Kishore Singh: Hatchback, off-roader and what not

Having cadged rides and the driver for years, it was a relief when my daughter announced that she was ready to buy her own car. Her brother, who had simply annexed his mother's car and got us to forfeit any claims on it by threatening to make me pay for its maintenance, set up a couple of test drives - the first of which was for an off-roader his sister definitely did not want. "Check it out," he said to me, "just in case."

I'm wary of my son. He has a lawyer's brain and is devious in intent. But since I wasn't putting my signature to any paper, we drove the large vehicle, and it was very nice, and I thanked the supervisor. "What about my car?" my daughter demanded to know, but her brother assured her that he had taken cognisance of her interests, too. True to his word, another sales supervisor showed up with a hatchback. We admired its features and my daughter took it for a spin and seemed happy enough to pay for it, till my son intervened.

Apparently, his go-to friend in such matters had suggested that she check out more cars before making up her mind. It didn't seem a bad idea till we discovered that cars come in as many variants as there are fingers, so if you upgraded to the next category, you wouldn't get a factory-fitted music system, or fog lights, or a keyless start, but if you downgraded to the top-of-the-category model in the lower class, you'd get everything from a GPS to customised mats. Did she want a roof trim or would she prefer a rear spoiler?

Soon, we were all in a fugue. If my daughter liked a car, it wasn't in the colour of her choice. Was the metallic grey available in the hatchback model or the sedan version? Would the automatic gear be needlessly expensive? Her brother and she were soon shouting over the features that one considered essential and the other an indulgence. Meanwhile, my son's friend organised some more test-drives, this time for me. "Just like that," he said, and so we drove a couple of top-end models I had no intention of buying. Still, having established a base price I was comfortable with, he began to scout around for "barely used" Beemers and Audis that were "great bargains".

If my daughter was flooded with finance options too numerous to make sense of, equated monthly installments for every model in the market, payable over three years or five, my son added his wishlist for "a decent car for you, Dad" to it, though it soon came about that he was, in fact, looking for a replacement for the car which wasn't his to begin with. "Why should I have to pay for my car when my brother got his for free?" my daughter asked, so I promised to pay half the cost of her new car. "Why should you pay for her car and not mine?" her brother asked, overlooking the fact that he'd already pinched his mother's sedan.

So, I've now paid my daughter for a car she still hasn't made up her mind about; I've paid my son for a car that I'd already paid for when I first bought it, and which I no longer even own; and the driver's threatening to quit because he no longer wants to drive a car that, he says, embarrasses him because it's the oldest in the family pool.