The significance of the lemon…

Just bought a car. A spanking metallic blue Tata Indica V2. Everyone says ‘hey, congratulations! Where are the sweets?’ Sweets??!! Here I am, in hock up to my eyebrows for the next three years, and you want sweets?

Feeling awfully consumerist. This thing turns in something like 12 km/litre. (Or so the smiling salesguys claimed. Ever wonder why they have so many teeth?) A whole 20 km less than even my old Bullet. But what with baby coming (oh yes, sometime towards the end of this month) I guess I need one now. Try never to drive it too far all alone. Still going to use the bike as much as I can – though everyone again tells me that that’s a hard thing to do once you get used to a car. We’ll see.

Went to the usual ‘car temple’ (Ganesha is the presiding deity) in Bangalore for the rite of passage. Showed up bright and early - 8ish – and waited for the venerable brahmin to show up and do his thing. As is usual with me in the presence of those little black stones the Hindus use to understand the universe, I start looking for meaning. All those things the bare-chested chap does – what do they mean? Where did they come from? I know they’re rich in symbolism, metaphor, and whatever other fancy grammatical thing you can think of. With the vehicular ritual, what’s always intrigued me are the lemons. You know – place four bright yellow lemons under the tyres and after he’s done with the chanting, run them over. Drive off.

I think the lemons stand for the bright, juicy happiness of ownership. Possession. You are now the worthy master of a machine slave. And shiny yellow the feeling may be, and sweet in parts, but it is, no doubt, spiked with some sourness from either the big load of money you spent on the darn thing, all the fear of damage, theft, loss. And you place the little gobs of feeling under your tyres and run them over – squashing not just your pride of ownership, but all the weighty paraphernalia of attachment. Making as dust what is, after all, an insignificant little event in an insignificant little town on an insignificant little planet…and so on. And all filled up with this clutch of meaning I proceeded to squash the lemons. I hope I can keep up the disconnection. For therein might lie the path. Sounds good eh? Amazing, the things you can think of just by being in the presence of some little black rocks.

Currently reading another Heinlein. Let you’ll know soon.