I am not particularly fond of motorbikes. Forget being aware of technical specs, I require broad daylight to tell a Harley-Davidson apart from a Hero Puch. It goes without saying that I do not own a fancy bike, and I do not accessorise my machine like a teen queen does her clothes. In fact, every motorbiking trip of mine is preceded by grand attempts to get my disused bike ready for the highway. After which, I pick a random direction and push off. I do this at least once a year, often twice, and in this piece, I will attempt to understand my compulsion to do so.
More so because I am not particularly fond of the outdoors. As a freelancer with the luxury of writing, counselling, and conducting online workshops from home, I venture out around 50 days a year. The rest of the time, I am blissfully indoors. I am lucky enough to experience sunsets, greenery, peacock calls, and birdsong from my balcony. That satiates my appetite for sights. I feel the need for no more.
Which begs the question again: what am I trying to achieve or experience on the road? Overworked axioms come to mind. One must wander the world to find oneself. Travel is the greatest university. The ageing indoor idiot has read but one page of the fascinating book called the world.
Not good enough. I must dig deeper to find more customised clichés.
Typically, a two-wheel rider covers 25 per cent less distance on a single day than a driver on four wheels. The comparable distance drops to 50 per cent if the rider is not on a muscular bike and can drop even further if the rider has a bum back. That’s me.
I usually keep my daily distance under 300 kilometres. That way, if I begin at dawn, I reach my destination by noon. But there have been a few memorable marathon days. Like Tiruchi to Wayanad (400 km) and Badami to Bengaluru (450 km). But the most vivid journey in recent times has been the shorter stretch of 332 km from Rameswaram to Kottarakkara. Mainly because my Royal Enfield Classic inexplicably kept sputtering to a halt. It seemed as if the ruddy thing was encouraging me to smoke because it would start just as inexplicably some 10 minutes later. But I would be climbing up the ghats as I entered Kerala late in the day and I therefore needed my bike to act responsibly.
Early start
I set off at 4:30 am, hoping the early departure would act as a buffer against contingencies. The first sputtering halt happened at 5:45 am. This was repeated maybe five more times before 9 am or thereabouts. Which is why, as I convulsed into the small town of Kovilpatti, I was overjoyed to see an Enfield service centre.
Also Read | Alone with silence in Kökar
The mechanics there were empathetic and thorough. They spent more than two hours inspecting my bike before concluding that there was nothing wrong with it! Mechanics in Bengaluru had come to the same conclusion. My bike and I seemed to occupy a different reality.
I thanked the mechanics and set off again. By now, I was familiar with the patterns in the stoppages. Ergo, I kept the speed below 55 km per hour, slowed down further at regular intervals, and took a short break every 40 minutes or so. The bike sputtered to a stop just twice more until 2:45 pm, when I reached the Enfield service centre at Tenkasi. Two more experts peered into my machine and reached the same conclusion.
My Royal Enfield Classic, parked while we take a breather before crossing the spectacular Pamban Bridge in Tamil Nadu.
| Photo Credit:
ESHWAR SUNDARESAN
I had given up my lunch break to keep time. I now had to travel around 80 km uphill on an empty stomach. Sunset was two and a half hours away. With a prayer to Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, I began an interesting climb where construction debris and a railway line punctuated thick, dark green foliage. I would have paid more attention to my surroundings were I not so anxious about stoppages. If they had occurred so often on flat ground, what could I expect on the slopes of the Western Ghats?
Reality often defies logic. This stretch proved to be the smoothest of the day. I reached my hotel within two hours of leaving Tenkasi. The rigours of the day melted away when I stepped into the balcony of my room to witness the sun sinking in between coconut fronds.
Rewards of hitting the road
Over the years, I have had many end-of-day moments like this. On a different evening many years ago, I checked into another hotel room and was greeted by a scolding radium green bird on the other side of the window sill. A couple of years ago, it was a squirrel monkey that regaled me with its frenzied scurrying up and down trees lined next to a brook inside the Mudumalai forest. And the most memorable of all was a pair of majestic toucans flying over the slopes of a tea plantation in Valparai, slowing down the heart and the world.
Perhaps there is a naive traveller inside me who believes that tough days end well.
Recently, chest pain and breathlessness goaded me to spend tens of thousands of rupees on doctor consultations and scans. I learnt anew the problem with allopathy: when the ailment is non-specific, doctors speculate cluelessly, like novice gamblers, often taking refuge in the possibility that the problem lies outside their area of specialisation.
With the medical fraternity only telling me what the ailment was not (so reminiscent of the philosophy of Neti neti), I got busy devising ways to pare my life to the bare minimum. The excesses of youth had been banished long ago. Now, the time felt ripe to bid adieu to remnant vices. An immediate decision harked: should I cancel the long-awaited family trip to the Rann of Kutch?
The midget rebel within me screamed a hoarse “No”. I heard his voice as a tearful whisper. I heard him. Instead of cancelling the trip, I added to it. I landed in Ahmedabad, and instead of taking a train to Gandhidham as planned, I took a circuitous route around the Kathiawar peninsula on my cousin’s Jawa.
Lessons from the highway
The highway teaches you that the world changes one kilometre at a time. Kathiawar being a universe away from my lair, I often could not tell the difference between a garage and a dhaba. Services were as sparse as vegetation in this land, and I often had to motor on interminably before finding a petrol pump or a decent tea stall. On more than one occasion, I pulled up at an eatery to find that it offered only those food items that had been baptised by oil: samosa, jalebi, and ganthiya. Not ideal for an undiagnosed indoors man.
I also created the hypothesis that good highway signage is as prohibited in Gujarat as low-carb food or alcohol. By the end of the trip, I must have travelled 50 km more than needed because I had to switch off GPS to conserve precious phone battery and thus missed important turns.
Two thoughts became paramount in the arid Kathiawar landscape: one, even a national highway can feel like wilderness and, two, livestock are the primary rulers of Gujarat. While the sacred cow and the sinful mongrel need circumvention everywhere in India, cattle demand the right of way in Gujarat. Behemoth trucks come to a suspenseful standstill to allow fleets of them to cross six lanes to chew on meagre grass cud on the other side. I would not have been surprised if the Rajdhani Express did the same.
You can come across anything on the highway. I spotted this assemblage of a demigod flanked by policemen along the half-constructed highway between Salem and Hosur in Tamil Nadu.
| Photo Credit:
ESHWAR SUNDARESAN
Bulls here have humps so large that they seem to hover above their sharp horns. On a couple of cattle crossings, these impressive duplex beasts were trotting on both sides of my bike, inches from my tense limbs, and I congratulated myself for staying standing still without wetting myself.
I suppose some flavours of courage cannot be experienced indoors.
Cold rides
My coldest ride happened the day I, along with a troupe of bikers, climbed from Phuentsholing to Paro in Bhutan. Passionless motorbiking is a solo sport, and I was making an exception by belonging to a troupe. Without a data connection in a foreign country, one needs guides to navigate through roads and culture. We left the town close to noon, just in time to catch a downpour. Within 10 minutes we had to stop to put on layers and a poncho large enough for both rider and baggage. While it was muggy in Phuentsholing, it got freezing cold as we climbed 2,000 m in no time at all. Police patrols checked our IDs maybe four times in the next couple of hours, making me want to check the history of invasions into Bhutan from the south.
Eventually, our wetnesses arrived at a café. We made a beeline for the toilet. Here, I learnt something buried deep in my biology. When pushed to a corner, I would choose urination over dignity. Because, right above an eastern toilet were words in stark red lettering: “Caution! You are under CCTV surveillance.” My bladder was too full for me to care. I unzipped, let go, and resisted the urge to wave to an invisible audience.
The ride ended the way rides end in Bengaluru: at a snail’s pace. Since it was the first day of the Paro Spring Festival, we took more than an hour to cover the last couple of kilometres into this town. Mercifully, the landscape stayed pretty through that ordeal.
The first to do so was my beloved RX-135, whose motor spindle wore out due to 18 years of use. As I entered the outskirts of the town of Namakkal, my faithful bike failed for the first time ever. It did so just 30 m away from the best Yamaha mechanic in town, who was willing to forgo his day off to machine a new spindle. He promised to get the bike ready the next morning, and I got an excuse to visit the Namakkal Fort. True to his word, he had the bike washed and waiting for me early the next morning. It has been a decade since that day, but we continue to follow each other’s mundane exploits on Facebook.
Trip to Kathiawar
The second coincidence happened in the recent Kathiawar trip. By the time I reached Jamnagar, a rare town with a Yezdi showroom, I saw that a rearview mirror had come loose. I find this unacceptable for a highway ride. Hence, I rode my Jawa to the Yezdi showroom to find a woman locking it up. Coincidence within this coincidence, the woman was the cleaning lady who visited the showroom to dust it every couple of days during the Diwali holidays. The staff was still on leave five days after the official end of the festival. I thanked her and tried to start my bike. Not even a perfunctory cough came up. I tried for several minutes before giving up.
A view from the Namakkal Fort in Tamil Nadu, the day bike trouble turned into an outing.
| Photo Credit:
ESHWAR SUNDARESAN
The woman offered me roadside tea and the number of the showroom’s owner. The latter heard me out, saw me parked outside his showroom through the CCTV feed, and offered to park the bike inside until the staff was able to rectify it. I jumped at the offer and begged him to get the staff to overcome their holiday spirit. The woman helped me with everything, and I left the venue grateful that my bike had conked off at the only spot in a 300 km radius where it could be repaired.
This problem required a person with extensive knowledge of the Jawa. In a parallel universe, I was pushing this heavy bike 30 km underneath the hot Kathiawar sun to reach the nearest mechanic, who, in all probability, would have been incapable of fixing it.
When coincidence meets kindness
In Jamnagar and Namakkal, I experienced the intersection of coincidence and kindness. If I were a man of faith, I might have devised a couple of new beliefs out of my experiences.
Perhaps this is another reason for me to bike. If, and when, I get into the occasional sticky situation, I might receive heightened levels of empathy, nearly almost impossible in our gated urban communities.
The weather was unremarkable the morning I fortified myself with an authentic benne masala dosa and left Davangere with a smile. I was on my way to Badami, and for reasons known only to the silicon gods, Google Maps offered me an adventurous journey through small village roads.
I was somewhere in rural Gadag when my bike began dipping into the reserve section of the fuel tank. My mobile phone’s battery was already running out of juice, although I had charged it fully before leaving my hotel at dawn. I was using the location feature on my phone the way a mountaineer would use an oxygen canister at high altitudes: sparingly, prudently.
It occurred to me that I had not passed another motorist in more than 10 minutes. I could see far into the nothingness of the flat, nondescript landscape. A part of me began enjoying the uncertainty of that moment. What would I run out of first? Petrol or battery?
Also Read | Notes from an exhausted life in urban India
A deafening clap of thunder brought me back to reality. I stopped and covered my backpack with its rainproof sheath. Perched on my seat, I was probably the tallest object in the vicinity, perhaps the best outlet for the next surge of lightning. Why had somebody not invented a mobile lightning repeller?
I felt like I was enacting a banal version of Survivor or a similar reality show. Especially since I reached a petrol pump within the next 10 km. My bike, my phone, and I recharged ourselves before setting off for the sandstone edifices of Badami.
Riding without passion
I wonder if one of the reasons I ride without passion is to encounter such challenges, which, in spite of their banality, test the physical and mental resilience of an ageing seat warmer. Is this my equivalent of skydiving or bungee jumping?
Sometime during the pandemic, as I drove down the Western Ghats towards the Udupi stretch of NH 66, I got a solution to a structuring challenge in a ghostwriting assignment. Elsewhere, almost a decade ago, waking up to the highlights of an India-Australia match in a hotel room, I was able to make an important career decision. The subconscious mind apparently offers greater clarity on the road.
At the end of this cogitation, I am no closer to having concrete answers to my question. Just abstract anecdotal evidences of enrichment. Is that enough?
All I know is that as long as I am able, I will occasionally get my bike ready for the highway and then figure out if I am still ready for life on the highway.
Eshwar Sundaresan is an author, freelance journalist, counsellor, life skills trainer, and bestselling ghostwriter.
