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.
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