marriage finally ends. i’ve been counting the days off to her all of this year, which unfortunately seems to have inspired the bitch to go on strike again.

she’s developed an evil sputter in her fuel injection as of yesterday and needs to retire to the mechanic for a week. while i meru cab it to gurgaon and back. @#@$#!!

after wasting all of today looking for car voodoo dolls, i’ve finally come up with a new agenda for august instead. i’m throwing a party at hauz khas and having all the local gym boys over. there's going to be an unlimited buffet of alcohol and sledge hammers. ha ha. malaika the bitch is going to get her birthday butt bumped right off in august 2010.


ps: i doubt i’ll miss this imaginary friend.


pps: you are blacklisted in my books, GM.

image credit: www.stardustkids.co.uk