Last summer, a series of fortunate circumstances brought a sky blue Maserati Coupe under my sphere of influence.  It was mine for the summer to drive as I pleased.  The exotic and storied visitor from overseas car arrived on sunny spring morning, with breathtaking curves, painted in the Ferrari anniversary nero blue.  The silver Trident on the hood, a replica of a trident in the town square at Bologna, where the race car driver Alfieri Maserati and his brothers began their auto works in 1926 glinted in the sun.   The blue leather interior looked “like it needed half a cow to upholster” as a friend put it. 

Driving a Maserati takes some getting used to.  The car was belligerent and unhappy at low speeds and the constant starts and stops of city traffic.  It bucked at low speeds as though wanting me to release it, to let it off the leash.  Because of the size of the engine and the revolutions needed to keep it spinning, it would stall at traffic lights unless I revved it, making me feel like an eighteen year in a tricked out Honda Civic vying for attention.  Luckily, if it did stall, other drivers sat without honking, eyeing the whole situation with interest. 

I became a little self conscious about the attention I was attracting.  Sometimes there was a small crowd peering in the windows in the parking lot when I came out.  Bystanders snapped pictures of the car with their cellphones. People let me into traffic just to take a closer look.  They smiled, they waved, they honked.   At lights, they would examine the little plate on the side that announces that the car was styled by the famed Italian car design house of Giugiari.  When I passed police officers, I could see them punching my plate number into their computers.  But it brought a smile to most faces that noticed me growling by.  There was something about this car that was different from other sports cars.  A Maserati enthusiast mused to me: “A Porsche is thrilling to drive, for a while, but the Maserati will whisper softly to you at night from the garage, beckoning you to come out to play.” 

This car was everything I wasn’t.  Lithe, muscular, beautifully shaped, and flamboyantly Italian, it made women in particular gasp with pleasure.  They loved the car in a sensual way.  Why couldn’t I have had this car when I was 25?  My wife reminded me that because then I was driving a VW Rabbit. 

The “Maser” as it is affectionately known, is a car of marvelous eccentricity.  It is evident that the Italian engineers prized aesthetics over function.  Take the oil gauge. It is a work of art, with its classic styling, manufactured by Jaeger, the same firm that makes Jaeger Le Coultre watches, a high end Swiss manufacturer, but entertainingly useless.  When the car is started, for the first half hour or so it flutters like an awakening  bird in its nest, seesawing from one end of the scale to another, before settling down in the middle.  The dealer just nodded.  “Ah, you are getting used to Italian instruments.” 

Another charming deficiency is the lack of cup holders.  It seemed the engineers simply could not fathom why anyone would drink coffee while driving a car.  Each could be enjoyed separately, but apparently, not at the same time.  After precariously balancing hot coffee cup over my lap, I reconciled myself to do as the Italians do, and drink espresso standing at a zinc bar. 

Yet another source of amusement was the gas cap.  To release it, there is a button in the glove compartment.  Unfortunately, that often failed to open the cap, so you would be at the gas station, with a small, gathering crowd around you, futilely trying to open the gas cap on a $200,000 car.  The engine, a Ferrari-tuned 415 horsepower brute, was a beauty to look at, with bronze and red foil and a solid silver Maserati Trident on the head.  But that engine loved to drink fuel, so you were effectively stranded until the cap could be opened.  I later learned that there was a secondary mechanism in the trunk, a kind of emergency rip cord to release the gas cap in just such an eventuality. 

Pretty much none of the accessories worked on the car.  The GPS was completely inoperative, often telling me I was going north when travelling south.  The radio controls  were so fantastically complicated and the displays, half in Italian and half in English, so difficult to follow that I never really managed to get it working.  The car had cruise control, but I never saw a trace of how it could be activated.  The seat mechanism to move the seat forward and back would waltz back and forth when you got in the car, seemingly at random. 

I bemoaned some of these things to an older Italian gentleman at the dealership.  Dressed impeccably in a navy suit and oxblood leather shoes he consoled me,” When you drive a Maserati,” he said in an cultured Italian accent, “you drive it for two thing only – the engine and the beautiful body.  The rest don’t matter.” 

So I resolved to do just that, love the engine and love the body.  If you took that view, the Maser was a beautiful car.  At 4000 rpm in third gear, with the throttle a quarter way down the engine would growl a sweet melody, and like a tiger let out of its cage, its bounding legs would push you forward effortlessly over a hundred miles an hour.  On a clear blue summer day, you felt like you were on the brink of a powerful wave on the ocean, and that a little squeeze on the accelerator would toss you aloft — forward, on top of, and ahead of the wind, faster, higher, further, and finally away. 

All summers end, and when I took over my real car —  a 4-door superannuated green Volvo, nobody gave me a second glance — I was myself again.  But it was fun while it lasted.   

Ravi Deshpande, September 2006