Rare breed

Sunil is one of that rare breed of mechanics - people who are equally at ease Japanese, Korean, Indian or whatever cars made in recent times, but who actually learned their art working on British and European vehicles.

The last time I saw him, he was working on a 1980s Skoda and a 1930s Standard, which shows that he's at ease in a number of motoring worlds. The Skoda, now, happens to be a communist-era model when the country of manufacture was still known as Czechoslovakia. Most mechanics I know wouldn't touch one with a barge pole (let's not hear any pathetic Skoda jokes now. It's a decent car for that price. The trouble is that the agency, if it still exists, hasn't bothered to import any spares) but Sunil got the little car going again.

"The owner can still get a lot of miles out of that car," he told me with a smile. "Can't let it head for the junkyard."

The Standard was there because the brakes needed fixing, hardly a brow-beater for Sunil, who learned the alphabet of mechanics working on similar cars and others of a slightly later vintage under his father, whose garage was situated in the front yard of their house near the Cotta Road rail crossing. This garage was demolished during the road widening undertaken a few years ago, and Sunil now works from a friend's garage along the lane which runs parallel to the railway towards the Parliament Road.

Repairing an old car is actually an art. There was a time when a car had to be at least 20 years old to be considered old. Now it's more like ten years, at least in the more down-to-earth circles. If not, it could be as little as five years, or maybe even less. But, when you are talking about cars which are thirty, forty, fifty years old or even older, and the mechanic has no manuals to fall back on and must work from memory and intuition, then it has to be an exceptional kind of mechanic who can cope with the relics, but is also adroit enough to understand the new technology that's coming in. In my own experience, there are only a handful of such people in this country, and Sunil happens to be one of them.

Sunil (his name is A. P. Chandrasiri. But he's known as Sunil by everyone in the neighbourhood) is now fifty years old. His father worked for the now defunct British Car Company. His father's tutelage was a harsh one. Sunil remembers being cuffed for making an error. The differential of a Morris 8 car has up and down marks on the outside. If fitted the wrong way up, the reverse gear will become a forward gear and all the forward gears will go in reverse. Lessons learned the hard way, Sunil smiles, are never forgotten.

As remarked earlier, all the necessary technical detail for repairing an old car is stored in the mechanic's brain, which of course must function properly. Unfortunately, most mechanics' brains are gone by the time they reach middle age, done in by drinking and the rigours of poverty. I have known Sunil for a quarter-of-a-century and, while his beard has grown grey, his smile is as ready as ever and his brain is working fine. He seems to have accepted poverty as his lot, doesn't bear a grudge with anyone and hasn't ruined himself by drinking.

While he needs to take every vehicle which comes his way in order to survive, his heart is in the classic and vintage cars. He loves to work on them. There was a time when Sunil's garage was full of Morris Minors. But their appearances grew less as even the driving schools gave them up and bought Japanese and Indian cars. Now, the only classics to be seen here are those owned as such by collectors. As I watched him working on the Standard, I thought how awful it was that, after a lifetime of toil, Sunil doesn't have a classic car on his own.