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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.