Meeting an old friend and colleague a couple of days back rekindled in me fond nostalgic memories about a ‘minor’ motor car owned
by him for about 45 years from the late 60s; a Morris Minor 1951 four seater four door sedan made in England. The
car is KLE 7488 in its original greenish shade
common for Morris Minor cars of the period. The car with a side valve
engine had its head lights mounted on
the wings instead of down in the grill console as in the earlier models. Morris Minor cars
were common on Kerala roads in the 50s and the 60s especially in bigger
towns like Kozhikode, Cochin, Trivandrum and so on.This rather slow moving car,
compared to the present day cars , was
but very convenient to drive in the crowded city roads as well as through
narrow by lanes of residential areas owing to its compact size
and easy manoeuvrability.
I have been seeing this car of my friend ever
since he bought it. In the early 70s he was
transferred to Bangaluru and
posted in the same office in which I was
working and took up a house on rent next to the house where I was staying with
my family. I still remember his arrival
in Bangalore in the Morris Minor driven
all the way from a northern centre of Kerala. He stayed in this house for a few
months with his family before shifting to a house near to the office. During
this period in particular and thereafter
till I was transferred out of Bangaluru in
1975, the two families had travelled in this car extensively to every nook and
corner of Bangaluru be it the Cubbon
Park , the Lal Bagh, Vidhan soudha, residential colonies like JayaNgar , Rajai
Nagar, Wilson Gardens , restaurants like the MTR, Brindavan, Nilgiris etc and
so on. My friend, like me, was fond of films and it was mostly in his car that the
two families went for films except on those
occasions when my 1967 Standard
Herald was taken out. Our rides through the long roads of Indira
Nagar, Double Road, M.G.Road, walks on the Brigade Road and Commercial
Street after parking the car are all still fresh in memory.
The car was well maintained with every problem attended to promptly. Even
in the 70s spare parts were not easily
available. Once we had to go around the whole of Bangalore to get a set of special screw type
wheel bolts. I also remember a complete overhaul including a fresh coat of paint done to the
car at Bangalore. My friend who wore only white clothes had always kept the
car clean and tidy with the seats covered with white Turkish cloth! He
drove the car with effortless ease and
we used to marvel at his ability to reverse the
car through narrow curving roads! During the 80s also when we were
working at Thiruvananthapuram and
Ernakulam I had travelled in the car
frequently.
While I had changed my car several
times by buying ‘new’ second hand ones,
my friend continued to keep the Morris Minor
and after his retirement towards the end of the 80s he settled down in
Trivandrum. We continued our contact and the car used to come up in our
conversations often. A few years after my retirement in the year 2000 I had
visited him at Thiruvananthapuram and he
dropped me back at the Rly.station in his Morris Minor . Years passed by and
when I went to his house again two years back the car was very much there and I
had taken a couple of casual photos on
my mobile.
When I met him at Kozhikode on the 5th
of this month, I enquired about the car assuming that it was still with him. To
my utter surprise and disbelief he told me that he had sold it off a few months
back. A sudden thought that I could have purchased it instead of it falling
into some other hands entered my mind. But it vanished faster than it came when
it was revealed that it was sold for a fancy price to a vintage car collector who had been pestering my friend to sell it
to him for several years. The reasons
for selling off the car which was close to his heart for so long , after refusing to do so for years, were
strong enough. The ophthalmologist had declined to give a certificate for
renewing the driving licence; getting the driving licence of an 85 year old
renewed is next to impossible; the re-registration and insurance were falling
due; practical difficulties for future maintenance are many; above all his
son’s advice to sell it off for a good price coupled with the thought that it was going into safe hands clinched
it. Yes, a vintage car collector’s garage is the best destination an old car can
hope for. Old cars seem to be better
placed than old people for whom the mythical heaven is the only, though futile,
destination to hope for.
Tail piece:-How I wish I had retained my
first car, the Standard Herald 1967 Model
two door Sedan MSQ 84 which I
sold off in 1978!!
