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.
''How many would take a sledge hammer to their cubical if only for one evening of my troubles? '' nice, well said. How many would give it all up for a night in my trouble, like, for a night in my pants, or for a night in my bed. Very romantic, very sensual, describes the setting sun and cigarette sweat by the side of the road with a dusty raw clarity.
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