Beetlemania

“Love bug, I’ve been bitten by the love bug,” sang Tina Charles.  I was bitten, too.

My love bug was a dark blue ‘63 Volkswagen Beetle, air cooled, with a 6 volt electrical system converted to a 12 volt system.  I got her in ‘83, when I was just learning to drive.  It took me no time at all to become competent in that bug, and I did it without an instructor or an accident.  It was just my love bug, me and the chemistry between us.  She was moody: she had frequent tantrums, but I always felt that in one of her peppier moods, she could have taken me to the moon, if only we could have refueled en route.  That would have been a giant step for mankind, and an evolutionary step for bugs.

That Beetle has since gone out of my life, but I have never gotten over my love bug bite.  I consider the Beetle one of the greatest things on four wheels ever built.  As my driving improved, I became very daring, secure in the popular delusion that Volkswagen and Mercedes cars never ever flip over, whatever the nut at the wheel does.  I know of at least two drunken drivers who took this delusion to the extreme and lost it when hitting the roof below them as they slid along in a meteor of sparks and screeching metal.  One of them lost more, too: he was DOA at the hospital.

My first drive out of the city was to Nagarkot, a mountain top resort more than 2000 feet above Kathmandu’s mean of 4500 feet.  Nagarkot, about an hour and a half’s placid drive from Kathmandu, is the nearest accessible point from where Mount Everest can be seen.  People find it hard to believe they are actually looking at Everest.  Perspective makes Everest look much smaller than other peaks in the foreground.  It looks like a pygmy amongst bushmen.

I set off early in the afternoon with three of my hometown buddies.

The narrow road snakes up over lush green mountainsides.  At several bends on the road, there are dips over which streams of crystal clear mountain water gurgle.  As you climb higher, the view of the Kathmandu Valley below and the Himalayas on the horizon expands into a stunning vista on clear days.  It takes a bit of will to keep your eyes and your car on the road, which at some points is so narrow that only one vehicle can go through. 

Tina Charles was yowling “You set my heart on fire” on the stereo halfway up the climb when Madhab, sitting in the front passenger seat, started sniffing the air.

“Don’t smoke, fellows,” he admonished the two guys behind, without turning his head.

“We aren’t smoking,” they protested.  Madhab turned around and confirmed that they were not smoking.

“May be it is Tina Charles’ heart burning,” he smirked.

Within a couple of minutes, Shyam, on the rear seat just behind Madhab, suddenly rose from his seat, shouting, “It is not Tina Charles’ heart, it is my ass, and it is burning.”

I snuck a fast look back.  Smoke indeed seemed to be billowing out from somewhere under Shyam.  Both of the guys in the back seat were yelling, and I pulled over.  We all tumbled out: the two in the back popped out of the two-door bug like it was really their butts on fire; I saw Shyam surreptitiously pat his behind to make sure it was not aflame.

I reached in and pulled at the rear seat.  It detached easily and I yanked it out of the car.  The coir stuffing under the seat was smoldering.  We wasted two virgin bottles of pure Himalayan spring water dousing the flames.

The bug’s battery was housed in the well of the rear seat.  It had been covered with a two-layer sheet of rubber derived from the inner tube of a truck tire.  The rubber sheet had been held down with broad rubber bands, also cut out from inner tubes.  The rubber bands had snapped and the rubber sheet had slipped off.  The exposed terminals had come into contact with the metal springs in the rear seat, setting off the sparks that ignited the stuffing below my friends’ butts.

We reassembled the battery set up and the rear seat.  I attempted ignition while my friends hovered outside the car with a subdued air of nervous anticipation, like they expected the bug to mutate into a giant firefly.  The engine fired sweetly at once, with that tinniness typical of the Beetle.  For the next few minutes we watched carefully.  There were no more sparks, no more smoke.  My friends got into the bug gingerly – you could see they were ready to scramble.

The stereo went on to Tina Charles’ “I’ll go where your music takes me.”

“Put that damn thing off,” Shyam snarled, and I obliged.

When we were almost at Nagarkot, the horn and turn lights died.  I pulled over once more.  Nothing electrical was working: the horn, the lights and the wiper.  The cause was obvious when we opened the hood: the belt driving the generator had vanished.  I had noticed the considerably frayed state of that belt earlier, but had done nothing about it, to my great regret now.

We looked around for a quick fix.  There was a boy lazing on the grass at one side of the road, keeping an eye on a goat grazing at the end of a thin hemp rope.  He was eating sugarcane, and it was an educational experience watching him work the skin off with his teeth, take a hefty bite, chew industriously, suck in the juice and spit out the crushed fibers.

“Sell me your rope?” I asked him.

He looked doubtful for a while, and then said, “Hundred Rupees.”

“I don’t want to buy your goat, I just want the rope,” I retorted.

“All right, eighty Rupees,” he came back with great equanimity, spitting cane fiber at my feet.

“We can get that rope in a shop for twenty Rupees,” I protested.

“So go and buy it in a shop,” he shot back, as he took another bite at his sugarcane.

We landed up buying his rope for fifty Rupees.  After a great deal of grunting effort we managed to tie the rope tightly around the pulleys from the engine and to the generator.  Once I closed the hood the smell of goat eased off, but it took longer than that to regain our breath and overcome our chagrin at having been had by a goatherd.

“We should have simply taken away that rope and given the goatherd twenty Rupees,” growled Madhab.

“Yeah, and we would have had to contend with his whole family and his whole clan on our way back,” commented Kedar from the back seat.

The bug’s gadgets were working again, and we were soon at Nagarkot.  We had to cut short our stay, though, because of concerns about our makeshift generator belt.

Halfway down the return, I had to stop when I saw some familiar looking kids waving at me wildly from the other side of the road.  They were school mates of my younger brother.  They were standing around a Suzuki car.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“We got a problem,” one of them replied.  “Something is wrong with our car’s engine.  We have been trying to fix for more than an hour now.  Can you help?”

I went over.  The engine fired as long as the key was held in the ignition position, but would stop as soon as the spring-loaded key was released.

It took us another hour of playing three blind men to identify the problem: a fuse labeled “Engine” in the fuse box had blown.  There was no spare fuse, and we jury-rigged the blown fuse with foil from a pack of cigarettes.  It worked fine.

These kids were on their way for an overnight stay at Nagarkot, and there was plenty to eat and drink in the boot of the Suzuki.  They insisted on treating us to a sort of quick picnic to show their gratitude.

The delay cost us.  By the time we left the major mountain curves behind and were on the highway back to Kathmandu, it was dark enough to need headlights. 

Our headlights, though, flickered out all too soon when we switched them on.  Once again we stopped to inspect our makeshift generator drive belt.  The rope had stretched loose and become a shiny, slippery black.  Tightening the rope again proved to be of no use.  It had about as much traction as a politician caught in flagrante delicto.

We crawled along in the deepening darkness.  There were no streetlights.  Fortunately, we had left the mountain road behind, so there were no sharp curves.  I used the faint glimmer of the broken white line in the middle of the road as my guide.  Everytime we saw the headlights of a vehicle coming up from ahead or behind, we hugged the curb.  It was becoming so dark that I began to worry about how long I could continue to see the white line in the middle of the road. 

After about half an hour of creeping along, we came to a small village where one of my friends had friends.  He was able to borrow a heavy-duty torch that seemed to have a set of fresh batteries.

We were able to keep up a better speed after that.  My friend in the front passenger seat leaned out of his window, aiming the torch at the broken white line.  I stepped on the gas whenever the road appeared free, praying that there was no other vehicle without headlights out on that road.  I slowed down when headlights approached, while my friend waved the torch beam back and forth.

We kept a sharp eye out for shops selling auto spare parts on the way and stopped at every one that was open.  None of them had a belt for the bug’s generator.  They all had parts and accessories for buses and trucks only.  A couple of them got bugged when we asked for parts for our bug and told us to bugger off.

After what seemed to be a very long drive, we got back to our neighborhood and
stopped outside my house.  We sat there in the bug, letting the tension seep out as we talked about the day’s events and laughed at ourselves.  I was on the receiving end of a great deal of sarcasm about the impeccable condition of my bug.

Looking out of the corner of my eyes at Shyam, I pulled out the Tina Charles cassette from the stereo and pushed in another cassette.  The notes of “Crawling from the Wreckage” by Dave Edmunds filled the car.

All of a sudden, there was an almighty bang from behind and the bug rocked like a skier on a tidal wave.  We were jerked forward with a wrench.

We clambered out, swearing, and found out that we had been rear ended by a “tempo,” a three-wheeled taxi, which seemed to have bounced off on impact and tilted over on one side.  We reached in and helped its driver clamber out.  He was bleeding from the nose, and was staring at us with stunned incomprehension on his face.  We sat him down on the sidewalk and gave him some water to drink.  He gulped some water down and gradually seemed to come back to his senses.

“What the hell did you do that for?” I asked him.

“I am sorry, sir,” he croaked.  “I did not see you at all.  My headlights were not working.”