A smooth ride through life

All my life, I've been surrounded by showrooms, Southeast Asian restaurants, and countless buildings, old and new, that tower upwards to make their denizens feel a little more powerful in their temporary homes. It was a comfortable setting growing up, full of a social understanding that transcended all borders and differences. The world was always one. It was tremendous; countless times larger than my own tiny soul.
In my place, a motorhead would probably have had the perfect childhood. I know I did. I spent years living near massive workshops, where tools made music on the heart and lungs of the cars, and my dad grew tomatoes near the workshops, for some reason. We forever played around on those infinite grounds, jumping on top of parked pickup trucks to dance and play. It was a dangerous place, full of toxic, goeey motor-mess and too many sharp, steely spare parts. But it was our playground for adventures. It was our land for as long as we believed so.
The only breaks were to catch our breaths on the hoods of cars, and to plan excitedly about what to do with someone's lost penny found on the dirt that we trampled upon. While shiny pennies remained the highlights of our adventures, comparing cars was also a regular activity, which makes no sense now because we were 7-8 year olds and only knew that cars were the shiny boxes on wheels that took you to places. Of course, that description was enough to make them wonderful to a child. Vehicles with TVs were extra glorious and undefeatable, even more so than powerful-looking Toyota Land Cruisers. And too much time was wasted lying and bluffing about how our next family cars were going to have TVs. Of course, we never did, because we've had the same olive-green Nissan Sunny for the past 10 years now, and not even its light-purple seat-covers have changed.
But then again, the Nissan Sunny didn't need to be changed, really. Everything from within it was always perfect. While our lives moved miles after miles, hours after hours in it, conquering highways standing between vast deserts, everything within it remained untouched and preserved. Siblings remained annoying as always, dad always found a way to tease mum, and mum was always the gracious presence that compensated for this collective of wayward beings.  Streetlights flashed past us in blurs as we sped through, and the moon seemed to follow us every time I fixed my eyes on it through the windows. The world kept changing, from concrete to bricks to green to blue, and we were in motion and alive when something as massive as the earth itself seemed motionless and dead. Luxury and sports cars caught our attention from within as much as the camels that walked by the highways did. I remember craning my neck as much as possible to catch glints of the tips of large towers through the windows. Days turned into nights, and nights turned into days on road trips, and many times, we parked the car and slept in it till we could go back to a real bed. And through it all- the trips, the celebrations, the accidents- the car retained its integrity in the end, despite the scratches, dents, paintjobs and breakdowns. It had hiccups and fell down a few times, of course, but it came back every time, and every time, it came back with even more. With age, it never lost those chances for us to follow our dad to the stations to pump air into its tires, or for my brother to fall in love with it repeatedly and address it as 'her'. We pulled it, and pushed it, and drove it through rides big and small, high and low. We made it dirty, we hurt it, we kicked it, we even cursed it. But no number of washes and fixes could strip it off the emotions that it witnessed throughout its time this family. It's now older, heavier with anecdotes that were shared in it and the ones that are now shared revolving around it. And it's still there.
As children, there were very few things that didn't strike as wondrous to us, I'm sure. But no matter how imaginative I might have been, I don't think I ever beheld cars with the kind of adoration that the usual readers of this paper hold. And I still don't. I don't think cars are otherworldly luxuries that I would drool over. They aren't commodities I would pursue for grandeur. I do hold cars dear, but as a part of life and growing up, not as trivialities that offer fleeting moments of pleasure. They aren't the toys, the cassette players, or the abandoned and broken tricycles from childhood that could be replaced by a better water gun, an iPod, and a new bicycle.  They are the ever-present and unchanging belongings that carry and shield us as our tastes and preferences evolve, just like home and its seemingly-perpetual company. They are the growing, ageing metal-boxes wrapped in nostalgia of childlike excitement.  They are not fantasies or lost wishes that rarely ever come true. They are the irreplaceable, real goodness of simple lives, the wheels on which life is carried on smoothly. They are just a humble presence, a home outside a house- for memories that were, and the memories that will be.