‘The greatest testament to love’ is what most people say. The ruler who built the Taj Mahal had in his library a book of Sufi mysticism. In this book there is a diagram of what apparently God’s throne room in heaven looks like. It just so happens that the Taj Mahal’s floor plan corresponds exactly to this throne room diagram. I’ll give you one try to guess where the ruler who built the Taj Mahal is buried. How very romantic, oh yea, his wife is buried next to him so I guess that makes it a grand testament to love. Funny that the same ruler was imprisoned by his own son and could see the Taj Mahal from his prison cell. In all honesty, as beautiful as it is, and as wonderful as the marble is, the Taj Mahal is an epic waste. In my eyes it could only be rectified if it was turned into a library. And on top of it, the inside of it smelled worse than a men’s locker room after an overtime hockey game
Monday, February 21, 2011
Varanasi
The train to the holy city was late and long and after a cold cycle rickshaw and a winding trail through narrow shit smeared lanes, cobbled and stoned, we finally got to the guesthouse. Sophie crashed into the bed and was done to the world. I, on the other hand, couldn’t sleep. I decided to go for a walk.
Walking back down the crooked narrow lanes, I found myself recollecting Venice. The mismatched stone tilts and everywhere askance as the passageways, ceilinged only by narrow jagged strips of open brightening blue. Shit piss and spit cakes the ground and the foot of every wall. Dark openings appear as barbers and paan makers, trinket sellers and all the like begin the morning ritual of the day. Signs pointing me back to my guesthouse litter every corner and I feel free to meander and get lost in the sandstone colored tumult.
I come across a street lined with vegetable sellers. Old dirty wicker baskets, worn clean are filled and piled with cabbage, kale, eggplant, potatoes, carrots, and green peppers. My meandering leads to an awaiting space, empty at the end of the corridor of sellers. The cool hazy air is thick and I look into the distance, walking towards it. I cannot see the other side, and before me the ground falls out in an ordered stone procession: stone steps, the Ghats leading down to the river Ganges.
In the dim morning light the holy parallels are already speckled, spotted and down the way - up the river - teeming with people. Boats are tied in thick packs at the banks edge. Men and boys in shorts and sometimes less stand knee, thigh, chest and neck deep in water. Women still wrapped in saris submerge themselves. Holy men dot each outcropping jutting out from the Ghats. Each with elaborate colors and shapes adorning their faces and all of them with the three white lines, horizontal on their foreheads - the lines of Shiva’s soul. Most of them sit on small raised platforms with hug umbrellas, like wicker parasols poised above them pointing o the rising sun. Each has a collection of cups and jars filled with flowers and color of yellow marigold and bright red. An Indian couple sits before one on his matted platform and listen to his oracle - his blessing, with their hands joined between them.
The plop of circular magnets, tied to strings and thrown from steps dot the trickling sounds cape. Boys hurling the trinket hooks, stand at the edge of stairs and from the prows of dirt colored boats. Among the wet rustle of clothing and oars, the squawk of gulls harassing boat goers in the center of the calm river.
A snake charmer demands 20 rupees for permission of a picture. He opens a second wicker basket and hit’s the edge in the same motion, awakening a second cobra crammed in coils. It springs up to the height of the first, angry, widening its hood. Automatically and with wandering eyes he raised a buzzing flute to his lips and the sound seems to keep the snakes still, erect, starring straight at the flute’s end.
Small tin foil bowls, each shallow and filled with marigolds and red flowers with a candle centered are piled into a larger wicker basket carried atop a girl’s head. She asks for rupees in exchange for the floating tribute to the payee’s god. The floating shrines are everywhere in the water, some still with a flame tugging against the light breeze.
Across the fiver is a bare bank with only a few river boats and some people congregated. As the sun lifts, the haze clears a little and I am tempted to think it is an island. In the whitened grey distance I think I see the outline of trees on another bank.
A large woman with her husband steps carefully into the Ganges. She looks back at her husband. She is elated and I wonder if she is from some other part of India, delighted to be -finally- bathing in the Ganges. Her smile is like a child too young to be embarrassed with the exuberance of the emotion behind it. It is a mark of the Indian people- they feel no embarrassment for their emotion, smiling and scolding with honesty.
The whole city of buildings is crowded on only one side of the Ganges. And slowly I walk back to the hotel, only to find Sophie still asleep. I ascend the stairs to the rooftop restaurant, and finally feeling the high breeze, I see that I am in one of the highest points of all Varanasi. It is Sunday morning and the sky above Varanasi is filled with kites. Twitching and gliding above the city, hundreds, if not thousands of tissue diamonds fluttered - simple squares turned askance and fixed to a cross of wood, each one a different color, each one a different design.
One boy, on a rooftop near and below mine stood casually watching his kite and with quick tugs and pulls at the sagging string he rose the colored square higher into the sky.
For the next week I had breakfast on the rooftop to the sound of a light wind and the flutter of tissue paper soaring through the hazy blue sky.
We walked along the Ghats and came across a human knee, femur, fibula and tibia, the bones all cracked and charred with some of the flesh still caked and caramelized to the bone. We walked farther and came across large piles of wood and beyond them flames churned into the sky from several points on the ash covered Ghats. We stood hypnotized by the bright movement. A boy standing next to me, dressed in rip-off designer jeans, and a matching shirt with a silver cross dangling from his neck turned to us and asked us the usual questions. Where we were from. He looked at Sophie and told her she was far too white. She feigned offense and he addendumed the comment by saying that she was 'cool'. Before the cremations he offered us the opportunity to buy hashish, opium, ecstasy and every other imaginable substance. We walked to a different point of view. A man dressed in simple white clothes approached me and asked me if I knew what was going on. I had read of these charity workers and I knew he was looking for an outrageous donation. I told him I did know what was going on. He asked 'how?'. I told him I'd read about it in a book. He said I could not learn everything from a book and that he could tell me the real details of what I was looking at. I told him that I was not interested in his offer. He continued on with his salesman pitch and as I walked away he yelled "You come to a Holy City and you don't learn about Karma?". There seemed to be spite in his voice.
The day Sophie and I took a boat ride in the Ganges, I dipped a small empty bottle into the river so that I could bring it back home with me and add to my collection of water. That night I got violently sick. When I had recovered several days later, Sophie and I went for a walk along the Ghats. I dipped my toe in the water next to a man who was bathing. That night I got violently sick. The two instances are just coincidences, I'm sure, but the truth is that the Ganges is incredibly polluted to the point where one could say it is poisonous. Not only does every variety of excrement find its way into the river, and burned bodies dumped into its water, but upstream factories unload incredible amounts of heavy metals and toxins into the water making it contaminated in a plethora of ways. Then again if the air wafting through the Vatican was just as polluted, I'm sure it wouldn't stop believers from breathing in with delight and praising their god.
All in all, Varanasi was my favorite city. I already miss those mornings of drinking chai and watching the kites flutter above the city.
Walking back down the crooked narrow lanes, I found myself recollecting Venice. The mismatched stone tilts and everywhere askance as the passageways, ceilinged only by narrow jagged strips of open brightening blue. Shit piss and spit cakes the ground and the foot of every wall. Dark openings appear as barbers and paan makers, trinket sellers and all the like begin the morning ritual of the day. Signs pointing me back to my guesthouse litter every corner and I feel free to meander and get lost in the sandstone colored tumult.
I come across a street lined with vegetable sellers. Old dirty wicker baskets, worn clean are filled and piled with cabbage, kale, eggplant, potatoes, carrots, and green peppers. My meandering leads to an awaiting space, empty at the end of the corridor of sellers. The cool hazy air is thick and I look into the distance, walking towards it. I cannot see the other side, and before me the ground falls out in an ordered stone procession: stone steps, the Ghats leading down to the river Ganges.
In the dim morning light the holy parallels are already speckled, spotted and down the way - up the river - teeming with people. Boats are tied in thick packs at the banks edge. Men and boys in shorts and sometimes less stand knee, thigh, chest and neck deep in water. Women still wrapped in saris submerge themselves. Holy men dot each outcropping jutting out from the Ghats. Each with elaborate colors and shapes adorning their faces and all of them with the three white lines, horizontal on their foreheads - the lines of Shiva’s soul. Most of them sit on small raised platforms with hug umbrellas, like wicker parasols poised above them pointing o the rising sun. Each has a collection of cups and jars filled with flowers and color of yellow marigold and bright red. An Indian couple sits before one on his matted platform and listen to his oracle - his blessing, with their hands joined between them.
The plop of circular magnets, tied to strings and thrown from steps dot the trickling sounds cape. Boys hurling the trinket hooks, stand at the edge of stairs and from the prows of dirt colored boats. Among the wet rustle of clothing and oars, the squawk of gulls harassing boat goers in the center of the calm river.
A snake charmer demands 20 rupees for permission of a picture. He opens a second wicker basket and hit’s the edge in the same motion, awakening a second cobra crammed in coils. It springs up to the height of the first, angry, widening its hood. Automatically and with wandering eyes he raised a buzzing flute to his lips and the sound seems to keep the snakes still, erect, starring straight at the flute’s end.
Small tin foil bowls, each shallow and filled with marigolds and red flowers with a candle centered are piled into a larger wicker basket carried atop a girl’s head. She asks for rupees in exchange for the floating tribute to the payee’s god. The floating shrines are everywhere in the water, some still with a flame tugging against the light breeze.
Across the fiver is a bare bank with only a few river boats and some people congregated. As the sun lifts, the haze clears a little and I am tempted to think it is an island. In the whitened grey distance I think I see the outline of trees on another bank.
A large woman with her husband steps carefully into the Ganges. She looks back at her husband. She is elated and I wonder if she is from some other part of India, delighted to be -finally- bathing in the Ganges. Her smile is like a child too young to be embarrassed with the exuberance of the emotion behind it. It is a mark of the Indian people- they feel no embarrassment for their emotion, smiling and scolding with honesty.
The whole city of buildings is crowded on only one side of the Ganges. And slowly I walk back to the hotel, only to find Sophie still asleep. I ascend the stairs to the rooftop restaurant, and finally feeling the high breeze, I see that I am in one of the highest points of all Varanasi. It is Sunday morning and the sky above Varanasi is filled with kites. Twitching and gliding above the city, hundreds, if not thousands of tissue diamonds fluttered - simple squares turned askance and fixed to a cross of wood, each one a different color, each one a different design.
One boy, on a rooftop near and below mine stood casually watching his kite and with quick tugs and pulls at the sagging string he rose the colored square higher into the sky.
For the next week I had breakfast on the rooftop to the sound of a light wind and the flutter of tissue paper soaring through the hazy blue sky.
We walked along the Ghats and came across a human knee, femur, fibula and tibia, the bones all cracked and charred with some of the flesh still caked and caramelized to the bone. We walked farther and came across large piles of wood and beyond them flames churned into the sky from several points on the ash covered Ghats. We stood hypnotized by the bright movement. A boy standing next to me, dressed in rip-off designer jeans, and a matching shirt with a silver cross dangling from his neck turned to us and asked us the usual questions. Where we were from. He looked at Sophie and told her she was far too white. She feigned offense and he addendumed the comment by saying that she was 'cool'. Before the cremations he offered us the opportunity to buy hashish, opium, ecstasy and every other imaginable substance. We walked to a different point of view. A man dressed in simple white clothes approached me and asked me if I knew what was going on. I had read of these charity workers and I knew he was looking for an outrageous donation. I told him I did know what was going on. He asked 'how?'. I told him I'd read about it in a book. He said I could not learn everything from a book and that he could tell me the real details of what I was looking at. I told him that I was not interested in his offer. He continued on with his salesman pitch and as I walked away he yelled "You come to a Holy City and you don't learn about Karma?". There seemed to be spite in his voice.
The day Sophie and I took a boat ride in the Ganges, I dipped a small empty bottle into the river so that I could bring it back home with me and add to my collection of water. That night I got violently sick. When I had recovered several days later, Sophie and I went for a walk along the Ghats. I dipped my toe in the water next to a man who was bathing. That night I got violently sick. The two instances are just coincidences, I'm sure, but the truth is that the Ganges is incredibly polluted to the point where one could say it is poisonous. Not only does every variety of excrement find its way into the river, and burned bodies dumped into its water, but upstream factories unload incredible amounts of heavy metals and toxins into the water making it contaminated in a plethora of ways. Then again if the air wafting through the Vatican was just as polluted, I'm sure it wouldn't stop believers from breathing in with delight and praising their god.
All in all, Varanasi was my favorite city. I already miss those mornings of drinking chai and watching the kites flutter above the city.
Waiting for Tigers
We made our way north up along the coast to Mumbai before turning inland for a long haul to Madhya Pradesh. After three days of travel by train, bus and taxi, we were finally in Tala, the access point to the Barharghvard National Park. Exhausted we collapsed and resolved to figure out our safari in the park later.
What we found out was that the most popular gate, Gate 1, was booked up for a week. It was popular for good reason: we were told that there was a 99% chance of seeing Tigers. The other gates only offered chances half of that. Reluctantly we agreed to wait a couple of days to see if any cancellations would open up a spot in Gate 1 and then if not, go take our chances with one of the other gates.
Tala is much as you would imagine an old frontier town might have been in the western United States. One road with not much there, this one, however, filled with Indians. Sophie and I had exhausted the towns possible amusements with one twenty minute walk up and down the strip. While waiting for tigers, we resolved our bored predicament by the same means than most people in Frontier towns probably passed the time: we got drunk.
We were awaken at 5:30 in the morning, completely unaware that our safari would be that morning. The air was cold and the sweater I had wasn’t enough, but I was on my way to see tigers, I didn’t care how cold it was. Like an idiot, I turned to Sophie and sang a song of one impromptu line: “It’s tiger time, in India!”. Mr. Rogers would have been proud of my melody and cadence, I’m sure.
Our open back safari jeep pulled up to a long line in front of Gate 1. From what I could see, all the jeeps in front of us were filled with Indian tourists. Sophie and I were the only westerners. After much waiting. And after Sophie had gone through several cycles of being amused and annoyed with my safari jingle, jeeps started to filter in through the gate. Our guide approached our jeep with a solemn expression. We weren’t going through Gate 1, I could tell. He told us that we weren’t going through Gate 1. I knew it. We drove off towards Gate 2 and I tried to cheer myself and Sophie up with my unstoppable jingle. I explained to Sophie that it was actually a secret mantra and that the tigers could hear me. I told her I knew that it sounded childish, but it was actually a highly sophisticated tiger call. Sophie, cold, with her hands hanging on the string of her hood, pulled down tight over her face, looked at me, she was not amused. Abruptly, our guide rapped his hand on the head of our driver as if he were beating a drum and trying to catch up with the rest of a band. He yelled in Hindi and our driver put the jeep in reverse for a moment or two. Our guide pointed down at the sand beside the road. Three huge ovate divots crowned a fourth diamond shape imprint, a tiger paw print. Our guide told us it was only a few hours old. Ever skeptical, my immediate notion upon seeing the print was that it was fake, it just looked too damn perfect. I pictured someone crouching down on the ground before we arrived, pressing a tiger paw print stamp into the sand, carefully and conscientiously. An animal couldn’t possibly leave such a mark. As the driver put the jeep back into gear and we sped off towards Gate 2, I wondered if my experience of tigers in India would be relegating to forever wondering if I’d seen a real paw print or just some damned scam to placate unlucky tourists. I sang my jingle to reassure my spirits. We arrived at Gate 2 ( it looked far less ‘official’ than Gate 1 which further depressed my already skeptical spirits. Surely tigers would be more drawn to dwell closer to more official looking infrastructure.). A large elephant with a wooden cockpit bound to its back and sawed off tusks stood near it, ravishing a tree of chlorophyll. A few jeeps (far less than Gate 1) were congregated and waiting to enter Gate 2 (waiting for what, we had no clue). Our guide, standing in the passenger seat was yelling a conversation in Hindi with one of the park rangers. After a few minutes, their language became hurried and almost frantic. Our guide seemed to have garnered the essential information first. He rapped the driver’s head frantically once again and turned around, grabbing the jeep’s crash bar and pointed behind us, yelling “Look!”. As Sophie and I turned around, the jeep shot into reverse and we grappled the edges for support. In reverse we hurried through the cold morning air, our eyes flitting back and forth across the visual geography. I saw it first. I pointed and Sophie saw it too.
From the dark brush on the park side of the road extended paws through the short space of air as they aimed a leap down from a small incline. In a moment another lept from the thicket and as we raced towards the crossing our guide excitedly directed our eyes into the brush rushing past us on the right. Another tiger sauntering in the same direction as we peered out at us, looking for an agreeable opening to pass through.
In one sense, they were just big cats, and ultimately all they did was cross the street and look at us occasionally while they did so.
And still, there was majesty. The powerful supple movements of their flesh and bone - the way the fur turned and shimmered around calculating muscles that pushed and carried the contours of their bodies, the calm full circles in their eyes. The black stripes like black gashes into a pretense sight arming intent behind the fur against alert and awareness of preyed animals. Faces of lithe expression, untroubled and relaxed as they strolled in their slow morning walk.
Their movements were gone as quick as they’d come, filtering into the adjoining brush at the road’s twin edges. What a wondrous flight of moments.
Later in the day, Sophie and I learned that the jeeps that had gone through Gate 1 had seen no tigers. We were the only ones to see the cats.
What we found out was that the most popular gate, Gate 1, was booked up for a week. It was popular for good reason: we were told that there was a 99% chance of seeing Tigers. The other gates only offered chances half of that. Reluctantly we agreed to wait a couple of days to see if any cancellations would open up a spot in Gate 1 and then if not, go take our chances with one of the other gates.
Tala is much as you would imagine an old frontier town might have been in the western United States. One road with not much there, this one, however, filled with Indians. Sophie and I had exhausted the towns possible amusements with one twenty minute walk up and down the strip. While waiting for tigers, we resolved our bored predicament by the same means than most people in Frontier towns probably passed the time: we got drunk.
We were awaken at 5:30 in the morning, completely unaware that our safari would be that morning. The air was cold and the sweater I had wasn’t enough, but I was on my way to see tigers, I didn’t care how cold it was. Like an idiot, I turned to Sophie and sang a song of one impromptu line: “It’s tiger time, in India!”. Mr. Rogers would have been proud of my melody and cadence, I’m sure.
Our open back safari jeep pulled up to a long line in front of Gate 1. From what I could see, all the jeeps in front of us were filled with Indian tourists. Sophie and I were the only westerners. After much waiting. And after Sophie had gone through several cycles of being amused and annoyed with my safari jingle, jeeps started to filter in through the gate. Our guide approached our jeep with a solemn expression. We weren’t going through Gate 1, I could tell. He told us that we weren’t going through Gate 1. I knew it. We drove off towards Gate 2 and I tried to cheer myself and Sophie up with my unstoppable jingle. I explained to Sophie that it was actually a secret mantra and that the tigers could hear me. I told her I knew that it sounded childish, but it was actually a highly sophisticated tiger call. Sophie, cold, with her hands hanging on the string of her hood, pulled down tight over her face, looked at me, she was not amused. Abruptly, our guide rapped his hand on the head of our driver as if he were beating a drum and trying to catch up with the rest of a band. He yelled in Hindi and our driver put the jeep in reverse for a moment or two. Our guide pointed down at the sand beside the road. Three huge ovate divots crowned a fourth diamond shape imprint, a tiger paw print. Our guide told us it was only a few hours old. Ever skeptical, my immediate notion upon seeing the print was that it was fake, it just looked too damn perfect. I pictured someone crouching down on the ground before we arrived, pressing a tiger paw print stamp into the sand, carefully and conscientiously. An animal couldn’t possibly leave such a mark. As the driver put the jeep back into gear and we sped off towards Gate 2, I wondered if my experience of tigers in India would be relegating to forever wondering if I’d seen a real paw print or just some damned scam to placate unlucky tourists. I sang my jingle to reassure my spirits. We arrived at Gate 2 ( it looked far less ‘official’ than Gate 1 which further depressed my already skeptical spirits. Surely tigers would be more drawn to dwell closer to more official looking infrastructure.). A large elephant with a wooden cockpit bound to its back and sawed off tusks stood near it, ravishing a tree of chlorophyll. A few jeeps (far less than Gate 1) were congregated and waiting to enter Gate 2 (waiting for what, we had no clue). Our guide, standing in the passenger seat was yelling a conversation in Hindi with one of the park rangers. After a few minutes, their language became hurried and almost frantic. Our guide seemed to have garnered the essential information first. He rapped the driver’s head frantically once again and turned around, grabbing the jeep’s crash bar and pointed behind us, yelling “Look!”. As Sophie and I turned around, the jeep shot into reverse and we grappled the edges for support. In reverse we hurried through the cold morning air, our eyes flitting back and forth across the visual geography. I saw it first. I pointed and Sophie saw it too.
From the dark brush on the park side of the road extended paws through the short space of air as they aimed a leap down from a small incline. In a moment another lept from the thicket and as we raced towards the crossing our guide excitedly directed our eyes into the brush rushing past us on the right. Another tiger sauntering in the same direction as we peered out at us, looking for an agreeable opening to pass through.
In one sense, they were just big cats, and ultimately all they did was cross the street and look at us occasionally while they did so.
And still, there was majesty. The powerful supple movements of their flesh and bone - the way the fur turned and shimmered around calculating muscles that pushed and carried the contours of their bodies, the calm full circles in their eyes. The black stripes like black gashes into a pretense sight arming intent behind the fur against alert and awareness of preyed animals. Faces of lithe expression, untroubled and relaxed as they strolled in their slow morning walk.
Their movements were gone as quick as they’d come, filtering into the adjoining brush at the road’s twin edges. What a wondrous flight of moments.
Later in the day, Sophie and I learned that the jeeps that had gone through Gate 1 had seen no tigers. We were the only ones to see the cats.
Friday, January 21, 2011
The Benefit of Mental Machinery
The good thing about Sasha’s disappearing mechanical failure is that given a little rest time I was almost guaranteed at least 20 k before it would happen again: perfect for a selling test drive. I took a good hit financially with the bike but sold it easily enough and considering that there really is a problem with it, I didn’t feel all that bad about getting back such a cut on the price: I’d rather Avihay’s bad karma ended with me. And I figure, you can’t buy a better seat in Heaven, but you can sure as Hell have better stories to tell the person next to you.
It goes without saying that I was relieved when the bike was sold. In celebration, I took Sophie, who had met up with me once again in Goa, sailing for a day on the Arabian sea. We have spent the time since on the beach, relaxing, reading, and me writing. Yesterday morning we watched dolphins breach a few hundred meters out in the water. They danced and played for about an hour in the Arabian sea before continuing north.
The motorcycle was by far way too stressful, but damn it was fun. To open up the throttle and feel the growl of the engine. The Indian wind in my face and the speckled ocean glistening not far from the road and the spinning rubber. By far, it was a fantastic mistake.
It goes without saying that I was relieved when the bike was sold. In celebration, I took Sophie, who had met up with me once again in Goa, sailing for a day on the Arabian sea. We have spent the time since on the beach, relaxing, reading, and me writing. Yesterday morning we watched dolphins breach a few hundred meters out in the water. They danced and played for about an hour in the Arabian sea before continuing north.
The motorcycle was by far way too stressful, but damn it was fun. To open up the throttle and feel the growl of the engine. The Indian wind in my face and the speckled ocean glistening not far from the road and the spinning rubber. By far, it was a fantastic mistake.
The Bribe That Never Happened
The next town, 18 kilometers away, also didn’t support the shipping of motorcycles, so I dished out the extra cash and went to Calicut with the motorcycle. Long after the sun had sunk and the stars had come out, my humble truck driver pulled the rig into the packing and loading area of the Calicut rail station. I was nervous, completely unaware of what documents might be required for the shipping of a motorcycle. Dan, the first Israeli I had approached about buying a motorcycle had apparently been able to take his Enfield on a train sans ownership papers. This line of thinking hadn’t worked in the insurance office and I heavily doubted it would work then.
Packers were working quickly wrapping Styrofoam boxes filled with fish and other items. The commotion seemed jovial but quickly I spotted a police officer sitting in a plastic lawn chair reading in the dark. I was weary of him and when communication between my driver, a packer and myself failed, they pointed at the police officer.
“Police. English. Police. English.”
I was led to the police officer and the uniformed man with a mustache looked up at me with a broad smile.
“I’m looking to go to Goa.”
“Goa?”
“Yes, Goa.”
“When?”
“Next train?”
“Next train, 12:24”
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Fantastic, thank you”
<Indian head bobble>
I pocketed the money I had cautiously loaded into my palm and walked back to the bike. After paying the packer to wrap the bike, I was directed inside the station to speak with the parcel officer. My driver explained what it was I wanted to do. The parcel officer looked at me over his glasses, tilting his head forward and making it look as though his eyebrows had been pulled downward in suspicion.
“Do you have documents for this vehicle?”
I took out the registration and handed it to him through the metal gated window. With the other hand I retrieved my unused bribe, hoping, if the need came that it would work in smoothing the situation over. The parcel officer looked at the registration for what seemed like a long time and then he looked up.
“You need a copy of this.” He handed the registration back to me.
“Where can I get one made?”
“Other side of the train station” He said, and motioned without looking up at me.
“Is that all I need?”
“Yes, only registration.” He said without looking up.
Twenty hours later, I was in Goa. Exhausted, I decided to find a tourist home and get a room before I’d deal with the bike. I showered off the grime and exhaustion of the train ride and with a clean set of clothes I went back to the train station and found the parcel office. It was busier than the one in Calicut and there were more Police around. They carried bigger guns than the ones in Kerala.
I found a subordinate worker and handed him my booking receipt for the motorcycle. He looked at it briefly and then said,
“Registration.” I handed him a copy of the registration, and as someone called his attention elsewhere, he looked back at me and said,
“You need license, too.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by ‘license’ and so I stood among the bustle of the parcel office, looking around, wondering what exactly I should do. My eyes fell upon a sheet pinned to a notice board that was titled: Requirements for Booking of Motorcycle. I read it and after tracing my eyes along the second requirement, I stopped short. It read:
“2. License/Proof of Ownership of Motorcycle”
Shit. I should have expected that things might be different in Goa. I retreated to my hotel room, but not before stopping at a bar and nursing my options with whiskey and cigarettes. I sent a SPOT signal, as I drank and watched the smoke swirl in the still hot air. The whiskey didn’t do me any good. My thoughts turned worried and fatalistic and I tried to imagine how ashamed I’d feel to inconvenience my father enough to come halfway around the world to visit his son in prison.
I’m just being ridiculous, maybe.
But I don’t know this country.
That’s part of the point you moron, this is supposed to be a country where you can get away with inconsequential shit like this.
But you don’t know!
You’re right, I don’t know, that’s why we’re worrying.
I need to stop talking to myself.
I sent unfair text messages to Sophie and after some fatalistic talk, I got her worried about my situation as well. I went back to my hotel room to sober up and wait till it got dark, figuring a bribe, if need be, would be easier to swing with less people and less light. After watching a thoroughly idiotic western movie and drinking water from the showerhead (the faucet in the sink wasn’t connected to any piping) I made my way out into the night, my pockets loaded with bribe money. I took out a cigarette and lit it, remembering that Jack used to call it the ‘poison tit’. I had smoked three packs of cigarettes in three days. I’ve got to chill out and let this shit go, I told myself. There are people back home who would crucify me for hypocrisy if they knew.
“It might all just work out fine.” was Sophie’s last text message.
I walked into the parcel office and up to the gated window with two officers seated behind it. I handed one of them my receipt.
“Registration?” I handed him a copy of the registration.
“License?” I handed him a copy of my International Drivers’ Permit that I had prepared at the hotel reception just prior to coming.
He slid the copy of the permit behind the copy of the registration and the booking receipt and stapled the three together. He looked at the clock and then tabulated numbers in his head for a moment.
“40 Rupees. Holding charge.” I gave him the money.
“Sign here.” I signed there.
Bribe money still in my pocket, I wheeled the bike out into the free night air.
40 Rupees is roughly the equivalent of $1.20
Packers were working quickly wrapping Styrofoam boxes filled with fish and other items. The commotion seemed jovial but quickly I spotted a police officer sitting in a plastic lawn chair reading in the dark. I was weary of him and when communication between my driver, a packer and myself failed, they pointed at the police officer.
“Police. English. Police. English.”
I was led to the police officer and the uniformed man with a mustache looked up at me with a broad smile.
“I’m looking to go to Goa.”
“Goa?”
“Yes, Goa.”
“When?”
“Next train?”
“Next train, 12:24”
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Fantastic, thank you”
<Indian head bobble>
I pocketed the money I had cautiously loaded into my palm and walked back to the bike. After paying the packer to wrap the bike, I was directed inside the station to speak with the parcel officer. My driver explained what it was I wanted to do. The parcel officer looked at me over his glasses, tilting his head forward and making it look as though his eyebrows had been pulled downward in suspicion.
“Do you have documents for this vehicle?”
I took out the registration and handed it to him through the metal gated window. With the other hand I retrieved my unused bribe, hoping, if the need came that it would work in smoothing the situation over. The parcel officer looked at the registration for what seemed like a long time and then he looked up.
“You need a copy of this.” He handed the registration back to me.
“Where can I get one made?”
“Other side of the train station” He said, and motioned without looking up at me.
“Is that all I need?”
“Yes, only registration.” He said without looking up.
Twenty hours later, I was in Goa. Exhausted, I decided to find a tourist home and get a room before I’d deal with the bike. I showered off the grime and exhaustion of the train ride and with a clean set of clothes I went back to the train station and found the parcel office. It was busier than the one in Calicut and there were more Police around. They carried bigger guns than the ones in Kerala.
I found a subordinate worker and handed him my booking receipt for the motorcycle. He looked at it briefly and then said,
“Registration.” I handed him a copy of the registration, and as someone called his attention elsewhere, he looked back at me and said,
“You need license, too.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by ‘license’ and so I stood among the bustle of the parcel office, looking around, wondering what exactly I should do. My eyes fell upon a sheet pinned to a notice board that was titled: Requirements for Booking of Motorcycle. I read it and after tracing my eyes along the second requirement, I stopped short. It read:
“2. License/Proof of Ownership of Motorcycle”
Shit. I should have expected that things might be different in Goa. I retreated to my hotel room, but not before stopping at a bar and nursing my options with whiskey and cigarettes. I sent a SPOT signal, as I drank and watched the smoke swirl in the still hot air. The whiskey didn’t do me any good. My thoughts turned worried and fatalistic and I tried to imagine how ashamed I’d feel to inconvenience my father enough to come halfway around the world to visit his son in prison.
I’m just being ridiculous, maybe.
But I don’t know this country.
That’s part of the point you moron, this is supposed to be a country where you can get away with inconsequential shit like this.
But you don’t know!
You’re right, I don’t know, that’s why we’re worrying.
I need to stop talking to myself.
I sent unfair text messages to Sophie and after some fatalistic talk, I got her worried about my situation as well. I went back to my hotel room to sober up and wait till it got dark, figuring a bribe, if need be, would be easier to swing with less people and less light. After watching a thoroughly idiotic western movie and drinking water from the showerhead (the faucet in the sink wasn’t connected to any piping) I made my way out into the night, my pockets loaded with bribe money. I took out a cigarette and lit it, remembering that Jack used to call it the ‘poison tit’. I had smoked three packs of cigarettes in three days. I’ve got to chill out and let this shit go, I told myself. There are people back home who would crucify me for hypocrisy if they knew.
“It might all just work out fine.” was Sophie’s last text message.
I walked into the parcel office and up to the gated window with two officers seated behind it. I handed one of them my receipt.
“Registration?” I handed him a copy of the registration.
“License?” I handed him a copy of my International Drivers’ Permit that I had prepared at the hotel reception just prior to coming.
He slid the copy of the permit behind the copy of the registration and the booking receipt and stapled the three together. He looked at the clock and then tabulated numbers in his head for a moment.
“40 Rupees. Holding charge.” I gave him the money.
“Sign here.” I signed there.
Bribe money still in my pocket, I wheeled the bike out into the free night air.
40 Rupees is roughly the equivalent of $1.20
The Only Man in Kuttipurum Who Can Speak Your Language: The Pimp‘s Nemesis
A tired monkey on a machine, that’s what I am, I thought as I rolled the stalled bike off of NH-17. The bike and I came to a stop next to a brightly colored bus. Like most vehicles on the road, it had “GANESH” painted in bright colors on the top of its windshield surrounded by designs that engulfed the whole truck. It had taken me a while to figure out that the western equivalent would be like seeing “JESUS CHRIST” painted on someone’s car. (I have also seen a few Indian trucks with this painted on them in place of Ganesh, or Shiva and the like). A boy of about 17 became very interested in me. Unfortunately he spoke no more than 5 or 6 words of English and when I tried my truly rudimentary Hindi on him, I discovered that he couldn’t speak Hindi either and actually spoke another language called Malabari. Go figure. After a bit of charade I just wanted to be left alone and contemplate my dwindling options while chain smoking. The boy would not give up, however. Then I hit upon two English words that he did know: Rail Station.
After a demonstration to convince him that the bike would not make it the 1 k to the rail station, he helped me wheel the useless beast the whole way. The town was Kuttipurum and the rail station there did not support the shipping of motorcycles via train. It would be possible at another town, 18 kilometers away. I needed a truck to get the bike there. Eventually, through the cracked English of the people who were helping me I was told of a man who spoke my language. I wasn’t sure talking to someone who knew English was entirely necessary, all I needed was a driver with a big enough truck. I had done it before and figured that since I was armed with the name of the town, I would be able to communicated what I needed to a driver, if only I could find one. The people helping me were convinced that I needed to see this man. The paranoid in me was suspicious.
“He know everyone in Kuttipurum, He help, he help.”
Whatever, I’m always up for meeting new people. I was led to an ‘English Speaking School’ and the gentleman who I was presented to, a healthy, smiling and handsome young Indian man in his late twenties offered me his hand. He was formally dressed and I could tell that he received a tremendous amount of respect in the community as I watched the children of the school and his subordinates observe the interaction. He seemed so pleased to meet a native English speaker, and I was a bit of a spectacle for everyone at the school. The man’s name was Musthafa and the first thing he asked me was whether I’d be willing to take a picture with the school children. I was afraid that I might be interrupting something - anything since it was the middle of the afternoon, but of course I agreed. Musthafa was delighted and then set out into the town with me to procure me a ride to the next train station. He asked me all the usual questions but with such graciousness and hospitality that I couldn’t help but be amazed. I felt like a faux badass who had snuck into a heaven where everyone was Indian and motorcycles acted like mental patients. All these people are so damn kind! I thought to myself. Where is this ‘corrupt India’? Where are all the bribes and thieves looking to take advantage of me? I seem to keep running into mid-western united states’ kindness, but I’m in India for Shiva’s sake.
Musthafa helped me negotiate a price for the truck ride and then after helping me, along with a few other men, get the motorcycle into the flat bed, he gave me his phone number and pleaded that I call him if anything goes awry. Poorly, I tried to communicate how grateful I was for his help and how utterly humbled I was by the generosity of the people of India.
After a demonstration to convince him that the bike would not make it the 1 k to the rail station, he helped me wheel the useless beast the whole way. The town was Kuttipurum and the rail station there did not support the shipping of motorcycles via train. It would be possible at another town, 18 kilometers away. I needed a truck to get the bike there. Eventually, through the cracked English of the people who were helping me I was told of a man who spoke my language. I wasn’t sure talking to someone who knew English was entirely necessary, all I needed was a driver with a big enough truck. I had done it before and figured that since I was armed with the name of the town, I would be able to communicated what I needed to a driver, if only I could find one. The people helping me were convinced that I needed to see this man. The paranoid in me was suspicious.
“He know everyone in Kuttipurum, He help, he help.”
Whatever, I’m always up for meeting new people. I was led to an ‘English Speaking School’ and the gentleman who I was presented to, a healthy, smiling and handsome young Indian man in his late twenties offered me his hand. He was formally dressed and I could tell that he received a tremendous amount of respect in the community as I watched the children of the school and his subordinates observe the interaction. He seemed so pleased to meet a native English speaker, and I was a bit of a spectacle for everyone at the school. The man’s name was Musthafa and the first thing he asked me was whether I’d be willing to take a picture with the school children. I was afraid that I might be interrupting something - anything since it was the middle of the afternoon, but of course I agreed. Musthafa was delighted and then set out into the town with me to procure me a ride to the next train station. He asked me all the usual questions but with such graciousness and hospitality that I couldn’t help but be amazed. I felt like a faux badass who had snuck into a heaven where everyone was Indian and motorcycles acted like mental patients. All these people are so damn kind! I thought to myself. Where is this ‘corrupt India’? Where are all the bribes and thieves looking to take advantage of me? I seem to keep running into mid-western united states’ kindness, but I’m in India for Shiva’s sake.
Musthafa helped me negotiate a price for the truck ride and then after helping me, along with a few other men, get the motorcycle into the flat bed, he gave me his phone number and pleaded that I call him if anything goes awry. Poorly, I tried to communicate how grateful I was for his help and how utterly humbled I was by the generosity of the people of India.
Prayer in Tripyyar
Considering how much difficulty the bike had been thus far, I decided that Alappuzha was as far south as I would go. I decided to turn back north and get back to Goa as soon as possible. Goa, being, perhaps the state in India with the greatest laxity with regard to rules and regulations was the most probable place to sell the motorcycle, considering I lacked the proper ownership and insurance papers. As optimistic as I tried to be about the ride north, there was an ominous sensation framing my perspective.
130 kilometers north of Alappuzha the bike stalled out. I waited for some time and then tried to start the bike up again. No luck. I took out my phone, which I had purchased to keep in touch with Sophie and in the event of an emergency. My balance was depleted, and upon buying additional minutes at a local outlet, I discovered that it went into a balance reserved for use in the state I had purchased the phone. No luck. I started the bike up again and made it less than a kilometer before it stalled out again, luckily, once again it had stalled out in front of a mechanic. Once again, tired and worn out by my own charade, I tried to communicate the problem, certain that whatever problem hid in the bike would not be found, let alone fixed. The mechanic, who I was reassured by locals on pristine Enfields was an expert. Yea, yea, I’d heard that before. He fiddled with the fuel intake float (no clue if its actually called this, but there is a little float, that floats in fuel and its placed right before the fuel goes into the piston cylinder) and seemed to make it look as though he was fixing something. One of his assistants, Thapan, took the bike for a test drive, and I prayed for the damn thing to stall while he was on it. With all the problems the cursed bike had caused me, I had been unable to get the problem to consistently show itself while a mechanic was present. Of course Thapan returned, sure that the problem was fixed. He did, however, discover another problem. The attachment at the bottom of the steering fork where the forward axle threaded into was cracked. Replacement would take 24 hours and so he suggested I drive back to Goa slowly. I decided that I didn’t want to ride a motorcycle with a cracked axle fitting. Thapan drove me to the nearest Tourist home in Tripyyar, a nice one, by my increasingly learned eye and drove off, assuring me that the next day would procure a repaired bike. I wasn’t terrible reassured, knowing that the bike’s real problem was still nestled somewhere in its bowels.
That night, unsettled feelings that had been trailing me for hundreds of miles began to fester and crystallize. For some time I had been listening to Death Cab for Cutie’s “Little Fury Bugs” a song which the sound of encapsulated perfectly the way I was beginning to feel. There is a drained repeating series of guitar chords that introduce the song and they never stray far from the progression that comforted me, mimicking with sound and music the nervous and monotonous depression that was making a home in me. Lonely and unsure my thoughts became fatalistic and scared. I had been away from home for more than 10 weeks, and I wondered if it was a sort of threshold of time, almost three months without all of them, everyone that I had left in Boston. I opened up my journal and started writing letters to them all. The people and the family that I missed; those I wanted to talk to and tell how much I missed, those that I couldn’t talk to and still missed. Why wasn’t I there, back in Boston, I wondered, why was it, I had decided to leave and come to the other side of the world. I had decided so long ago that I would, almost immediately upon moving back to Boston, I had known that I would leave. And the months succeeding that decision had only made work to enforce it. It wasn’t until plans and dates were gaining certainty and finalizations were starting that I started to hit a stride there in Boston. The summer had grown into such a wonderful life, and laying in that hotel room somewhere in Kerela, watching repeating movies on the only western channel, I wondered if I had made a mistake. I did not know what awaited me on the road ahead. I imagined all of the contingencies, a tripled up chicken challenge on the road - people merely trying to pass and overtake, all of it going wrong, myself torn and lifeless. I imagined running into the wrong cop, a by the book do-gooder who was still imbued with a sense of force and cruelty. All of the ridiculous contingencies that feel more than plausible in that state flooded my head and made me certain only of how much I missed my home. I flipped through the blank pages of my journal and wondered if they would be filled, and what they might be filled with. Holding a random page, I wondered, where will I be when I get to this one? Perhaps the bike was stolen, perhaps I had bought a stolen bike - I had virtually no clue about Indian law and in that hole of a hotel room, drowning in the over active imagination of an anxiously depressed paranoia, I wondered if journals and pens were allowed in prison. I tried to laugh at myself. I’m being ridiculous, I tried to tell myself. I got myself into this mess, I’ll get myself out of it.
24 hours later I walked up to the mechanic’s shop to find Thapan working by the light of a tiny florescent bulb, hanging from a neighboring store. He was just beginning to dismantle the front fork of my bike. My anxiety reached a pitch, I paced back out into the darkness, shuffling my boots in the roadside dirt. I tried to breath, calmly pulling in the air and heavily it left me. My heart was crazed fool trying to run, chained to a dank colored cell.
One of my stipulations for getting the bike had been, if worse came to worst, I could walk away from the bike and financially I’d be ok. I wondered if I should just walk away from the bike. I tried to keep myself from hyperventilating while a circumspect train of thought tried to recall the last time I had felt similar. Was it a panic attack? Or some sort of nervous breakdown? Nah, it couldn’t be that bad. But still, some how things in me were moving far too fast, in directions that didn’t make sense. I needed to calm down, not take all this so seriously. I’ve always had that problem, occasionally rearing its head: taking things too seriously. It was part of the reason I got the bike, to say “To hell with it all, I’ll do as my starving sense of adventure wants!”.
Well, here’s your adventure, I bitterly told myself.
For a moment I was flooded with an ecstatic sense of joy. I was pacing the road, somewhere in India, waiting for my motorcycle to be repaired, how incredibly fantastic! How often does that happen? How many would take a sledge hammer to their cubical if only for one evening of my troubles? It was only a moment, and just as quick as if had filled me, it fled, and with a sense of dread, I wondered if I was going manic.
Don’t be ridiculous, I just need to calm down, I told myself.
I walked to a dimly lit open-aired corner store. Several men congregated around the shop owner seated behind a small counter. They spoke lowly and after a few moments, the poorest looking one of the group turned and noticed me. He exuberantly made a charade to help me, directing me to the store owner. I bought a pack of cigarettes and offered one to the sparsely toothed man who had helped me. He declined and I walked off into the darkness. I had never been a smoker and never wanted to be. And it was so far and against all of my sense of self to use something other than my own thoughts and will power to change my emotional state, terribly out of character, but at that moment, I truly didn’t care. I lit the poison tit and took in the rank ghost the way college had taught me of other wafting spirits. I sat at an empty out door restaurant and found myself calming as I waited for ordered food. Smoke sinuously rose, wavering back and forth like a dancer with an aim to seduce. Oh bloody hell. I laughed at myself.
Eventually I hunkered down next to Thapan and watched as he filed the threads off a very important looking screw. Great, I thought. I’m going to die. He placed the bolt at the end of the screw and tried to hammer it on. This guy is a moron, I thought further. Eventually he switched out the screw and the bolt for ones that worked. I rode the bike back to the hotel and tried to convince myself asleep, terribly unsure of the next day.
The bike went about 20 k and then kicked out. I rested at a mechanic’s shop and chained smoked, convinced beyond commandment that the young man who called himself the mechanic could fix the bike. He seemed to think it was an accomplishment that he got the bike started. My hopelessness turned into a resigned giddiness. After senselessly learning some Hindi and purposely becoming a source of amusement for the young men who were gathered around the neighboring chai stand, I eventually started up the bike and took off. I made it 5 k.
130 kilometers north of Alappuzha the bike stalled out. I waited for some time and then tried to start the bike up again. No luck. I took out my phone, which I had purchased to keep in touch with Sophie and in the event of an emergency. My balance was depleted, and upon buying additional minutes at a local outlet, I discovered that it went into a balance reserved for use in the state I had purchased the phone. No luck. I started the bike up again and made it less than a kilometer before it stalled out again, luckily, once again it had stalled out in front of a mechanic. Once again, tired and worn out by my own charade, I tried to communicate the problem, certain that whatever problem hid in the bike would not be found, let alone fixed. The mechanic, who I was reassured by locals on pristine Enfields was an expert. Yea, yea, I’d heard that before. He fiddled with the fuel intake float (no clue if its actually called this, but there is a little float, that floats in fuel and its placed right before the fuel goes into the piston cylinder) and seemed to make it look as though he was fixing something. One of his assistants, Thapan, took the bike for a test drive, and I prayed for the damn thing to stall while he was on it. With all the problems the cursed bike had caused me, I had been unable to get the problem to consistently show itself while a mechanic was present. Of course Thapan returned, sure that the problem was fixed. He did, however, discover another problem. The attachment at the bottom of the steering fork where the forward axle threaded into was cracked. Replacement would take 24 hours and so he suggested I drive back to Goa slowly. I decided that I didn’t want to ride a motorcycle with a cracked axle fitting. Thapan drove me to the nearest Tourist home in Tripyyar, a nice one, by my increasingly learned eye and drove off, assuring me that the next day would procure a repaired bike. I wasn’t terrible reassured, knowing that the bike’s real problem was still nestled somewhere in its bowels.
That night, unsettled feelings that had been trailing me for hundreds of miles began to fester and crystallize. For some time I had been listening to Death Cab for Cutie’s “Little Fury Bugs” a song which the sound of encapsulated perfectly the way I was beginning to feel. There is a drained repeating series of guitar chords that introduce the song and they never stray far from the progression that comforted me, mimicking with sound and music the nervous and monotonous depression that was making a home in me. Lonely and unsure my thoughts became fatalistic and scared. I had been away from home for more than 10 weeks, and I wondered if it was a sort of threshold of time, almost three months without all of them, everyone that I had left in Boston. I opened up my journal and started writing letters to them all. The people and the family that I missed; those I wanted to talk to and tell how much I missed, those that I couldn’t talk to and still missed. Why wasn’t I there, back in Boston, I wondered, why was it, I had decided to leave and come to the other side of the world. I had decided so long ago that I would, almost immediately upon moving back to Boston, I had known that I would leave. And the months succeeding that decision had only made work to enforce it. It wasn’t until plans and dates were gaining certainty and finalizations were starting that I started to hit a stride there in Boston. The summer had grown into such a wonderful life, and laying in that hotel room somewhere in Kerela, watching repeating movies on the only western channel, I wondered if I had made a mistake. I did not know what awaited me on the road ahead. I imagined all of the contingencies, a tripled up chicken challenge on the road - people merely trying to pass and overtake, all of it going wrong, myself torn and lifeless. I imagined running into the wrong cop, a by the book do-gooder who was still imbued with a sense of force and cruelty. All of the ridiculous contingencies that feel more than plausible in that state flooded my head and made me certain only of how much I missed my home. I flipped through the blank pages of my journal and wondered if they would be filled, and what they might be filled with. Holding a random page, I wondered, where will I be when I get to this one? Perhaps the bike was stolen, perhaps I had bought a stolen bike - I had virtually no clue about Indian law and in that hole of a hotel room, drowning in the over active imagination of an anxiously depressed paranoia, I wondered if journals and pens were allowed in prison. I tried to laugh at myself. I’m being ridiculous, I tried to tell myself. I got myself into this mess, I’ll get myself out of it.
24 hours later I walked up to the mechanic’s shop to find Thapan working by the light of a tiny florescent bulb, hanging from a neighboring store. He was just beginning to dismantle the front fork of my bike. My anxiety reached a pitch, I paced back out into the darkness, shuffling my boots in the roadside dirt. I tried to breath, calmly pulling in the air and heavily it left me. My heart was crazed fool trying to run, chained to a dank colored cell.
One of my stipulations for getting the bike had been, if worse came to worst, I could walk away from the bike and financially I’d be ok. I wondered if I should just walk away from the bike. I tried to keep myself from hyperventilating while a circumspect train of thought tried to recall the last time I had felt similar. Was it a panic attack? Or some sort of nervous breakdown? Nah, it couldn’t be that bad. But still, some how things in me were moving far too fast, in directions that didn’t make sense. I needed to calm down, not take all this so seriously. I’ve always had that problem, occasionally rearing its head: taking things too seriously. It was part of the reason I got the bike, to say “To hell with it all, I’ll do as my starving sense of adventure wants!”.
Well, here’s your adventure, I bitterly told myself.
For a moment I was flooded with an ecstatic sense of joy. I was pacing the road, somewhere in India, waiting for my motorcycle to be repaired, how incredibly fantastic! How often does that happen? How many would take a sledge hammer to their cubical if only for one evening of my troubles? It was only a moment, and just as quick as if had filled me, it fled, and with a sense of dread, I wondered if I was going manic.
Don’t be ridiculous, I just need to calm down, I told myself.
I walked to a dimly lit open-aired corner store. Several men congregated around the shop owner seated behind a small counter. They spoke lowly and after a few moments, the poorest looking one of the group turned and noticed me. He exuberantly made a charade to help me, directing me to the store owner. I bought a pack of cigarettes and offered one to the sparsely toothed man who had helped me. He declined and I walked off into the darkness. I had never been a smoker and never wanted to be. And it was so far and against all of my sense of self to use something other than my own thoughts and will power to change my emotional state, terribly out of character, but at that moment, I truly didn’t care. I lit the poison tit and took in the rank ghost the way college had taught me of other wafting spirits. I sat at an empty out door restaurant and found myself calming as I waited for ordered food. Smoke sinuously rose, wavering back and forth like a dancer with an aim to seduce. Oh bloody hell. I laughed at myself.
Eventually I hunkered down next to Thapan and watched as he filed the threads off a very important looking screw. Great, I thought. I’m going to die. He placed the bolt at the end of the screw and tried to hammer it on. This guy is a moron, I thought further. Eventually he switched out the screw and the bolt for ones that worked. I rode the bike back to the hotel and tried to convince myself asleep, terribly unsure of the next day.
The bike went about 20 k and then kicked out. I rested at a mechanic’s shop and chained smoked, convinced beyond commandment that the young man who called himself the mechanic could fix the bike. He seemed to think it was an accomplishment that he got the bike started. My hopelessness turned into a resigned giddiness. After senselessly learning some Hindi and purposely becoming a source of amusement for the young men who were gathered around the neighboring chai stand, I eventually started up the bike and took off. I made it 5 k.
Indian Venice
Alappuzha is often referred to as the Venice of the East. The Rough Guide to India will addendum this by saying that its not really Venice, and anyone hoping to find Venice will be disappointed. I was pleasantly surprised with the canals of Alappuzha, but for the more urban part, I’d peg it as more of a tropical, less wealthy Amsterdam without all the drugs and sex.
From one of the main canals in Alappuzha we boarded an old ferry with an orange hull made from what looked like, hammered metal. We waited for some time and when we finally got under way I realized that aside from a few other foreigners, the array of passengers were mostly Indian. A few school children dressed in blue uniforms clustered in parts- one group of boys seated just in front of us.
The canal opened up to a large lake and as the old Indian Hannah Glover chugged across the water we got our first view of the famous house boats. Big bulbous floats with thatch walls woven beautifully. The best of the lot had ornate thatch roofs that resembled most closely the build and design of a tortoise’s shell. They powered along, all with an open front that doubled as a cockpit and main dinning area. The early morning gave us a quick glimpse of breakfast aboard the backwater yachts. Some - most had a flat screen TV, opposite the view and on the inside wall. I was amused with the people I saw enveloped in morning programs.
Our ferry started making frequent stops and I came to think that it was more like a waterbus than a ferry. Across the lake we entered a narrow canal and in the course of about a quarter mile, we passed perhaps 4 or 5 dozen houseboats. The pass felt more like a highway along with the wide river it led into. The stops became more frequent and the number of school children at each stop started to climb.
How fantastic, I thought, it would have been to get to school by a boat and how funny I thought that these kids must be just as inured with the experience as I am enthralled. The group of boys in front of us played a game that seemed to be a more complicated version of ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’. Before they got off the ferry for school I got the chance to take each of their portraits in turn.
Soon, the old Indian who was to be our guide motioned to us that the next cement piling roofed with corrugated plastic was to be our stop. After a few minutes we started walking along a very narrow canal perpendicular to the main water drag. Palms arched out over the water, bulging in towards it as their bases began to tilt, enacting a slow fall into the water. Every variety of green, shape and shade crowded the banks.
Kunjachan, our guide, led us to his house, a darkly cluttered home of three rooms. His smile all pervaded as he showed us in and pointed out his children in a photo. The youngest, a daughter of my age, is a nun living in Kenya. He seated us and with what English he had, we were laughing within moments. It was truly wonderful how he got the French group of four (who joined us for the backwater tour) laughing considering how little English they all shared.
Kunjachan’s wife soon brought out breakfast for the lot of us - a meal I had yet to come across in India: Plain white noodles over a bed of sugared coconut. I had seconds.
Soon after, Kunjachan loaded us into a long canoe and our tour of the Kerelan backwaters began. We had opted for a smaller boat to tour the backwaters, not just out of cost but also for the chance to see life along some of the smaller quieter canals were a houseboat would never be able to go. Aside from the melodic racket of birds in the expanding and flowering greenery, the only other sound that filled us was the relaxing flutter of water as Kunjachan lowered his oar into the water.
For the first quarter of the tour he kept asking us if was liked the canal we were on, as if this were his first time being a tour guide and nervous at his performance. When it was clear that we were all generally happy, he seemed reassured and we all enjoyed the sights as they slowly lulled past.
At several points we passed vast stretches of rice paddies and I noticed with curiosity that the water level of the canal was higher than the whole of the paddy, almost as if we were riding in an elevated aqueduct. Women and men bathed at the canal side, and washed clothes, swinging the wet whips high above their heads and smacking them down on smooth rock.
When the sun had stretched to its highest point and began to relax, Kunjachan turned us back towards his home. There, his wife had lunch already prepared. That morning we had watched as a man in a canoe had pulled up just outside of Kunjachan’s wife had purchased fish from the man after he had weighed an amount on an old scale placed next to the bucket of fish in his boat. They had now been fried and accompanied a regional version of Thali. A rice dish that comes with several small dishes filled with different curries and masala mixes. Our plates proved to be banana leaves.
Shortly after taking off from Goa on the motorcycle, I had decided to do away with the tourist caution that had guarded my food decisions. I had spent much of my time in Nepal and Rajasthan sick and figured any caution I had really didn’t do me any good. I now ate whatever was placed in front of me (including the tap water), regardless of the scared rumors that visitors of India carry from home, and I ate my food with my hand, just as all the other Indians who I watched in restaurants eat. There is a wonderful sensation in being able to touch one’s food as one eats it. The experience has made me wonder if it is part of the reason why hamburgers, hot dogs, and pizza are so popular in the United States - all foods that we eat with our hands.
For family reading this, let this be a warning that the next time I make dinner, utensils may not be allowed.
After our meal of rice and masala with fired fish, Kunjachan offered to go buy us coconut beer. Apparently certain palm trees produce a certain coconut that naturally ferments some of the sugars in its milk and creates a naturally alcoholic mix.
The alcoholic percentage is low, but I still managed to get pretty buzzed off the stuff, even though the taste was far counter to the spirited beverages I’m accustomed to. Coconut beer has a slightly fizzy texture as if it had almost been carbonated and the taste is a bit like the smell of warm, slightly stale milk, and altogether something that might taste like a partially rotten cashew. Needless to say, I was the only one who drank much of it and what remained of my share I offered to Kunjachan, who, after some customary protestations, accepted my proffered beer and downed the rest of it like a college kid. The old man, jovial and a true expression of hospitality, is a credit to the fact that wonderful people can be found anywhere and everywhere.
From one of the main canals in Alappuzha we boarded an old ferry with an orange hull made from what looked like, hammered metal. We waited for some time and when we finally got under way I realized that aside from a few other foreigners, the array of passengers were mostly Indian. A few school children dressed in blue uniforms clustered in parts- one group of boys seated just in front of us.
The canal opened up to a large lake and as the old Indian Hannah Glover chugged across the water we got our first view of the famous house boats. Big bulbous floats with thatch walls woven beautifully. The best of the lot had ornate thatch roofs that resembled most closely the build and design of a tortoise’s shell. They powered along, all with an open front that doubled as a cockpit and main dinning area. The early morning gave us a quick glimpse of breakfast aboard the backwater yachts. Some - most had a flat screen TV, opposite the view and on the inside wall. I was amused with the people I saw enveloped in morning programs.
Our ferry started making frequent stops and I came to think that it was more like a waterbus than a ferry. Across the lake we entered a narrow canal and in the course of about a quarter mile, we passed perhaps 4 or 5 dozen houseboats. The pass felt more like a highway along with the wide river it led into. The stops became more frequent and the number of school children at each stop started to climb.
How fantastic, I thought, it would have been to get to school by a boat and how funny I thought that these kids must be just as inured with the experience as I am enthralled. The group of boys in front of us played a game that seemed to be a more complicated version of ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’. Before they got off the ferry for school I got the chance to take each of their portraits in turn.
Soon, the old Indian who was to be our guide motioned to us that the next cement piling roofed with corrugated plastic was to be our stop. After a few minutes we started walking along a very narrow canal perpendicular to the main water drag. Palms arched out over the water, bulging in towards it as their bases began to tilt, enacting a slow fall into the water. Every variety of green, shape and shade crowded the banks.
Kunjachan, our guide, led us to his house, a darkly cluttered home of three rooms. His smile all pervaded as he showed us in and pointed out his children in a photo. The youngest, a daughter of my age, is a nun living in Kenya. He seated us and with what English he had, we were laughing within moments. It was truly wonderful how he got the French group of four (who joined us for the backwater tour) laughing considering how little English they all shared.
Kunjachan’s wife soon brought out breakfast for the lot of us - a meal I had yet to come across in India: Plain white noodles over a bed of sugared coconut. I had seconds.
Soon after, Kunjachan loaded us into a long canoe and our tour of the Kerelan backwaters began. We had opted for a smaller boat to tour the backwaters, not just out of cost but also for the chance to see life along some of the smaller quieter canals were a houseboat would never be able to go. Aside from the melodic racket of birds in the expanding and flowering greenery, the only other sound that filled us was the relaxing flutter of water as Kunjachan lowered his oar into the water.
For the first quarter of the tour he kept asking us if was liked the canal we were on, as if this were his first time being a tour guide and nervous at his performance. When it was clear that we were all generally happy, he seemed reassured and we all enjoyed the sights as they slowly lulled past.
At several points we passed vast stretches of rice paddies and I noticed with curiosity that the water level of the canal was higher than the whole of the paddy, almost as if we were riding in an elevated aqueduct. Women and men bathed at the canal side, and washed clothes, swinging the wet whips high above their heads and smacking them down on smooth rock.
When the sun had stretched to its highest point and began to relax, Kunjachan turned us back towards his home. There, his wife had lunch already prepared. That morning we had watched as a man in a canoe had pulled up just outside of Kunjachan’s wife had purchased fish from the man after he had weighed an amount on an old scale placed next to the bucket of fish in his boat. They had now been fried and accompanied a regional version of Thali. A rice dish that comes with several small dishes filled with different curries and masala mixes. Our plates proved to be banana leaves.
Shortly after taking off from Goa on the motorcycle, I had decided to do away with the tourist caution that had guarded my food decisions. I had spent much of my time in Nepal and Rajasthan sick and figured any caution I had really didn’t do me any good. I now ate whatever was placed in front of me (including the tap water), regardless of the scared rumors that visitors of India carry from home, and I ate my food with my hand, just as all the other Indians who I watched in restaurants eat. There is a wonderful sensation in being able to touch one’s food as one eats it. The experience has made me wonder if it is part of the reason why hamburgers, hot dogs, and pizza are so popular in the United States - all foods that we eat with our hands.
For family reading this, let this be a warning that the next time I make dinner, utensils may not be allowed.
After our meal of rice and masala with fired fish, Kunjachan offered to go buy us coconut beer. Apparently certain palm trees produce a certain coconut that naturally ferments some of the sugars in its milk and creates a naturally alcoholic mix.
The alcoholic percentage is low, but I still managed to get pretty buzzed off the stuff, even though the taste was far counter to the spirited beverages I’m accustomed to. Coconut beer has a slightly fizzy texture as if it had almost been carbonated and the taste is a bit like the smell of warm, slightly stale milk, and altogether something that might taste like a partially rotten cashew. Needless to say, I was the only one who drank much of it and what remained of my share I offered to Kunjachan, who, after some customary protestations, accepted my proffered beer and downed the rest of it like a college kid. The old man, jovial and a true expression of hospitality, is a credit to the fact that wonderful people can be found anywhere and everywhere.
Schizophrenic Machine, Part: II
When I started up the bike two days later to make the 60 k jaunt south to Alappuzha, it sputtered and stalled 30 seconds later. After each start, the bike stalled in smaller and smaller increments of time. I checked back into the hotel and then wheeled the bike five blocks to the Ernakulum Royal Enfield Showroom.
Once again the Enfield mechanics started her up and she purred beautifully. I told them to wait, sure that this time the bike would not disappoint and would soon sputter out to a stop. The mechanics continued to look at me as though they’d missed the joke. I waited. The mechanics waited. I looked intently at the idling bike, as if staring at it hard enough might embarrass it into showing its problem. I looked back at the mechanics. They raised their eyebrows. I looked back at the bike. The bike idled perfectly. I put my face into my hands. I had an oil change done anyways.
Once again the Enfield mechanics started her up and she purred beautifully. I told them to wait, sure that this time the bike would not disappoint and would soon sputter out to a stop. The mechanics continued to look at me as though they’d missed the joke. I waited. The mechanics waited. I looked intently at the idling bike, as if staring at it hard enough might embarrass it into showing its problem. I looked back at the mechanics. They raised their eyebrows. I looked back at the bike. The bike idled perfectly. I put my face into my hands. I had an oil change done anyways.
The Magic Number Is Just Short Of 250
On a map it looked as though I only had another 250 kilometers to go to rendezvous once again with the girls. The next day as I took the bike’s best shot at the 250 k, I stopped frequently, hoping not to rouse whatever problem was sleeping in the steel belly of the bike. My goal was Ernakulum, a city just next to Kochi.
Around 230 k, she stalled. I waited, knowing that the only thing that seemed to do any good with the bike’s problem was time. I waited an hour, maybe two. Then I started her up and got about another 10 k before she stalled again. I waited longer. Suddenly it didn’t look as though I’d make it to Ernakulum before sun fall. I tried the bike again. This time, after an hour or so of cooling off, the bike stalled after half a kilometer. I was quickly growing nervous and angry, but at the same time, I was so close, the girls were barely a twenty minute bike ride away.
I resorted to wheeling the bike forward as I waited to start it again. Between shot gunning the bike for half a kilometer and wheeling it another two, I eventually made it into Ernakulum. Drenched in sweat and caked in dirt, my frustration was mounting. Now if only I could find the hotel they’re staying at…
One thing about India is that a lot of streets don’t have names, an extraordinarily reliable system when lost in the country. Another helpful tidbit is that the streets that do have names, well, the buildings that line those streets don’t have numbers. For example, when listing the return address of a package that I sent from Mumbai, I wrote the address verbatim from the business card which listed its name and was then followed by “near Crawford Market”, no numbers or zip codes, just “near Crawford Market“. I suppose locations and addresses in India function much like the definitions of words: if you don’t know a good amount of words, you won’t be able to understand the definition when you read it, just as, if you don’t know where the hell Crawford Market is, there’s damn little chance you’ll find where I was staying.
After several helpful people pointed me in what turned out to be opposite directions, my anger and frustration mounted to a level of pure inactivity. I straddled the dead bike as cars whizzed past me, perpetually honking and beeping at…well everything. I wondered what percentage of beeps were actually directed at me. I realized how useless the thought was and how it wasn‘t getting me anywhere. In like fashion, that realization persuaded me to sit even longer in a more convincing strata of dismay.
Two young Indian men walked up to me and asked me if I needed help. I showed them the map of Ernakulum from my Rough Guide and pointed to the spot where the elusive hotel was supposed to be. After ten minutes of half-attempts to explain where I wanted to go, choked out by anger, the young man who seemed most concerned about me said something that seemed to wake me up.
“I’m sorry, I’m new to Ernakulum, I’m actually from Karnataka. Please, tell me how I can help you?”
The sincerity of his words and the earnest feeling behind his expression swept away my irritation and made me realize how emotionally knotted I’d become with my situation. Who are these people who just come up and want to help me? I thought. Are all these Indians from quaint mid-western towns in the United States? The Indian’s words were straight out of a similar experience I’d had in Washington state, or Montana, or North Dakota, or any of the other states that I had cycled through (excluding New England).
The young man helped me figure out that the hotel wasn’t terribly far away and after wheeling and shot gunning the bike a few more times, my bedraggled and long cloistered smile showed itself at the sight of my friend Sophie coming out of the hotel reception to meet me.
Around 230 k, she stalled. I waited, knowing that the only thing that seemed to do any good with the bike’s problem was time. I waited an hour, maybe two. Then I started her up and got about another 10 k before she stalled again. I waited longer. Suddenly it didn’t look as though I’d make it to Ernakulum before sun fall. I tried the bike again. This time, after an hour or so of cooling off, the bike stalled after half a kilometer. I was quickly growing nervous and angry, but at the same time, I was so close, the girls were barely a twenty minute bike ride away.
I resorted to wheeling the bike forward as I waited to start it again. Between shot gunning the bike for half a kilometer and wheeling it another two, I eventually made it into Ernakulum. Drenched in sweat and caked in dirt, my frustration was mounting. Now if only I could find the hotel they’re staying at…
One thing about India is that a lot of streets don’t have names, an extraordinarily reliable system when lost in the country. Another helpful tidbit is that the streets that do have names, well, the buildings that line those streets don’t have numbers. For example, when listing the return address of a package that I sent from Mumbai, I wrote the address verbatim from the business card which listed its name and was then followed by “near Crawford Market”, no numbers or zip codes, just “near Crawford Market“. I suppose locations and addresses in India function much like the definitions of words: if you don’t know a good amount of words, you won’t be able to understand the definition when you read it, just as, if you don’t know where the hell Crawford Market is, there’s damn little chance you’ll find where I was staying.
After several helpful people pointed me in what turned out to be opposite directions, my anger and frustration mounted to a level of pure inactivity. I straddled the dead bike as cars whizzed past me, perpetually honking and beeping at…well everything. I wondered what percentage of beeps were actually directed at me. I realized how useless the thought was and how it wasn‘t getting me anywhere. In like fashion, that realization persuaded me to sit even longer in a more convincing strata of dismay.
Two young Indian men walked up to me and asked me if I needed help. I showed them the map of Ernakulum from my Rough Guide and pointed to the spot where the elusive hotel was supposed to be. After ten minutes of half-attempts to explain where I wanted to go, choked out by anger, the young man who seemed most concerned about me said something that seemed to wake me up.
“I’m sorry, I’m new to Ernakulum, I’m actually from Karnataka. Please, tell me how I can help you?”
The sincerity of his words and the earnest feeling behind his expression swept away my irritation and made me realize how emotionally knotted I’d become with my situation. Who are these people who just come up and want to help me? I thought. Are all these Indians from quaint mid-western towns in the United States? The Indian’s words were straight out of a similar experience I’d had in Washington state, or Montana, or North Dakota, or any of the other states that I had cycled through (excluding New England).
The young man helped me figure out that the hotel wasn’t terribly far away and after wheeling and shot gunning the bike a few more times, my bedraggled and long cloistered smile showed itself at the sight of my friend Sophie coming out of the hotel reception to meet me.
Christmas in Mahe
Simply being around the Enfield mechanics seemed to have fixed the bike and for all my disbelief and confusion, the next day, the bike went 260 kilometers before I decided to call it quits and got a room in a coastal town called Mahe. It was Christmas of 2010 and so I called home and talked to family, careful to elude questions and design answers that circumvented the motorcycle.
Strangely, the only store that seemed to crowd the streets of Mahe were liquor stores. Standing in front of the Christian church near what looked to be the relative center of town, I could see 7 liquor stores.
It is strange, coming from an upbringing in the U.S. where one parent is Catholic and the other is Episcopalian, and to sit in a church on Christmas in India and watch women in saris kneel before a sculpted depiction of Jesus Christ.
Strangely, the only store that seemed to crowd the streets of Mahe were liquor stores. Standing in front of the Christian church near what looked to be the relative center of town, I could see 7 liquor stores.
It is strange, coming from an upbringing in the U.S. where one parent is Catholic and the other is Episcopalian, and to sit in a church on Christmas in India and watch women in saris kneel before a sculpted depiction of Jesus Christ.
Schizophrenic Machine
The next morning I got up early in hopes to catch the sunrise while riding in the cool morning air. Barely 5 kilometers down the road the bike sputtered and stalled. The engine wasn’t hot.
“This really isn’t good.” I said to myself, trying not to let myself think that maybe I had made a mistake.
I kicked life back into the bike and made it another kilometer before she stalled out again and I started asking for a mechanic. Luckily the bike had sputtered out in a more densely cluttered stretch of the 17. The mechanic I was led to worked out of a shack. He had very few tools. The man who led me to the mechanic tried to reassure me.
“Expert with Bullet, Expert.”
I had read that it was quite common and easy to find mechanics in every town of India, mechanics who had ten, twenty, even thirty years of experience with Enfields. Still, I had my doubts. The mechanic made a routine check. Oil, spark plug, fuel, etc. He got the bike running but I wasn’t convinced. He assured me the bike was ok. I didn’t believe him but took off anyways.
Two or three kilometers later the bike stalled again. I waited and then started the bike again and headed back. The bike stalled before I got back to the same mechanic. Luckily, however, I had stalled in front of another mechanic. I tried to explain what the problem was. He seemed to think it might be an electrical problem and started taking the bike apart to get at the electrical web underneath the gas tank, and just behind the steering fork. He bought out a little contraption I had seen before that tested for electrical currents. This was encouraging. He stuck the instrument in every electrical port he could find and then eventually switched what looked to be a small fuse box of some sort. He got the bike reassembled with the help of a couple assistants and then got the bike started. I prayed that he had actually done something.
Maybe ten kilometers. It was probably a little less, but it wasn’t long before I rolled off the road with the bike quiet and sat in my own dejected pool of bad luck. I didn’t get angry. I got sad, disheartened.
As always, I quickly had a small crowd of Indian men around me. I explained what I could and shortly one was on his phone and then reassured me that an Enfield expert was on his way. When the old man arrived the other Indians explained what they had gathered from me. He did the round of checks that was beginning to look routine to me. Spark plug, oil, fuel, etc. Then he got the bike started. I wasn’t impressed nor was I reassured. I tried to explain to him that if I took off the bike would just shut down after ten or fifteen minutes - an over heating problem, I speculated.
He revved the bike up to full throttle, louder than I’d ever heard it go, and after a moment or two I heard a loud metal clank and the engine died instantly. Great. He broke it, I thought. I doubt I’ll be able to get him to pay for it. The old mechanic tried the kick start, but the lever wouldn’t budge, internally jammed. Handling a spanner he quickly removed a small rectangular panel on the side of the engine that to my guess housed the pumps for the oil circulation system. Once removed, the panel revealed that one of the rods extending up through the oil columns had come loose from the valve below it. Askew, the rod had the entire engine jammed. With pliers and the levered application of a screw driver, the old mechanic managed to click the rod back into place. He placed his old feeble dark foot on the kick start once more, the open cavity of the engine still exposed and started the bike. Black blood gushed from the hole in her heart, and depressed and thoroughly disheartened I watched the bike’s heart pump itself to death. Raining oil dotting her chrome and the grey metal of her heart. The mechanic reassembled the panel and gave the engine a cursory cleaning. He said there was a major problem with the oil circulation and that I should go to the Enfield Showroom in Udipi, 90 kilometers away.
I walked away from the group and sat down at a broken old table, rotted from the rain and sun. God knows where in India I was, somewhere on the south western coast, with a broken motorcycle and no one I knew. How did I get into this situation, I asked myself. I thought of my cross-country cycling trip that I’d done two summers prior. I missed my bicycle. Even in her breakdowns, she was dependable, I realized. The bicycle was merely an extension of a person’s body and so aside from minor mechanical setbacks, a bicycle was as dependable as a person’s body. The motorcycle isn’t an extension of a person’s body, it attempts to be a replacement. This two wheeled beast that I was now riding had blood and guts that all functioned with a design thought of by a flawed god. The more we use our bodies, I thought, the better they work. Machines are the opposite of humans. The more you use them, the more they break down. Whether it be God or Mother Nature or Natural selection, or whatever it was that gave us our body’s design, they did a damned good job. I looked back at the motorcycle, my beloved symbol of freedom, now tethering me, heavy as she was like a ball and chain. My bicycle was 18 pounds, on par with a couple high school textbooks and far from a complaint. The Royal Enfield is the heaviest bike in India.
The group of Indian men looked at me, waiting for a decision, wanting to know what it was that I wanted to do. If there was a major problem with the bike, I decided it wouldn’t be safe to ride. I had one of them call a truck and with the help of the dozen men who had gathered, we lifted the bike into the flatbed. 90 kilometers later I was at the Royal Enfield Showroom in Udipi.
The mechanics at the Royal Enfield Showroom looked far more convincing and dependable than the half dozen mechanics who had already had a go at my bike that day, I was hopeful that these men would be able to fix the problem. With these mechanics, however, Sasha decided to pull out a bag of tricks that one might imagine she borrowed from a psychotic ex-girlfriend. The Enfield mechanics started her up and she purred beautifully, and idled perfectly… for an hour, and more. I sat in disbelief and truly a new level of dismay as the minutes rolled by and the mechanics started to look at me like I was crazy. They took the bike for a long test drive. Then I took the bike for a test drive, racking up more than 20 kilometers as fast as I could. The problem seemed to have disappeared. I was baffled. It’s a machine, how can a problem just disappear? The bike had run perfectly for almost two hours. The mechanics didn’t know what to tell me.
I got a room down the street and for dinner I had the best Masala Dosa I’ve ever had.
“This really isn’t good.” I said to myself, trying not to let myself think that maybe I had made a mistake.
I kicked life back into the bike and made it another kilometer before she stalled out again and I started asking for a mechanic. Luckily the bike had sputtered out in a more densely cluttered stretch of the 17. The mechanic I was led to worked out of a shack. He had very few tools. The man who led me to the mechanic tried to reassure me.
“Expert with Bullet, Expert.”
I had read that it was quite common and easy to find mechanics in every town of India, mechanics who had ten, twenty, even thirty years of experience with Enfields. Still, I had my doubts. The mechanic made a routine check. Oil, spark plug, fuel, etc. He got the bike running but I wasn’t convinced. He assured me the bike was ok. I didn’t believe him but took off anyways.
Two or three kilometers later the bike stalled again. I waited and then started the bike again and headed back. The bike stalled before I got back to the same mechanic. Luckily, however, I had stalled in front of another mechanic. I tried to explain what the problem was. He seemed to think it might be an electrical problem and started taking the bike apart to get at the electrical web underneath the gas tank, and just behind the steering fork. He bought out a little contraption I had seen before that tested for electrical currents. This was encouraging. He stuck the instrument in every electrical port he could find and then eventually switched what looked to be a small fuse box of some sort. He got the bike reassembled with the help of a couple assistants and then got the bike started. I prayed that he had actually done something.
Maybe ten kilometers. It was probably a little less, but it wasn’t long before I rolled off the road with the bike quiet and sat in my own dejected pool of bad luck. I didn’t get angry. I got sad, disheartened.
As always, I quickly had a small crowd of Indian men around me. I explained what I could and shortly one was on his phone and then reassured me that an Enfield expert was on his way. When the old man arrived the other Indians explained what they had gathered from me. He did the round of checks that was beginning to look routine to me. Spark plug, oil, fuel, etc. Then he got the bike started. I wasn’t impressed nor was I reassured. I tried to explain to him that if I took off the bike would just shut down after ten or fifteen minutes - an over heating problem, I speculated.
He revved the bike up to full throttle, louder than I’d ever heard it go, and after a moment or two I heard a loud metal clank and the engine died instantly. Great. He broke it, I thought. I doubt I’ll be able to get him to pay for it. The old mechanic tried the kick start, but the lever wouldn’t budge, internally jammed. Handling a spanner he quickly removed a small rectangular panel on the side of the engine that to my guess housed the pumps for the oil circulation system. Once removed, the panel revealed that one of the rods extending up through the oil columns had come loose from the valve below it. Askew, the rod had the entire engine jammed. With pliers and the levered application of a screw driver, the old mechanic managed to click the rod back into place. He placed his old feeble dark foot on the kick start once more, the open cavity of the engine still exposed and started the bike. Black blood gushed from the hole in her heart, and depressed and thoroughly disheartened I watched the bike’s heart pump itself to death. Raining oil dotting her chrome and the grey metal of her heart. The mechanic reassembled the panel and gave the engine a cursory cleaning. He said there was a major problem with the oil circulation and that I should go to the Enfield Showroom in Udipi, 90 kilometers away.
I walked away from the group and sat down at a broken old table, rotted from the rain and sun. God knows where in India I was, somewhere on the south western coast, with a broken motorcycle and no one I knew. How did I get into this situation, I asked myself. I thought of my cross-country cycling trip that I’d done two summers prior. I missed my bicycle. Even in her breakdowns, she was dependable, I realized. The bicycle was merely an extension of a person’s body and so aside from minor mechanical setbacks, a bicycle was as dependable as a person’s body. The motorcycle isn’t an extension of a person’s body, it attempts to be a replacement. This two wheeled beast that I was now riding had blood and guts that all functioned with a design thought of by a flawed god. The more we use our bodies, I thought, the better they work. Machines are the opposite of humans. The more you use them, the more they break down. Whether it be God or Mother Nature or Natural selection, or whatever it was that gave us our body’s design, they did a damned good job. I looked back at the motorcycle, my beloved symbol of freedom, now tethering me, heavy as she was like a ball and chain. My bicycle was 18 pounds, on par with a couple high school textbooks and far from a complaint. The Royal Enfield is the heaviest bike in India.
The group of Indian men looked at me, waiting for a decision, wanting to know what it was that I wanted to do. If there was a major problem with the bike, I decided it wouldn’t be safe to ride. I had one of them call a truck and with the help of the dozen men who had gathered, we lifted the bike into the flatbed. 90 kilometers later I was at the Royal Enfield Showroom in Udipi.
The mechanics at the Royal Enfield Showroom looked far more convincing and dependable than the half dozen mechanics who had already had a go at my bike that day, I was hopeful that these men would be able to fix the problem. With these mechanics, however, Sasha decided to pull out a bag of tricks that one might imagine she borrowed from a psychotic ex-girlfriend. The Enfield mechanics started her up and she purred beautifully, and idled perfectly… for an hour, and more. I sat in disbelief and truly a new level of dismay as the minutes rolled by and the mechanics started to look at me like I was crazy. They took the bike for a long test drive. Then I took the bike for a test drive, racking up more than 20 kilometers as fast as I could. The problem seemed to have disappeared. I was baffled. It’s a machine, how can a problem just disappear? The bike had run perfectly for almost two hours. The mechanics didn’t know what to tell me.
I got a room down the street and for dinner I had the best Masala Dosa I’ve ever had.
Troubles, Impromptu Temple
On that first glorious day of riding, I traveled about 150k, and when the sun started to dim in the late afternoon, my beautiful Royal Enfield let out a loud pop that sounded like a gunshot, shut down, grew quiet and rolled to a stop as I gingerly steered her off the road onto the dirt. I looked backward and forward along the road. It seemed to be an incredible expression of the concept of nowhere. I should have seen this coming too - idiot.
One thing about India that everyone knows is that there are a lot of people. So many, in fact, that even when stranded in the middle of nowhere, one will find themselves surrounded by 10 - 15 Indian men within a matter of minutes. Two in particular who had rolled up on a much younger Japanese made bike - a bike that looked as though it had been modeled after a wasp, or some other insect - were concerned about my breakdown and tried to help me figure out what the problem was. Te engine column was very hot. We checked the oil and it was very low. After enough time had passed and the engine had cooled sufficiently we got the bike started again and I made the short distance to the petrol station just over the hill. I filled the bike with oil and then took off, confident and happy that the problem had been so easily fixed. About one kilometer down the road she stalled again. I was starting to worry. The same two Indians on the same Japanese bike rolled up again.
“Complaint again?”
“Yep.”
One of them had a brother who apparently lived a little ways back and told me that I could get a good deal on room. I agreed and after waiting longer for the engine to cool, taking some chai at a small rest stop, we turned back north on NH-17 and then turned off west. We stopped shortly and I was introduced to the man’s brother - David. He took his brother’s bike and I followed him to what I assumed would be a small coastal town. After a moment or two of riding I looked up ahead in the distance and muttered to myself. Holy shit. Silhouetted by the big falling sun was a huge temple tat towered into the sky. I had seen one much like it in Hampi, but the lines of this temple were so crisp and it was far taller. As we approached, something else, behind the temple came into view. The dark shape of Shive sat ust behind the temple. When I grew nearer, I realized the seated statue of Shiva, pristine and painted, must be at least 150 feet tall if not 200.
I looked back in wonder and awe as David led me south down along the beach road. He negotiated a price with one of the local tourist home owners and after dropping my stuff and changing, I ran into the water and floated there in the cool Arabian sea as I gazed up at the gargantuan Shiva sitting with his back to the setting sun. After a quick cool off, I ran back to my room to shower and change as David said he would return to give me a tour of the temple.
I was confused as I looked at the temple on our approach. The temple had immaculate lines, edges that were sharp, completely unlike any of the temples I had seen thus far in India. David quickly told me why. The temple was brand new - less than 5 years old. A very wealthy man in construction who had started in this area as a relatively poor business man had commissioned it and work was still being done.
David and I took an elevator inside the temple to the very top where a spectacular view of the sun, blood pink, was beginning to set just behind Shiva’s head. Afterwards David took me on a tour of the religious complex below the Shiva statue.
The tour was through a narrow winding corridor, that had on one side huge niches that contained a sculpted scene from the creation myth of the place that I had stumbled across. Life-size painted statues filled these separate scenes depicting critical moments in the story. It told of a man named Rama who was asked by his mother to obtain the soul of Shiva. Rama set out on his quest, mastering meditation and attempting to prove to Shiva that he was worthy of his presence. The gods realized what Rama was up to and attempted to divert his efforts. They sent Cali in the form of a beautiful woman to distract Rama. He married her, but when he brought her home to his mother, Rama’s mother wept seeing that her son had not delivered the soul of Shiva. Rama doubled his efforts and took up his meditation once again. As an expression of his success and the power that Rama’s meditation brought him, he is depicted as having ten arms and ten heads. After Rama had spent much time attempting to gain Shiva’s presence he became dismayed and angry, he began to tear off his arms and his heads. When Shiva saw Rama doing this he came down and visited Rama. Rama then obtained the soul of Shiva, exactly how he did this, I’m not all that clear on. Shortly after gaining the soul of Shiva, however, Rama (for whatever reason) had to go for a swim. Rama asked a small man who was passing by if he would look after the soul of Shiva while he went for a swim. The small man was actually the god Ganesh in disguise. Ganesh told Rama that if he counted past three and Rama was not back he would leave with the soul of Shiva. Rama went for a swim and returned just as Ganesh was leaving. Seeing that he was planning to leave Rama, angry hit him on the head and magically the small man was revealed as the god Ganesh. Whether Rama was angry at this deception, or for some other reason, I do not know, but Rama with all his strength took the soul of Shiva and ripped it into 7 different pieces and scattered them along the coast. A town was founded around each of the pieces. The temple where David had taken me and where I learned of this myth was one of the resting places for a piece of Shiva’s soul.
One thing about India that everyone knows is that there are a lot of people. So many, in fact, that even when stranded in the middle of nowhere, one will find themselves surrounded by 10 - 15 Indian men within a matter of minutes. Two in particular who had rolled up on a much younger Japanese made bike - a bike that looked as though it had been modeled after a wasp, or some other insect - were concerned about my breakdown and tried to help me figure out what the problem was. Te engine column was very hot. We checked the oil and it was very low. After enough time had passed and the engine had cooled sufficiently we got the bike started again and I made the short distance to the petrol station just over the hill. I filled the bike with oil and then took off, confident and happy that the problem had been so easily fixed. About one kilometer down the road she stalled again. I was starting to worry. The same two Indians on the same Japanese bike rolled up again.
“Complaint again?”
“Yep.”
One of them had a brother who apparently lived a little ways back and told me that I could get a good deal on room. I agreed and after waiting longer for the engine to cool, taking some chai at a small rest stop, we turned back north on NH-17 and then turned off west. We stopped shortly and I was introduced to the man’s brother - David. He took his brother’s bike and I followed him to what I assumed would be a small coastal town. After a moment or two of riding I looked up ahead in the distance and muttered to myself. Holy shit. Silhouetted by the big falling sun was a huge temple tat towered into the sky. I had seen one much like it in Hampi, but the lines of this temple were so crisp and it was far taller. As we approached, something else, behind the temple came into view. The dark shape of Shive sat ust behind the temple. When I grew nearer, I realized the seated statue of Shiva, pristine and painted, must be at least 150 feet tall if not 200.
I looked back in wonder and awe as David led me south down along the beach road. He negotiated a price with one of the local tourist home owners and after dropping my stuff and changing, I ran into the water and floated there in the cool Arabian sea as I gazed up at the gargantuan Shiva sitting with his back to the setting sun. After a quick cool off, I ran back to my room to shower and change as David said he would return to give me a tour of the temple.
I was confused as I looked at the temple on our approach. The temple had immaculate lines, edges that were sharp, completely unlike any of the temples I had seen thus far in India. David quickly told me why. The temple was brand new - less than 5 years old. A very wealthy man in construction who had started in this area as a relatively poor business man had commissioned it and work was still being done.
David and I took an elevator inside the temple to the very top where a spectacular view of the sun, blood pink, was beginning to set just behind Shiva’s head. Afterwards David took me on a tour of the religious complex below the Shiva statue.
The tour was through a narrow winding corridor, that had on one side huge niches that contained a sculpted scene from the creation myth of the place that I had stumbled across. Life-size painted statues filled these separate scenes depicting critical moments in the story. It told of a man named Rama who was asked by his mother to obtain the soul of Shiva. Rama set out on his quest, mastering meditation and attempting to prove to Shiva that he was worthy of his presence. The gods realized what Rama was up to and attempted to divert his efforts. They sent Cali in the form of a beautiful woman to distract Rama. He married her, but when he brought her home to his mother, Rama’s mother wept seeing that her son had not delivered the soul of Shiva. Rama doubled his efforts and took up his meditation once again. As an expression of his success and the power that Rama’s meditation brought him, he is depicted as having ten arms and ten heads. After Rama had spent much time attempting to gain Shiva’s presence he became dismayed and angry, he began to tear off his arms and his heads. When Shiva saw Rama doing this he came down and visited Rama. Rama then obtained the soul of Shiva, exactly how he did this, I’m not all that clear on. Shortly after gaining the soul of Shiva, however, Rama (for whatever reason) had to go for a swim. Rama asked a small man who was passing by if he would look after the soul of Shiva while he went for a swim. The small man was actually the god Ganesh in disguise. Ganesh told Rama that if he counted past three and Rama was not back he would leave with the soul of Shiva. Rama went for a swim and returned just as Ganesh was leaving. Seeing that he was planning to leave Rama, angry hit him on the head and magically the small man was revealed as the god Ganesh. Whether Rama was angry at this deception, or for some other reason, I do not know, but Rama with all his strength took the soul of Shiva and ripped it into 7 different pieces and scattered them along the coast. A town was founded around each of the pieces. The temple where David had taken me and where I learned of this myth was one of the resting places for a piece of Shiva’s soul.
A Note On Indian Traffic
Indian traffic looks like suicide. And like anywhere in the world, sometimes it is. But as I briefly mentioned before, traffic in this part of the world just works differently, but it still works. In the United States, one could easily get away without having a working horn, many probably don’t even know that their horn has stopped working. In India, a horn is as important as a wheel.
Almost all vehicles seem to think that there is a beginning of the line that they can achieve, if only they pass all the cars in front of them. This is a perpetual occurrence that is not unlike salmon swimming upstream. For the most part, roads generally have two lanes, forcing passing cars into the next lane where an oncoming car might be.
At night it looks like your in a Starship in the middle of a space battle from Star Wars. The line “There’s….. too ….. Many of them, ahhhhhhh!” comes to mind.
There were many times during my ride when two pairs of cars (or even three stacked side by side) were heading straight for one another. The passing cars would each have to gun it for one another as those cars being passed rarely if ever slowed down to ease the overtake. Very often the space between the two vehicles over taking would be inches if not less when they eventually did soar past one another.
I am unsure if it is a credit to a control of fear or an acceptance of things that clearly lack sanity, but I can say that I grew to become perfectly comfortable being in the place of any of those vehicles.
Almost all vehicles seem to think that there is a beginning of the line that they can achieve, if only they pass all the cars in front of them. This is a perpetual occurrence that is not unlike salmon swimming upstream. For the most part, roads generally have two lanes, forcing passing cars into the next lane where an oncoming car might be.
At night it looks like your in a Starship in the middle of a space battle from Star Wars. The line “There’s….. too ….. Many of them, ahhhhhhh!” comes to mind.
There were many times during my ride when two pairs of cars (or even three stacked side by side) were heading straight for one another. The passing cars would each have to gun it for one another as those cars being passed rarely if ever slowed down to ease the overtake. Very often the space between the two vehicles over taking would be inches if not less when they eventually did soar past one another.
I am unsure if it is a credit to a control of fear or an acceptance of things that clearly lack sanity, but I can say that I grew to become perfectly comfortable being in the place of any of those vehicles.
And So Sasha She Was
I figured that since the first Israeli I had talked to had been able to get third party insurance without ownership papers, so if I could get that, I’d feel good enough about the whole thing. I stayed in Arambol that night in order to get a luggage carriage installed the next day. Once that was done, I went to Mapusa and found an insurance agency. Of course, the insurance agent at the end of the long seated line of insurance agents asked for the ownership papers and the previous insurance. I should have seen this coming - idiot. I walked out in a trapped daze, wondering how Dan, the first Israeli with insurance papers and no ownership papers had done it.
I fired up the Enfield and drove back down to Palolem in a nervous daze.
That evening, after talking to Sophie about the problem, I walked back to the bike, reeling over my stupidity and my next move. Perhaps it would be best to just put a ‘For Sale’ sign up on it now and get rid of it before it gets me into trouble. Like I’ve said, I’ve always been a kid who, for the most part did things by the book. Paranoia gets some strange and truly ridiculous ideas breeding in your head. I saddled the bike and just then an Aussie with golden blonde hair down to his shoulders, a guy in his mid forties rode up on an old army green Enfield Bullet. I struck up a conversation with him to get a more informed opinion. I told him my issue with the papers.
“So I’m thinking of just putting a for sale sign on her now, I don’t know, what do you think? Should I just go for it, instead?”
“Aw yea man, you gotta go. Its incredible out there. Getting up early, getting on the road by 5 and watching the sun come up over the land. Yea, don’t worry about the police. They’re just a paid mafia anyways. Even if you had your papers all in order, they’d still take money from you.”
“What about insurance?”
“Any accidents are settled right there on the road, all anyone ever wants is money. I’m not even sure if insurance claims ever get processed to be honest. And I’ve never heard of anyone getting pulled over for speeding. They see you coming, see that you’re a tourist and they pull out the stops because they know they can get money out of you. I’ve been riding this bike for 15,16 years so a few of the cops around here in Goa know me, so whenever they see this bike they stop traffic. I usually just flip them the bird and turn around and take off. Come back in an hour, they’re gone. And a lot of the time I also just blow right past them. They never chase you, they don’t have radios or any of that stuff, and honestly they can’t be bothered. I got someone to draw up papers for this bike a while ago, you know, just something to carry really, with stamps on it, something that makes is look official, but its total bullshit. Each state has different looking papers anyways”
“So you think it’d be worth it? Just to go like I’ve got it?”
“Oh yea, sure, don’t let this stuff hold you back.”
I wasn’t totally reassured but what he’d said made me feel better. I was a bit sick of being ‘the tourist’ and I knew there was an ‘India’ out there that perhaps I was missing out on. Part of this India seemed to be that there were discrepancies between the Book of Law and the Book of Custom. I knew that India had a reputation of bribes and corruption, and that regulation was in many cases simply an avenue to be avoided for personal gain. Was this risk my entry fee for seeing, experiencing - tasting an India that my contrived tourist experience had shielded me from? To hell with the books, I’ll write my own.
The girls took off the next day on a bus, and once I’d gotten new tires on my Enfield, I took off. Hoping that her good will would rub off, I had Sophie name the bike. And so Sasha she was. My back pack, sleeping bag and camera bag were all strapped on to the luggage rack and I made my way to NH-17 (National Highway) to trace my way down the coast and hopefully meet up again with Sophie in Kochi, two states down, about 1000 kilometers. Within half an hour I saw the border crossing that marked the division between Goa and Karnataka. The beige uniformed police officer was slumped back in a white plastic lawn chair and his eyes traced my route as I made it but his expression couldn’t have been more… apathetic. I just rode through.
NH-17 is a winding road that changes in quality depending on which district it is cutting through. And much like a mid-western highway in the United States, it cuts right through towns, turning into ‘Main Street’ for a kilometer or two before thinning out again. For all its bumps, torn up sections and lack of consistency, NH-17 south of Goa is a great road to tour. As the land rose out of the Arabian sea flatly or in great rolling hills punctuated and severed by inlets and rivers, my way along 17 took me to sights that will live with me forever.
I remember crossing one of the many bridges and looking out over the water. The land was lined and crowded with the infinite thick green of palm trees and a lone fisherman out in a boat that looked as though his grandfather might have used, hauled up a net, patched and sewn, for the gifts of the sea, led astray by the currents and the land wriggled and struggled for a freedom no longer theirs.
That was what my hunt for Royal beauty had been about. Yes, I had searched for and found my Enfield but the nature and the vision that it harked after was an idea, an expression of freedom. Open road, unbound by bus and train timetables. Direction and time, both of them mine. Myself, a slave to neither.
I fired up the Enfield and drove back down to Palolem in a nervous daze.
That evening, after talking to Sophie about the problem, I walked back to the bike, reeling over my stupidity and my next move. Perhaps it would be best to just put a ‘For Sale’ sign up on it now and get rid of it before it gets me into trouble. Like I’ve said, I’ve always been a kid who, for the most part did things by the book. Paranoia gets some strange and truly ridiculous ideas breeding in your head. I saddled the bike and just then an Aussie with golden blonde hair down to his shoulders, a guy in his mid forties rode up on an old army green Enfield Bullet. I struck up a conversation with him to get a more informed opinion. I told him my issue with the papers.
“So I’m thinking of just putting a for sale sign on her now, I don’t know, what do you think? Should I just go for it, instead?”
“Aw yea man, you gotta go. Its incredible out there. Getting up early, getting on the road by 5 and watching the sun come up over the land. Yea, don’t worry about the police. They’re just a paid mafia anyways. Even if you had your papers all in order, they’d still take money from you.”
“What about insurance?”
“Any accidents are settled right there on the road, all anyone ever wants is money. I’m not even sure if insurance claims ever get processed to be honest. And I’ve never heard of anyone getting pulled over for speeding. They see you coming, see that you’re a tourist and they pull out the stops because they know they can get money out of you. I’ve been riding this bike for 15,16 years so a few of the cops around here in Goa know me, so whenever they see this bike they stop traffic. I usually just flip them the bird and turn around and take off. Come back in an hour, they’re gone. And a lot of the time I also just blow right past them. They never chase you, they don’t have radios or any of that stuff, and honestly they can’t be bothered. I got someone to draw up papers for this bike a while ago, you know, just something to carry really, with stamps on it, something that makes is look official, but its total bullshit. Each state has different looking papers anyways”
“So you think it’d be worth it? Just to go like I’ve got it?”
“Oh yea, sure, don’t let this stuff hold you back.”
I wasn’t totally reassured but what he’d said made me feel better. I was a bit sick of being ‘the tourist’ and I knew there was an ‘India’ out there that perhaps I was missing out on. Part of this India seemed to be that there were discrepancies between the Book of Law and the Book of Custom. I knew that India had a reputation of bribes and corruption, and that regulation was in many cases simply an avenue to be avoided for personal gain. Was this risk my entry fee for seeing, experiencing - tasting an India that my contrived tourist experience had shielded me from? To hell with the books, I’ll write my own.
The girls took off the next day on a bus, and once I’d gotten new tires on my Enfield, I took off. Hoping that her good will would rub off, I had Sophie name the bike. And so Sasha she was. My back pack, sleeping bag and camera bag were all strapped on to the luggage rack and I made my way to NH-17 (National Highway) to trace my way down the coast and hopefully meet up again with Sophie in Kochi, two states down, about 1000 kilometers. Within half an hour I saw the border crossing that marked the division between Goa and Karnataka. The beige uniformed police officer was slumped back in a white plastic lawn chair and his eyes traced my route as I made it but his expression couldn’t have been more… apathetic. I just rode through.
NH-17 is a winding road that changes in quality depending on which district it is cutting through. And much like a mid-western highway in the United States, it cuts right through towns, turning into ‘Main Street’ for a kilometer or two before thinning out again. For all its bumps, torn up sections and lack of consistency, NH-17 south of Goa is a great road to tour. As the land rose out of the Arabian sea flatly or in great rolling hills punctuated and severed by inlets and rivers, my way along 17 took me to sights that will live with me forever.
I remember crossing one of the many bridges and looking out over the water. The land was lined and crowded with the infinite thick green of palm trees and a lone fisherman out in a boat that looked as though his grandfather might have used, hauled up a net, patched and sewn, for the gifts of the sea, led astray by the currents and the land wriggled and struggled for a freedom no longer theirs.
That was what my hunt for Royal beauty had been about. Yes, I had searched for and found my Enfield but the nature and the vision that it harked after was an idea, an expression of freedom. Open road, unbound by bus and train timetables. Direction and time, both of them mine. Myself, a slave to neither.
The Hunt for Royal Beauty in the Indian Tropics
A couple of days after we arrived in Goa, I decided to try something I had always wanted to do. I decided to rent a motorcycle. As corny as it might be, ever since I had seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I had wondered what it would be like to tool around on a motorcycle in India. I had gone so far as to get an International Driving Permit from AAA. Of course, to obtain an International Driver’s Permit for a motorcycle, one must hold a normal license for a motorcycle. I figured it was worth a shot and forged documents on my application for the Permit in such a way that I could always claim it was a typographical error that I had requested the permit to include ‘motorcycle’. I was pleasantly surprised that it worked, even though I was quite sure, based on everything that I had read and heard that it would mean almost nothing to carry it. Without ever having been on a motorcycle, I inquired about the price of renting one and feigned a lackadaisical confidence that would make it appear I knew what I was doing. I’m positive many tourists who have never driven a motorcycle rent one and figure out how to do it here in India, but considering it was my very first time and I didn’t even have the most elementary understanding of the controls, I figured faking a little confidence wouldn’t hurt. It was a Bajaj Avenger I rented. A bike with generally up to date technology that incorporates self-starting. The battery, according to the guy who helped me out, was weak enough that I had to use the kick start. While he got the bike started for me I looked the bike over, figuring that what wasn’t a brake was either a clutch or a gear shifter. I remembered my father, upon my asking, had told me that riding a motorcycle was very easy, “its like a bicycle, with a motor.” Sounds easy enough. And it was. My years driving my beloved 318ti BMW with a standard shift had readied me perfectly for handling the clutch and acceleration of the Avenger. After two or three awkward shots forward, I got a feel for it and sped off down the winding narrow streets of Arambol.
I was thinking about that day as I headed back towards Arambol, this time on a small scooter. Two weeks had passed and we had visited Hampi far to the East of Goa and returned once again to the beaches of Goa. I realized as I headed north on the pathetic little Japanese made scooter that my short time on the Avenger had done something terrible. It had instilled in me a sense of the road and adventure. For the first time I felt as though I understood, if only briefly and superficially, the culture and love of motorcycles. All those overly testosteronic looking men who revved their Harleys had always made me laugh as I wondered if they were compensating for… something. But my afternoon ride along the coast on the Bajaj Avenger had wooed me into a new view. As the sunlight glittered in bands along the sinuous road north, back towards Arambol, I craved to get back to that place and that state of mind. I wanted metal and fire and the road. There was something about having that loud controlled violence and the speed at one’s calm, collected fingertips. It wasn’t power. On that ride north in the hopes of finding an iron fire horse for myself, I tried to figure out just what it was. But also, what that two wheeled Avenger had dug into me had grown, and I felt desperate for an even greater expression of the need and the feeling that I tried to define. My eyes had been glazed over with the fermented desire of the last dozen days. There was an even greater design of the romantic mystique that I craved, an even sweeter shade of the indefinable masculinity that my mind jockeyed around.
The Royal Enfield was originally a British made bike. But much like the pieces of colonizing culture, India had eventually claimed the bike for its own and it had become a symbol of all the things that my stubborn young, impetuously adventurous temperament lusted after. For the past two days I had rented the pathetic little Japanese scooter and had scoured the coast for an Enfield to call my own with no luck. I knew, however, that Arambol, the beach paradise we had stayed in two weeks prior was a breeding ground for Enfields and on that day in mid-December I was headed back to find if there was an Indian stallion who might take me further and farther into India.
Before we had left Arambol for Hampi I had looked at a bike, tempted to take it. It had been a 16 year old Enfield Bullet, a little old considering and something told me at the last moment to back out. The registration had matched the engraved numbers on the bike but it was past its 15 year renewal date without having been renewed. Always a son of my father, I rarely if ever strayed from anything that wasn’t by the book, whether it be the book of law, or the book of custom. My last minute and cursory research on the subject had armed me with the knowledge that an expired registration could cause some problems. The Israeli who was looking to sell the bike also didn’t have the ownership papers, another strike against the sale. He did however have third party insurance registered in his name with the bike, which seemed odd. Regardless, I backed out of the situation.
The two weeks since had made me lean slightly more towards desperate and like a starving stranded seaman eyeing his favorite dog, I questioned my readiness to cut ties with caution. The day previous had been spent scouring the southern Goan coast and had yielded nothing, contributing to the desperation I was starting to feel for the Royal beauty that I so longed for. After making my way through the familiar roads of Goa on the scooter which I perpetually cursed for its lack of weight and presence, its sheer practicality and its complete inability to harken after the grand vision of reality I wanted, (It was a Honda scooter, the kind of plastic mopedesque contraption that a girl studying abroad in Italy might ride to and from the local bakery) finally, I arrived in Arambol. It is strange to return to a place you do not call home and feel a sliver of relief, much like the kind that would come with plunging into the familiar sights and sounds of childhood.
I felt as though the Enfield was an elusive and beautiful creature, that, for some reason was skirting my desire to win it and experience a different side of India. The breeding ground of Arambol was devoid of ‘For Sale’ signs, and partially dejected, I retreated to a favorite Israeli falafel joint where I literally bumped into a mutual friend of Anya, who had connected the two of use via Facebook. William and I chatted, all the while my nervous greedy starved eyes bounced around the coming and goings of Arambol, hopeful to spot a white printed page reading ‘For Sale’. After a casually introductory and like-minded conversation I went off to search the notice boards, finding a plethora of signs that claimed to tell of Enfields for sale. Wondering how old the signs might be, I took down the numbers and details, unhopeful.
I remember being a boy and feeling nervous and excited to the point of excruciation at the prospect of obtaining some longed for toy. When the third phone number seemed to yield the seemingly perfect prospect, I felt it again - debilitated by my own functioning. The damn scooter couldn’t go fast enough and I tried to remain conscious of the fact that I wasn’t wearing a helmet. (none of the places that I rented two-wheeled vehicles from offered helmets, even upon asking, all I got was a funny look and a laugh). Anjuna is quite close to Arambol, but not close enough. When finally I was there I found a phone and dialed the number again. “I’m near the market, on the cliff by the beach.” The seller told me he’d be there in ten minutes.
It can be difficult to spot an Enfield from the front. There are a few other Japanese made bikes that also sport a circular front light, and an unpracticed cursory glance will wonder which it might be. When the sound catches up to the light of the bike, however, there is never a mistake. The Enfield pumps and her purring is a slow calculated roar. The yawning of the beast, breath expelled instead, and she alerts the world, like the shadow of a cloud, that greatness is at hand.
Avihay (India, besides the Indians, is filled with Israelis and Russians) rolled up on a 2003 Royal Enfield Thunderbird. 5 speed 350cc. Her colors were black and chrome and I dare say that when I saw her, I thought “Oh shit” because I knew that there was no turning back, I’d have to go through with it, no matter what and find out what my vague adventurous yearning might have in store. As Avihay showed me the bike, several locals walked up to the bike, interested, and Avihay also got a call inquiring about the bike.
“I’ll take it.”
I asked about the papers for the bike. Just like the prior bike that I had looked at, Avihay only had the registration which matched the bike and engine numbers.
“I was only going to do this as long as I could get the papers in order.”
“You don’t need the papers, all you need is the registration.”
“Were you pulled over by the police at all?”
“Many times.”
“And?”
“Baksheesh man, all they want is baksheesh. They would pull us over and search our stuff for hashish and when they didn’t find any, they’d ask for our papers and that’s when our wallets would come out. The first time, I gave him 500 Rupees and when I told my friend I’d given him that much, he laughed, 2 or 300 would have been enough. As long as you have the registration, it shows you didn’t steal the bike.”
Since I couldn’t drive both the scooter and the Enfield south so we agreed to meet the next day. This would give me a little space to think over this paper problem. I opened up that little scooter’s throttle as far as it would go and hurtled south back towards Palolem where the girls were. That evening, while walking along the beach, I gave Sophie the option to ask me not to go off on the bike. I still wasn’t sure if I should tell family back home about the bike.
“You should do it. You’d regret not doing it since its something you’ve wanted to do for so long.”
The next day, after three bus transfers, I was back in Anjuna and sealed the deal.
I was thinking about that day as I headed back towards Arambol, this time on a small scooter. Two weeks had passed and we had visited Hampi far to the East of Goa and returned once again to the beaches of Goa. I realized as I headed north on the pathetic little Japanese made scooter that my short time on the Avenger had done something terrible. It had instilled in me a sense of the road and adventure. For the first time I felt as though I understood, if only briefly and superficially, the culture and love of motorcycles. All those overly testosteronic looking men who revved their Harleys had always made me laugh as I wondered if they were compensating for… something. But my afternoon ride along the coast on the Bajaj Avenger had wooed me into a new view. As the sunlight glittered in bands along the sinuous road north, back towards Arambol, I craved to get back to that place and that state of mind. I wanted metal and fire and the road. There was something about having that loud controlled violence and the speed at one’s calm, collected fingertips. It wasn’t power. On that ride north in the hopes of finding an iron fire horse for myself, I tried to figure out just what it was. But also, what that two wheeled Avenger had dug into me had grown, and I felt desperate for an even greater expression of the need and the feeling that I tried to define. My eyes had been glazed over with the fermented desire of the last dozen days. There was an even greater design of the romantic mystique that I craved, an even sweeter shade of the indefinable masculinity that my mind jockeyed around.
The Royal Enfield was originally a British made bike. But much like the pieces of colonizing culture, India had eventually claimed the bike for its own and it had become a symbol of all the things that my stubborn young, impetuously adventurous temperament lusted after. For the past two days I had rented the pathetic little Japanese scooter and had scoured the coast for an Enfield to call my own with no luck. I knew, however, that Arambol, the beach paradise we had stayed in two weeks prior was a breeding ground for Enfields and on that day in mid-December I was headed back to find if there was an Indian stallion who might take me further and farther into India.
Before we had left Arambol for Hampi I had looked at a bike, tempted to take it. It had been a 16 year old Enfield Bullet, a little old considering and something told me at the last moment to back out. The registration had matched the engraved numbers on the bike but it was past its 15 year renewal date without having been renewed. Always a son of my father, I rarely if ever strayed from anything that wasn’t by the book, whether it be the book of law, or the book of custom. My last minute and cursory research on the subject had armed me with the knowledge that an expired registration could cause some problems. The Israeli who was looking to sell the bike also didn’t have the ownership papers, another strike against the sale. He did however have third party insurance registered in his name with the bike, which seemed odd. Regardless, I backed out of the situation.
The two weeks since had made me lean slightly more towards desperate and like a starving stranded seaman eyeing his favorite dog, I questioned my readiness to cut ties with caution. The day previous had been spent scouring the southern Goan coast and had yielded nothing, contributing to the desperation I was starting to feel for the Royal beauty that I so longed for. After making my way through the familiar roads of Goa on the scooter which I perpetually cursed for its lack of weight and presence, its sheer practicality and its complete inability to harken after the grand vision of reality I wanted, (It was a Honda scooter, the kind of plastic mopedesque contraption that a girl studying abroad in Italy might ride to and from the local bakery) finally, I arrived in Arambol. It is strange to return to a place you do not call home and feel a sliver of relief, much like the kind that would come with plunging into the familiar sights and sounds of childhood.
I felt as though the Enfield was an elusive and beautiful creature, that, for some reason was skirting my desire to win it and experience a different side of India. The breeding ground of Arambol was devoid of ‘For Sale’ signs, and partially dejected, I retreated to a favorite Israeli falafel joint where I literally bumped into a mutual friend of Anya, who had connected the two of use via Facebook. William and I chatted, all the while my nervous greedy starved eyes bounced around the coming and goings of Arambol, hopeful to spot a white printed page reading ‘For Sale’. After a casually introductory and like-minded conversation I went off to search the notice boards, finding a plethora of signs that claimed to tell of Enfields for sale. Wondering how old the signs might be, I took down the numbers and details, unhopeful.
I remember being a boy and feeling nervous and excited to the point of excruciation at the prospect of obtaining some longed for toy. When the third phone number seemed to yield the seemingly perfect prospect, I felt it again - debilitated by my own functioning. The damn scooter couldn’t go fast enough and I tried to remain conscious of the fact that I wasn’t wearing a helmet. (none of the places that I rented two-wheeled vehicles from offered helmets, even upon asking, all I got was a funny look and a laugh). Anjuna is quite close to Arambol, but not close enough. When finally I was there I found a phone and dialed the number again. “I’m near the market, on the cliff by the beach.” The seller told me he’d be there in ten minutes.
It can be difficult to spot an Enfield from the front. There are a few other Japanese made bikes that also sport a circular front light, and an unpracticed cursory glance will wonder which it might be. When the sound catches up to the light of the bike, however, there is never a mistake. The Enfield pumps and her purring is a slow calculated roar. The yawning of the beast, breath expelled instead, and she alerts the world, like the shadow of a cloud, that greatness is at hand.
Avihay (India, besides the Indians, is filled with Israelis and Russians) rolled up on a 2003 Royal Enfield Thunderbird. 5 speed 350cc. Her colors were black and chrome and I dare say that when I saw her, I thought “Oh shit” because I knew that there was no turning back, I’d have to go through with it, no matter what and find out what my vague adventurous yearning might have in store. As Avihay showed me the bike, several locals walked up to the bike, interested, and Avihay also got a call inquiring about the bike.
“I’ll take it.”
I asked about the papers for the bike. Just like the prior bike that I had looked at, Avihay only had the registration which matched the bike and engine numbers.
“I was only going to do this as long as I could get the papers in order.”
“You don’t need the papers, all you need is the registration.”
“Were you pulled over by the police at all?”
“Many times.”
“And?”
“Baksheesh man, all they want is baksheesh. They would pull us over and search our stuff for hashish and when they didn’t find any, they’d ask for our papers and that’s when our wallets would come out. The first time, I gave him 500 Rupees and when I told my friend I’d given him that much, he laughed, 2 or 300 would have been enough. As long as you have the registration, it shows you didn’t steal the bike.”
Since I couldn’t drive both the scooter and the Enfield south so we agreed to meet the next day. This would give me a little space to think over this paper problem. I opened up that little scooter’s throttle as far as it would go and hurtled south back towards Palolem where the girls were. That evening, while walking along the beach, I gave Sophie the option to ask me not to go off on the bike. I still wasn’t sure if I should tell family back home about the bike.
“You should do it. You’d regret not doing it since its something you’ve wanted to do for so long.”
The next day, after three bus transfers, I was back in Anjuna and sealed the deal.
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