21/03/2016
She passed away on 25 May 2014 at the age of 56. It was a silent exit; after all, she was on life support for sometime. When the end finally came, not many of us were surprised. We merely shrugged shoulders and bid adieu to yet another relic of our past life. But to someone who was once equated to a queen and who once rubbed shoulders with prime ministers, diplomats and top bureaucrats, our resigned, rather indifferent response to her death must have been painful.
I was in love with her once. Despite her old ways, cranky moods and bulky frame, I hoped that she would belong to me one day. Yet, as I grew up and saw the world in its myriad beauty and panache, I grew weary of my first love and abandoned her soon after. Now as I stand at her grave, the least I owe her is a heartfelt eulogy to atone for my indifferent face and indifferent heart.
Friends, I present my eulogy for India’s very own Ambassador car, whom we affectionately called Amby. Despite being born in the shadow of her 1956 colonial ancestor British Morris Oxford, the 1958 Ambassador from Hindustan Motors became a quintessential Indian fixture in no time. In the closed socialist economy of India, rallying for self-sufficiency and austerity, she was the lone choice for all. She carried top politicians and bureaucrats with a red beacon on her head, lace curtains on her sides and a chauffer at the wheel. With an equal grace, she heaved heavy matrons packed like sardines on her bench style seats, an equal number of children on their laps and everything from jackfruit to huge bunches of plantains in her boot. It was a sight to behold, when this bowler-hat shaped, bulbous, white beauty sped across our almost non-existent roads with a devil-may-care attitude. In our hierarchy driven society, she transcended all hierarchies; among our differences, she reflected a certain commonality.
For us, the middle class Keralites aspiring to make it big, she was the stuff that dreams were made of. You had arrived if you had an Amby in your porch. It was the dream I grew up with - get rich enough to own my own Amby. The distance from my dad’s beat up Vespa to the gleaming white ambassador was what the distance to success looked like to me at the height of innocence. Yes, those were the last days of postcolonial idealism and delusional optimism.
In fact, those were the last days for many things as we knew them. Change was in the winds. Soon a tin box named Maruti captured the mind space and market share of India’s car market. Then came the foreign beauties whom the liberalization delivered in all shapes and colors with fancy names and fancier accessories.
Amby could never match up to the newbies in the market. Why did she have to, when no one could match up to her in sheer engine power, leg space, boot space or elegance? Man, she imperiously rode our potholed roads that still break the legs of foreign beauties a 100 times over. She didn’t change, but alas, times did. From the queen of roads, she became the grand old lady of the Indian road, then to the frail, inconsequential lady.
I feel guilt and pain for her death. Yet I realize it was inevitable. That her end coincided with the ascend of the new Modi government is an amusing coincidence. In many ways, it also marks the decisive end of socialist, nostalgic, hesitant India. This is a new India, never more confident of its place in the world, the India that is out to have it all, the India aspiring for skyscrapers, malls and bullet trains, the India which in Amartya Sen’s words, have islands of Californias in vast stretches of sub-saharan Africa. This India has no place for Amby and her egalitarianism or her ratty moods. She was part of another time, when things were more meaningful, slow paced and understanding, but also more closed, cautious, and restrictive.
She may yet make a come back as an expensive retro model. But those times when we squeezed into the raised, hard, uncomfortable seat of the crowded Amby, rushing to yet another marriage, and breathed in the waft of jasmine flowers hanging from the rearview mirror and the incense sticks jutting out from the glove box? They are definitely over.
The fleet of Ambys left behind may chug on for few more years in Kerala’s villages where battle-hardened cabbies still swear by them. But in the age of Uber and Ola cabs, they would be mere ghosts waiting for release from our nostalgic hold. It’s time to set them free and give Amby and her past, a fitting burial.
Hope you rest in peace Amby, knowing that to some of us, you were our childhood dream girl and our faded, but fondly remembered first love.
(Photo credit: Stephan Rebernik via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA Scalino via Foter.com / CC BY-NC tony_the_bald_eagle via Foter.com / CC BY-ND)