The Little Blue Polo I Named Nandi, and the Bay She Sat In Too Long

The car I bought before I trusted myself to

I named her Nandi. I know that sounds ridiculous, naming a car, but I did it the day I signed for her at a dealership in Midrand, and the name stuck for four years. She was a little blue Polo Vivo, second hand but barely, with cloth seats that smelled faintly of the previous owner's air freshener for about a month before they smelled like me. She was the first thing I ever bought entirely on my own, no co signer, no help from my mother, nothing. I was twenty seven when I got her and I remember sitting in the parking lot outside the dealership just holding the steering wheel and feeling like an actual adult for the first time.

I grew up in Tembisa and by the time I bought Nandi I was renting a flat in a complex in Kempton Park, close enough to work that the drive was bearable and far enough from where I started that it felt like progress. I paid her off in three years. The day the last debit order went through I bought myself a Woolworths chocolate slab to celebrate and ate the whole thing in the car in the underground parking at work, which is a very small kind of joy but it was mine. After that, every month with no car payment felt like a raise I had given myself.

So when I say I was attached to that car, I mean it in a way that maybe only makes sense if you have ever counted every rand to get somewhere. She was not just transport. She was evidence.

The morning everything folded in

It was a Wednesday in the middle of winter, one of those rare Highveld mornings when it actually rains instead of just threatening to. The roads on the way toward Bedfordview were slick and grey and everyone was driving with that nervous Johannesburg hesitation that somehow makes things more dangerous, not less. I was in the left lane, indicator on, slowing for the robot up ahead where the traffic was stacking.

I heard the taxi before I felt it. That particular engine note, that speed that does not match the weather. A Quantum came off the on ramp too fast, tried to change lanes into a gap that was not there, clipped another car, and the whole thing concertinaed backward until the last push landed on me. The impact threw me forward into the belt so hard I bit my tongue and tasted blood, and my handbag emptied itself into the footwell, and for a second the world was just the sound of my own breathing and rain on a roof that no longer sat right.

Nobody was seriously hurt. That is the thing I keep coming back to, the thing I remind myself of when I get dramatic about it. The taxi driver was fine, shaken and loud but fine. The man in the car between us had a sore neck. I had a bruise from the seatbelt that turned the colour of a bad plum over the next week, and a tongue I could not stop poking. We stood on the wet verge exchanging details, the taxi passengers already flagging down another taxi to carry on with their lives, and I looked back at Nandi sitting crooked in the lane with her boot pushed halfway into the back seat and I already knew. I did not have the words for it yet, but I knew.

Weeks of paper and a wreck in bay 14

The tow truck took her to a holding yard in Isando and I went home in an Uber and cried in a way that embarrassed me even though there was no one to see it.

Then came the admin, and the admin was its own kind of accident, slow and grinding. The insurance assessor took days to look at her. Then more days for the report. When the call came, the woman on the phone was kind but brisk, and she used the phrase that I now hear in my sleep. Uneconomical to repair. The cost of fixing the structural damage was more than what Nandi was worth, so they were writing her off. They paid out the market value, which was fair, I suppose, and much less than she was worth to me, which is a different currency they do not deal in.

Here is the part nobody warns you about. When a car is written off but you are still deciding what to do, it does not vanish. Nandi came back. I had her towed to my complex because I could not bear the yard fees and I could not bear, if I am honest, the finality of just letting her go from a place I had never seen. So she sat in bay 14, my bay, bent and undriveable, her boot creased like a can someone had stepped on, one taillight held on with hope.

And she sat. And sat. A week. Two. Three. I would come home from work and there she was, this monument to the worst Wednesday of my year, taking up the only parking I had. I started parking my rental in visitors and getting the little notes on the windscreen about it. The body corporate sent an email to the whole complex about vehicles that are not roadworthy occupying bays, and even though it did not use my name I felt every word of it aimed at bay 14. My neighbour two doors down, a decent enough guy, asked me at the postboxes when I was going to sort out the eyesore. He smiled when he said it. I did not.

I know now that I was not really keeping her because I was undecided. I was keeping her because getting rid of her meant admitting she was actually gone, and that the version of me who bought her, so proud in that Midrand parking lot, had to hand the whole thing over to someone with a flatbed and a cheque book.

Learning that letting go is also a chore

The strange thing about grief over an object is that the world still expects you to do paperwork about it. Eventually a friend of mine, practical in the way I am not, sat me down on my own couch and said the sentence I needed to hear. She is a wreck in your parking, she said, and you are paying for a rental to park next to her. That is not honouring anything. That is just stuck.

So I started actually looking into what people do when they need to sell damaged cars, because I genuinely did not know. I had spent four years learning how to own a car and zero minutes learning how to unmake one. I read a bit, asked around in a WhatsApp group of women in my complex, and slowly it stopped feeling like a betrayal and started feeling like a task, which is exactly what it needed to become.

The mechanics of it were less dramatic than the feelings around it. Once you accept that the goal is to sell your damaged car and not to resurrect it, the questions get simpler and smaller. What is the registration situation. What documents do you need. Who takes a car that cannot drive itself onto a truck. It turns out that selling damaged cars is a whole ordinary thing that ordinary people do all the time, on the same wet mornings, in the same complexes, and there was something quieting about realising I was not the first person to stand in a parking bay feeling foolish about loving a Polo.

The day she left I did not cry, which surprised me. I stood at my gate in the cold and watched them winch her up onto the flatbed, that ruined boot catching the light, and I said a quiet thank you that I would have been mortified for anyone to hear. Thank you for the paid off years. Thank you for the chocolate slab in the parking garage. Thank you for being the proof I needed that I could do a hard thing on my own.

Then bay 14 was just a rectangle of oil stained concrete again, waiting for whatever I drive next. I have not named the next one yet. I am not sure I will. But I understand now that keeping a wreck is not the same as keeping a memory, and that the version of me who bought Nandi did not live in the car. She lives in me, and she came out of that parking bay perfectly fine, tongue healed, plum bruise faded, ready to sign for the next thing entirely on her own.