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This is apparently the Brooke Swan Car. I struggled to find a primary source to explain it, but the Vintage and Classic Car Club of India and this article in the Telegraph seem pretty confident that it is an actual object and not a fevered dream, and they agree that the swan head had glowing eyes and could spurt hot water from its beak, in order to clear people away from the streets ahead of the car.
The Vintage and Classic Car Club of India has a passage that powerfully evokes the emotions of this car more effectively than I ever could:
The amber lighiting of the car, glowed dissonantly in the dark, coupling
the level of un-comfortableness with the multi-note Gabriel exhaust
horn and an hot water spray in the swan’s beak that enabled the
chauffeur to clear passage through Calcutta’s crowded streets.
And the Telegraph adds an extra dollop of detail:
It was in the fashionable Maidan Park, where Calcutta’s elite promenaded
in their carriages and cars every afternoon, that Scotty displayed the
Swan Car’s most outrageous feature. A dump valve inside the car dropped
splats of whitewash on to the road from the Swan’s rear end - just to
make it more lifelike.
Apparently a keyboard in the back allowed the owner to “play chords and bugle calls” on the horn. TOOT TOOT MOTHERFUCKERS.
You’ll know it’s Mad Max time when I come tooling and screaming my way towards your home in this car, wreathed in blasts of steam, menacingly honking “In the Hall of the Mountain King” out of a rubber horn concealed in a carved swan head, and artistically shitting paint everywhere. I’ll peel to a halt in front of you and say “Can you play the keyboard” in a sexy way, possibly looking over my cool aviator sunglasses. It doesn’t matter if you say “yes” or “no,” I’ll just look at you approvingly and say, “Get in.” You’ll leave your life behind and climb in and just smash the keyboard in a cacophony of magnificent toots, while we drive off through the apocalypse and into the better world.
