How the ‘Kool Keg’ tamed a heated engine

It was around 1998 when our entire family ventured out from Ahmedabad to Mount Abu in our white Fiat DIC 7705. 

We carried food, had a book of maps and iced water in a 5 litre ‘Kool Keg’.  

My son Manu was around 11 years old and daughter Bhavya 13. The car was really a primitive one, but had become over the years, an extension of our feet and the pivot of my attention with eyes ahead & on the rearview mirror; the ears tuned to the rear. 

Driving does become like playing tennis, mostly a subconscious activity with the car being navigated and controlled through the action of the reflexes, tempered as they are with all our previous experiences. 

We climbed up the hill and the engine heated up. We stopped next to a spring, but it was dry, and we badly needed water to cool the engine. 

“Babba” (father) said my dear son Manu,

“We have water in the Kool Keg”. “Okay son “, I answered with a sense of relief and hope, “Will you pour water down the radiator as I rev up the engine?”.  I had managed to keep the car in neutral and stationary by placing stones behind the rear wheels, because our handbrakes rarely worked.  

“Yes, Babba”, said my son, as he gradually poured water in the radiator while I throttled up the engine. The cool water was evenly circulated by the water pump around the engine in its jacket, and this brought down the temperature needle from red to green. 

After an hour or so, we were in Mount Abu. Those days I always compared all hill stations we visited to Nainital, (where we had spent our childhood) and never found them to be up to the mark. Now I don’t. I’m happy anywhere in God’s wide world. All of it is beautiful. 

After checking in at a hotel, I browsed the telephone directory to see if there was anyone in town from my large number of friends and relations. And I soon found the name of a Wing Commander who happened to be my maternal aunt’s son.  

We called him, met his family and saw the 16-bit computer he had brought from a study visit to the United Kingdom. He took us in his Maruti Gypsy to a temple near a hilltop where our old Fiat would not have been able to reach.  

  

Thank you, dear family, for such empowering memories and all these great digitally controlled cars we have since owned. 

But I will never tire of telling tales of journeys on our Fiat accompanied by love songs of Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar, Mukesh and Asha Bhosle playing shakingly in a loosely fitted assembled cassette car stereo, operated deftly by my wife Jaishri because at times the tape got entangled in the pinch roller. We carried food, printed maps, a full fuel tank, a 5 Litre ‘Kool Keg’ and prayer books. We were always rewarded with feelings of the pure joy of traveling to fine places and sometimes getting to meet loved ones and old friends, in what is a small world. 

It is amazing how burnout and meltdowns in machines can be prevented by cooling systems and lubrication and those in relationships by love, children, music and motion.