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MY LUNA TFR – PART I (THE MOST UNIQUE PIECE KINETIC ENGINEERING EVER PRODUCED)

Apr 4 2008 | Views 922 | Comments (69)

The first vehicle of the automotive kind I ever bought (that is, my father bought it for me a... Expand

The first vehicle of the automotive kind I ever bought (that is, my father bought it for me after I wore his resistance down by finely crafted reasons) was the Luna TFR. I don’t know what TFR means but I do know that in the advertisements it said, “Be kind with your hind!” But kind this vehicle was not – I mean the unique piece that I bought. It was the most willful, refractory, ungovernable, recalcitrant, intractable, wicked, ruffianly and headstrong vehicle I have ever owned. It did not obey the most sacrosanct rules that all vehicles - mobikes or mopeds or scooters - are supposed to abide by. Let me tell you what it did.

There was no horn in the vehicle. The company had definitely provided one but it had conked off some five-six months after I bought the vehicle. I never saw any need to repair it either. The reason was quite simple really – I was using the brakes as the horn. You don’t understand? Well it does not take a genius to understand this, just be patient. Every time there was a need for braking, the vehicle emitted a sharp resonant sound which sounded something like PHYEINNNNNG (it actually sounded as a man with a horrible throat trying to sing high pitched like Mohd. Rafi) and it carried easily over at least half a kilometer. So all I needed to do when I needed to use the horn was brake. Such was the impact of the ‘horn’ that some nearby drivers actually fell off their vehicles the moment I applied the brakes. Also, my friends actively shunned me when we were going somewhere together – they said I should drive well away from them, after all they had a reputation to maintain! Almost every person who knew me and my Luna, gave me a long rope and kept his/her distance on the road. This made my drives actually quite safe.

All vehicles must obey the throttle. The more you rotate the throttle towards you, the more should they speed up. This is a moral and ethical code of conduct by which all vehicles are bound. My Luna was an amoral vehicle though. If you pulled the throttle, it immediately slowed down and emitted sounds which made you believe that it was indeed being throttled. You immediately let go of the throttle and the speed started increasing! The more you released the accelerator, the more it would speed up. But if you think that that makes it simple – one only has to do the opposite of the normal thing, definitely not worth cribbing about – forget it. It only occasionally did it. On other occasions, nothing simply happened whether you rotated the accelerator clockwise or anti-clockwise. And if I happened to get a girlfriend on a particular day, God save me. The following happened one day.

A girl finally realized I was handsome and deigned to sit on the pillion even though she had heard rumors about the reputation-shattering shrieks that the vehicle emitted from time to time. The Luna started in just half a pedal. But then this didn’t mean anything – for all its unethical behavior, it always started in half a pedal even if it had rained and the vehicle had been standing there in the open without any cover. I sat and she sat on the pillion. I raised the accelerator and vehicle gave a groan. The groan increased in its pitch and then the exhaust started emitting white clouds. This was happening while the vehicle stood its ground most obstinately. I then thought I should gradually release the throttle. When I did that, the thing moved – lurched – forward with a jerk. The girl clasped me from behind in order not to fall off. Then I had to brake because there was another vehicle in front of me. The moment I braked, it emitted its infamous ‘horrible Mohd. Rafi’ war cry making the girl cringe and clutch the skin of my waist between her shapely nails. By that time I had released the throttle completely and so I had to pull on it again. Whereupon it took off with a jerk again. I started lowering the accelerator in panic because the vehicle had obviously assumed that it was a rocket in reality. But lowering the accelerator did not have the desired effect of lowering the speed – the speed started increasing further! So I started braking whereupon the vehicle started giving horrible jerks with the ‘Mohd. Rafi’ barks. All this while the girl was clasping me and the intensity of clasp was increasing with each jerk. For some reason I remembered my biology class from the 8^th standard. Bhatt Madam in her sonorous voice was saying, “So, the male frog has clasping pads in its limbs with which to hold the female firmly in water.” And then, while Bhatt Madam was speaking to me, the infernal vehicle stopped right there in the middle of the road. The girl got down and gave me a slap that was intended for the cheek but landed on the neck because I had taken quick evasive action.

“What’s wrong? Why are you hitting me?”

“What’s wrong? You think I don’t understand the workings of your perverted mind? The moment someone sits behind you, you go on on a jerky ride so that the lady will clasp you and you will get the press of her body on your back! Some people will go to any length for this. Scoundrel!” and she stomped off in a huff.

I lashed out in frustration and anger and gave the Luna the boot. The moment I did it, it started.

The other thing about the Luna was its lights. This is how it used to happen.

You are going somewhere. There are no street lights (there used to be very little by way of street lights in Nagpur then). Suddenly the vehicle goes into a small pothole and its headlamp stops functioning. So, what do you do now? Nothing, you just give the headlamp a nice stinging slap for having been on the blink and it comes back to life. In the process, your hand feels the sting of course. The moment it goes into another pothole (of which there were numerous on any given road in those days), it blinks off again whereupon you have to slap it again. There is another way to get it back to life. If one pothole switches it off, you deliberately take it through an even bigger pothole whereby it switches on again.

Obviously there was some loose connection somewhere, but believe me, no repairman could ever find that in its lifetime. Therefore I was condemned to ride from pothole to pothole in a psychedelic cascade of light. Eventually the lamp decided that it had taken enough humiliating slaps from me and so switched itself off permanently. From then on I drove in the nights through sheer reckoning.

One day I walked into the college with my left hand in a sling.

"What happened?" my friend asked.

"My Luna does not have a light, you see," I informed him.

"Uh huh. That's old hat. What else is new?"

"There were no street lights either," I continued.

"So what? Most days there aren't any street lights."

"It was the new moon too and the road, you know, is black."

"Where are you getting at?"

"The buffalo sitting right there in the middle of the road was also black," I said, ending the story.

Needless to say, everyone had a good laugh at my expense.

One day I was going to a function. I had taken extra care to groom myself because a girl awaited me there. We had actually put up a stall in a health exhibition and we were a few volunteers who manned the stall. I was paired with a girl and the last time we were together in that stall, the conversation had taken a rather encouraging turn. So I had dandied myself up in the best clothes I possessed and was currently perched atop my notorious Luna and speeding away to the venue even though there was at least one hour to go before our duty started.

The Luna was exceptionally well behaved that day. It was doing everything according to the normal code of conduct for the vehicles. I must have gone about 2 kms when there was an explosion behind me. Obviously someone’s tyre had burst – it happens all the time. However, there were a few shouts of Oye …. Oye from behind. I ignored them because that was none of my business. Then there was a second explosion from behind and I wondered a bit. Two tyres bursting in the same area in a space of a few seconds is something that is possible but rather rare. Then a man wearing a green shirt suddenly pulled alongside me and said something.

“What?” I cried.

“The vehicle is burning,” he informed.

“Oh yeah? If you don’t take care of your vehicle, it is going to burn.”

“It’s your vehicle that is burning you fool; just look back. We have been shouting ourselves hoarse from behind but you are cruising away quite jauntily.”

I looked back. Sure enough, the back part of my Luna was engulfed in big smoke clouds that were drifting behind me. And before I could comprehend what was going wrong and do something about it, a large flame came out of the exhaust and the ensuing explosion grounded me on the road and my Luna went slightly ahead due to the momentum of its speed. People all around got down from their vehicles and dumped soil from the road banks and put off the fire.

I took the vehicle to the nearest repairman. He examined it.

“Hmmmm,” he said.

He had a look at other parts and said, “Hmmmm…”

Then he opened the infernal thing’s innards, had a long look and said, “Hmmmmmm…”

“Well say something. How much is it going to cost?” I asked, exasperated.

“Well, you could get Rs. 500 for it,” he informed me.

“What do you mean I could get 500 for it? I have to pay for the repair you fool,” I said.

“No, no. You didn’t get my sense right. Who is talking about repairs? If you sell this piece of junk, the Kabaadi may actually think of parting with Rs. 500 for the weight of the metal.”

“What?” I asked, shocked. “I want it repaired, not sold as junk.”

“Oh!” he said and emitted the next series of Hmmmmmms. After finishing the Hmmmms that he had stored in his lungs, he said, “In that case it will cost you about 600.”

“600?” I shrieked. “Why, the whole bloody contraption cost just Rs. 2500/- and to repair you say it will cost 600?”

“May be it will cost a couple of hundreds more,” he informed blandly. There was no emotion in his voice at all. “You see, the piston is completely fucked. And I believe your silencer is gone too. Come to think of it, it is surely gone? Where is it? It does not seem to be there at all. Were you driving your vehicle without a silencer?”

I thought about it and reached the conclusion that the silencer must have, in order to save its life, detached itself from the rest of the burning vehicle somewhere along the line and may now be lying on the road. And someone by now must have taken it to some junkyard and sold it for whatever it fetched. The repairman kept on telling me about what else could be wrong or was certainly wrong. I told him to repair the vehicle and walked home. There was no point in going to the stall anymore.

Friends, there is actually more to it. But this piece is getting quite lengthy already. So I may as well tell you the rest of the story of how I got rid of the Luna in the next part.

Sulekha.com

Avinashjee

avinashjee.sulekha.com

MY LUNA TFR – PART I (THE MOST UNIQUE PIECE KINETIC ENGINEERING EVER PRODUCED)

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