Why Is That Bus Looking at Me?
Since childhood, I have seen faces in buses, trucks and cars — some smiling, some angry, some downright silly. What began as a private childhood game somehow never went away, turning every long drive into a gallery of vehicles with personalities of their own.
HUMOUR & SATIRE
9/13/20266 min read
I have always seen faces in vehicles. I don't remember exactly when this started, but some of my earliest memories are from the bus journeys I used to make between Chengalpattu and Trichy, and between Chengalpattu and Kanchipuram. We mostly travelled by private buses, and sometimes by the long-distance government buses of those days. For reasons I cannot explain even today, I would spend a considerable amount of time looking at their faces.
To me, the headlights were the eyes and the grille was the mouth. Depending on how the grille was designed, the bus could be smiling, angry, sad or occasionally just looking rather unfortunate. Some buses had grilles that were completely closed, which made them look as though they were grinning widely. I liked that expression so much that I would later stand in front of a mirror and try to reproduce it. Then there were grilles with a gap in the middle, and those buses looked like old people laughing without their teeth.
The headlights helped enormously with this imagination. In those days, they often had a black circle in the middle, meant to reduce the glare for vehicles coming from the opposite direction. I knew nothing about the purpose then; the black circles simply made the headlights look even more like eyes. Once a vehicle had eyes and a mouth, it was only natural in my little world that it should also have a personality.
My fascination wasn't limited to buses. Lorries were equally interesting. During my childhood, Tata and Leyland were the two names I remember seeing everywhere, and I always liked the Tata lorries. Their faces looked cute to me, and they also seemed relatively quiet, which somehow fitted their personality perfectly. Leylands were a different matter. Their grilles looked like an angry person clenching his teeth, and they were noisy too. The face and the sound together were enough to convince me that these were angry vehicles. Tata, on the other hand, was the nice fellow.
Much later in life, I would learn about Tata, its history and its pioneering role in Indian industry. But apparently my relationship with the brand had begun much earlier. My childhood preference had nothing to do with engineering, business history or corporate values. I simply liked their faces.
Old movies gave me another collection of vehicle faces to study. The buses from the 1950s and 60s often had what we would call in Tamil a Siva pazham face — extraordinarily innocent and paavam. Looking at one of those buses, I could almost imagine it pleading with everyone around it, “I am paavam. Please spare me. Don't trouble me by loading more people into me.” I wasn't merely seeing expressions in vehicles anymore; somewhere along the way, I had started assigning characters to them as well.
There was another fascination running alongside all this: drivers. I could watch them endlessly, and it didn't matter whether it was a car driver or a bus driver. I observed the way they sat, the way they held the steering wheel, the way they changed gears and even the way they got into the driver's seat. At one stage, I told my mother that I wanted to become a Pallavan bus driver when I grew up. That was the level of my fascination.
We had a three-wheel cycle at home, and during vacations I discovered that it could serve a far more interesting purpose than merely being ridden around. I would turn it sideways and use one of the rear wheels as my steering wheel. I even created a makeshift gear lever using a stick near the front wheel so that I could move it back and forth. That was enough to transform the whole arrangement into my imaginary Pallavan bus, and I could spend hours during my vacations driving it. There was no bus, there were no passengers and the actual vehicle was a three-wheel cycle lying sideways, but none of these minor technical shortcomings seemed to affect the experience.
Cars naturally became part of this world too. The Ambassador was everywhere when I was growing up, and to me it had a wonderfully friendly face, with a smiling grille and beautiful eyes. The wipers fascinated me as well. As a child, I did not know that they were meant to be used when it rained, so whenever I saw them moving back and forth across the windscreen, I had my own explanation: the Ambassador was wiping the sweat off its forehead. It had obviously been working hard and needed to wipe its face once in a while.
The Premier Padmini was perhaps the cutest of them all. It looked smooth and classy, with a sweet smiling face. My grandfather had owned one before I was born, and although I had only seen photographs of it, I loved looking at them. The Jeep belonged to an entirely different species. It was bulky, sturdy and masculine, and its face reminded me of a big stern man staring directly at you. That fascination never went away either; even today, I love the way Jeeps look.
Some vehicles took my imagination in completely different directions. Mr Bean's little car had one of the silliest faces I had ever seen, and I always found it hilarious. The old cars I saw in movies such as The Godfather produced an entirely different character in my head. With their enormously long bonnets, they looked like witches with very long noses, while the spare wheel mounted at the back somehow became the band holding the witch's hair together. Why my mind chose to assemble a witch out of a perfectly respectable vintage automobile is something I cannot explain.
You might reasonably expect that I grew out of all this as I got older, but I didn't. The habit simply travelled with me. More importantly, once I got married, what had begun as my own private childhood game was no longer quite so private. My wife soon discovered that I could look at a vehicle and reproduce its expression, and over the years she became a willing participant in the madness. During a drive, she would sometimes spot an interesting vehicle herself, turn towards me and ask me to make its face.
I never restricted the imitation to the grille. If the vehicle was smiling, my mouth and eyes had to smile with it; if it looked angry, the eyes and the rest of my face had to reproduce that expression too. Our daughters therefore grew up with a father who could suddenly start impersonating a truck or a car in the middle of a journey. They eventually arrived at the perfectly reasonable conclusion that their dad was a nut case.
The habit naturally continued with the cars that became part of my life. My little white Maruti Zen always looked like an angry or sad child to me; its grille simply refused to smile. The crimson-red Ritz was exactly the opposite. It had a wonderfully happy face, with the expression you have when your favourite dish has just been placed in front of you. Perhaps it was simply happy because I was driving it.
More recently, this lifelong fascination may even have interfered slightly with what was supposed to be a rational car-buying decision. I had always been fascinated by the Jeep Cherokee in the US, particularly its grille and the masculine character it gave the vehicle. When I went looking for an SUV in India, I test-drove several options from different manufacturers. The moment I saw the Kia Seltos, however, its grille reminded me of the Jeep Cherokee, and I found myself leaning towards it. The grille certainly wasn't the only reason I bought the car, but I cannot deny that it introduced a certain amount of bias into the decision. Apparently, the boy who used to stare at bus grilles still had a vote.
Two years later came my latest addition, a grey Tata Punch EV. After all these decades of finding human expressions in vehicles, this one has presented me with something slightly different. It looks like a bug. There is a smile on its face, but it is a smile without teeth — not quite like the old toothless-person bus of my childhood, but distinctly its own expression. Every time I look at the Punch from the front, I feel that Tata's designers stopped just a little too early. Two antennae on top would have completed the bug perfectly.
Long drives continue to be one of the best places for this pastime. There are trucks everywhere — Tata, Leyland, Eicher and many others — and I still find myself looking at their faces and assigning personalities to them. Over the years, I have even watched those personalities change. The Leyland trucks that frightened me as a child don't seem quite as angry anymore. As the designs changed, some seemed to acquire smiling faces while others became almost expressionless. I couldn't tell you which model changed in which year, but somewhere deep inside I remember the character changing. The angry man who used to come towards me clenching his teeth seems to have calmed down over the years.
Nobody taught me this game. It was entirely my own private invention, and what surprises me is not that I did something like this as a child, but that I never really stopped doing it. More than four decades later, a long highway journey still gives me an endless procession of characters to observe. Some vehicles look happy, some angry, some stern, some paavam and some appear to have no opinion about life whatsoever. Every now and then, one comes along with an expression interesting enough for my wife to turn towards me and ask me to reproduce it, which I invariably do, much to the continuing amusement — and occasional embarrassment — of my family.
I don't think there is a profound lesson hiding behind any of this. I don't consciously look at vehicle faces because I am trying to preserve the child in me, practise mindfulness or rediscover some forgotten simplicity of life. I still do it for exactly the same reason I did it all those years ago: I enjoy it. Through different cities, cars and stages of life, this completely unnecessary little pastime has simply travelled along with me.
And somewhere on the road ahead, there will inevitably be another bus coming towards me with a peculiar grille. It probably isn't looking at me, but after all these years, I am still looking back.