Hengasu! Pioneering woman at the wheel

BENGALURU: Clara Francisca Pinto stopped driving cars eight years ago. Her doctor overrode her objections, telling her that her peripheral vision was failing — and that she would be endangering not herself, but other drivers on the road.
Pinto was 92 then. She had been driving cars for more than eighty years.
On November 27, Pinto celebrated her 100th birthday.She still takes her car out for a spin, but it’s within the walls of her Frazer Town residence.
Pinto isn’t Suzanne Tata, the first Indian woman to drive a car, back in 1905, nor is she the Maharani of Bhavnagar, who used to drive her husband around Bombay back in the 1910s, but she has been driving since before most of our parents were born.
Driving in 1938
It’s hard to believe that Pinto’s a centenarian. She’s active, brisk, and remarkably vital. She smiles as she displays a message from the Vatican, wishing her a happy 100th birthday. “I was born in Mangalore in 1918 as the tenth and last child of my parents. My father Gilbert Coelho was a coffee planter. We had an old Standard car, and my brother taught me to drive,” she says. The year was 1938.
Pinto remembers, with obvious fondness, her brother handing her the car manual, so that she could better understand how the vehicle worked, before she started driving. “It was a great feeling to drive. We would go to Belgaum and Bombay and I remember the scenery and those muddy roads like it was yesterday,” she says.
Pinto did her intermediate at the Lingaraj College in Belgaum and went to complete it at Central College for Woman in Nagpur, all under the Bombay Presidency in British India. She wanted to become a doctor. She married planter BF Pinto in 1942 and the couple moved into their estate in Mudigere in Chikkamagaluru. As years passed the couple decided to give their children a good education and enrolled them in the residential school at St. Francis Xavier Girls High School in Frazer Town in 1950s.
“Then began my driving days to Bangalore from Mudigere and back when I used to come to pick my kids to drive them home for vacations. Those days it was six to eight hours of drive via Belur, Channarayapatna, Kunigal and Nelamangala. My husband didn’t know how to drive, so it was my job to pick up the girls,” she laughs.
Hengasu, hengasu
Pinto obtained her driver’s licence from Hassan in the ’40s. In those days, cars always broke down enroute and people often carried tool kits, fuel and spare parts apart from food and water for the journey. However, Clara Pinto wasn’t just an expert driver but also a mechanic who fixed cars on her own. “I used to drive to Bangalore with a helper and when I fixed the repairs enroute, villagers used to gather in large numbers. The most common word that I heard those days was people shouting ‘hengasu, hengasu’ (Kannada for woman) when I drove past - or stopped to fix my car,” Pinto says.
She remembers with sad affection the Bengaluru of the 50s and 60s when it was truly the Garden City, when cars were few and women drivers were fewer. People on the road in the city used to be awestruck by the sight of Pinto behind the wheel with some even running towards whichever car she was driving at the time to take a closer look at its driver. “She used to change her cars every two years. Those days one had to book the next car immediately after you took delivery of a car as the waiting period was over 24 months. She drove us everywhere — to and from school, to picnics, to beautiful locations in Kerala, Maharashtra and of course Karnataka,” says Juanita, Pinto’s youngest daughter.
“If given a chance, I will still drive. When I sit behind the steering wheel I get the feeling that’s the way it should be,” says Pinto with a smile.