The car is now five-year-old, the lease payment is completed and now, as we say in Karachi trade jargon, I am the whole-sole owner. Its story is relevant in the case of a majority of cars in the city, and their owners, especially women. I count my blessings, for despite financial constraints during the period of lease payment, despite theft and vandalisation of the car in its first year, both of us are in fine fettle.
Most car-owners have purchased their car against a bank loan because that is the only way we can afford a new vehicle. Only smugglers and the very rich can buy a new car outright. In the old days before car-leasing people like me could only buy a second-hand jalopy their meagre resources. A brand-new car was simply unaffordable. Yet , when car leasing began, a lot of people hesitated to purchase because they would actually be paying much more than the market price. But they soon realised were they to save money, it would take them a lifetime to have enough because car prices keep shooting up and up. Car leasing changed the face of Karachi traffic. Now there are too many cars, but most of them are brand new or not so old as to be called jalopy.
Some means of private transport, even a bicycle, is a must in Karachi. For women a car is an 'absolute' must. That brings us to the issue of male chauvanism. Men do not mind women owning a car, but they mind very much when women drive their vehicle themselves. Otherwise very reasonable men become terribly superior. They laugh at women's inability to efficiently do parallel parking. If a woman drives badly they curse " Women drivers!" As if all those bus drivers and male car drivers never ever drive badly. If a man drives fast they do not notice it; if a woman drives fast they are shocked. I have lost count of the number of men who have told me I drive too fast. I ask: do I drive rash? Men who have been passengers admit I do not. So why complain? Is fast driving a privilege of menfolk?
Actually, there is a reason why I drive fast. I have even told my nieces they should drive fast because this is Karachi. You could be chased by a kidnapper, a car thief or a young lad trying to frighten the female driver just for fun. If at that moment you step on the gas you will have no control because you will not know how your car performs at speed. In a panic you could cause an accident. But if you are in the habit of driving fast you can gateway confidently.
Garage mechanics, service station operators, the lad who cleans the car daily are the bane of my life. They know I don't know a thing about cars except how to drive. They think I am easily fooled. Of course they are right. So they manage to make me pay for some fictitious job they have done. Of course I pay, even if I am vaguely suspicious they have duped me. You know that saying, "Service with a smile"? I always get service with a smile because they love a gullible fool.
When a car running on CNG is five-year-old the gas cylinder has to be inspected. This is a law which everyone breaks, according to the operator of my gas station. People do not have the cylinder checked for ten or fifteen years, he said. What he meant was men do not. Women are law-abiding, and I dutifully took the car to the Suzuki workshop. While they were dismantling the cylinder, the engineer checked the mileage, and I got another dose of male chauvanism. "This car is five-year-old and its only done 11,000 kilometers?" he asked as if I had done something wrong. What he meant is no self-respecting male driver would have such low mileage on his car. If such low mileage showed on a man's five-year-old car the engineer would have been highly suspicious the milometer had been tampered. I believe that is what men do when they sell their car. Women, however, are not suspected of foul play. Women's cars therefore have better resale value. Once a colleague took my car to Regal Chowk to have a new side-view mirror fitted. He came back grinning and told me he was tempted to sell my car. He had two offers to buy it on the spot at its original market price, when the men saw the low mileage, the good condition of the car and heard the car was owned and driven by a woman.
There is one problem with car-leasing. Because of the high rate of car theft in the city, it is compulsory to install a tracker in a leased car. When my car was stolen it was located, recovered and impounded within an hour after the theft, thanks to the tracker. But for the rest of the time the tracker has proved to be a trouble-maker. It depletes the battery. When it is old the tracker seems to go haywire consuming more than the required battery charge. As a result the car would often stall, but I did not know the fault was in the tracker. When I had a new battery installed and that went dead within three weeks, the Exide mechanics worked three hours to locate the fault. When they would install the battery in another vehicle it worked fine, so they said the fault was not in the battery. They located the fault in the tracker. After the tracker was removed and the new battery installed the car worked fine. These tracker gadgets should be checked because another person told me he had the same problem in his car and only removal of the tracker solved the problem.
The tracker problem is the reason why I am not having the car re-insured because the insurance company insists on installing a tracker. I wonder how many sufferers these days are driving about without car-insurance?
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