Gypsy Horns

1:30AM is not the time for Gypsy horns to blare and never stop. Which is what happened last Friday night. Woke me up like the feckin’ end of the world.

I remember on the way to Mualvum one evening, before the year 2000 (so basically primitive), my dad’s then-driver Pa Hmaa, a man with an incredible sense of humour, boasted jokingly over how everything in his Gypsy made noise all the time save for the horn.

As though offended, all hell broke loose at that precise moment sort of like a punctuation, or a stage cue, and the horn blared and wouldn’t stop. He got out of the Gypsy and searched under his seat. Meanwhile, all of us had our hands cover our ears, silently pleading with the Universe to just stop the cacophony. Pa Hmaa fished out a machete and opened the hood. We heard a dull thud and the horn went quiet. I still don’t know the exact wire for the horn in my car or in a Gypsy. How remiss of me. I should maybe learn this.

Cars are wonderful inventions. I don’t know much about them and even less about the fancy ones. I was driving one time and the accelerator just stopped pumping. I had always feared that the brakes would just refuse to work and I would die; it is a recurring fear, to be honest. But I had never imagined a situation where the accelerator would not work. I somehow managed to find someone to help and he realised the wire had popped off. He reattached it and tightened the screw and the car was alright again. So now I know the wire attached to the accelerator; I still don’t know the one attached to the horn.

Which is what I supposed happened last week. I believe someone was trying to hotwire our neighbour’s Gypsy in the dead of the night. But they somehow touched upon the horn one and not the accelerator one. And then there was pain.

1:30AM is very quiet, you guys. And if a gd Maruti Suzuki Gypsy horn just starts blaring out without a single pause, it drives you half insane! And in the hills, with our nice acoustics, it is hard to figure out where from it originates. Of course, we have two Gypsies in our immediate locality – the white government one with me and the red one belonging to our neighbour. My first thought was the sound was a Gypsy horn! Because dear lawd, it has been years upon years since the police one Pa Hmaa drove blared out, but I realise you don’t forget such a blessedly ugly sound! It’s just there in the recess of your brain. Or something. And that one had been during the day. This was the dead of the night and yet no mercy. The only question was whether it was my Gypsy or not. I fumbled around in the house looking for the key. But the caterwauling stopped. So I returned to bed.

A silent night is a blessed night, my friends. I’m not even kidding.