Miscellanea/Shashi Warrier

Beauty in the Beast

Sometimes, the strangest things make me sentimental.

One is a monster of a motorcycle. It belongs to a youngster who lives a mile away and is the spitting image of a bike I used to have a decade ago, a Norton Dominator, one of a long and distinguished line of single-cylinder four-strokes that the British used to make in large quantities until the Japanese took over the motorcycle industry.

I used to call it the Beast: it was as crabby and ill-behaved a bike as ever was, and temperamental as hell. In its old age - it was then nearly as old as I was, getting on to 30 - its electrical system began to fail, its once-powerful headlamp flickered, it rarely, if ever, started without a curse or two, it guzzled fuel, you needed good arms and shoulders to manhandle it on gravel or across country, and pushing it along in the sun with a flat was a fate worse than death.

But each time I see its spitting image, I get a lump in the throat and wonder how it's getting along. I'm sure it's still going, my Beast: bikes of that vintage last a lifetime because they're solidly built and don't have a body that'll rust and fall to pieces. Unless someone thumps a bike like that really hard and bends the cradle, it'll keep going forever.

That was the best part of the Beast. It might have been hard to start but, once it got going and was properly warmed up, it wouldn't stop for anything. I remember its least beastly characteristics best: it used to be the ideal machine on which to go thumping around the countryside, with the engine thudding slowly under the tank like an athlete's heart, taking potholes and steep slopes with aplomb, going cross-country with nary a hiccup or a groan, responding easily to the slightest touch on the throttle or the brakes.

We've been on some memorable journeys together, the Beast and I. Long journeys, stretching out over days and weeks and covering hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles (with the Beast, it's hard to talk of kilometres; there's a romance to miles that no kilometreage will ever equal). We did one of our best journeys almost exactly 10 years ago, from Bangalore to Cochin, on a pleasant winter day.

It's 350 miles, give or take, and just the right distance to cover in one day on a bike if there isn't too much traffic and if you don't intend to ride far the next day. We set out early that morning from Bangalore, well before dawn, running into a bracing wind on ghostly silent streets on which milkmen were just beginning their chores, streetlamps casting their feeble blue-white glow on trees that seemed to be strange and misshapen ogres from some childhood nightmare.

Out of the city, we had the road to ourselves. We stopped at a gas station at the outskirts for the Beast's breakfast - a dozen litres of petrol and oil to go with it - where a sleepy-eyed lad served us, nodding off as he held the nozzle to the Beast's tank. From there, we flew. In all the distance from there to the border between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, a distance of 15 miles or more, we saw just three other vehicles, all trucks coming in perhaps from Madras.

Past the border, past the checkposts and the ponds along the road after them, we ground up the slope past parked lorries, sleeping behemoths just coming awake, to Hosur and breakfast and coffee for me. Dawn came with the coffee and the rising sun brought with it a soupcon of warmth that took the edge off the chilly wind that morning. Warmer inside and out, we took off into a world slowly turning from monochrome to colour, mostly red, and were faced with a choice: we could keep going along the highway, on to Krishnagiri and then Dharmapuri and so on, or we could turn westwards onto a parallel secondary road that rejoined the highway 60 miles further on, near Dharmapuri.

We took the secondary, thudding on alone - except for the occasional bullock cart - through fields and open country, with the sun strengthening every moment, through small towns and shanties and small clusters of mud houses where playing children stopped their games to look at the Beast and to wave us on. There was a feeling of space then, and space was what the Beast thrived on.

Past Raykottai and a level crossing near Palakkode, we returned to the highway just before a ghat section where the road twists and turns and dips and rises over a five-kilometre stretch and where the hulks of crashed lorries - there are always a couple of wrecked vehicles there, sometimes with bloodstains amidst the wreckage on the driver's side - remind passersby of traffic laws and mortality. Late morning: I'd been taking off bits and pieces of the extra clothing I'd put on against the chill.

Just a mile past the twisty bits was another fork: the highway, straight on to Salem and, from there, another highway - NH 47 - towards Cochin; or right, towards Mettur, a secondary that joined NH 47 at Bhavani. Again we took the secondary, after a brief halt - rest for the Beast and coffee for me. Mettur lay 40 kilometres away, and the worst part of the day - the hot part - was just beginning. Towards noon, the heat softened the blacktop; I took off my helmet and strapped it to the holder by the passenger seat but the Beast didn't bother. I opened the throttle wide and the engine raced and, before we knew it, there was the odour of the awful chemical factory at Mettur in my nostrils.

The sun was up now and the glare and the heat were giving me a headache.

At a teashop just past Mettur, I parked the Beast under a banyan tree and snoozed on a bench under a thatch roof that smelt of woodsmoke and sawdust. When I woke an hour later, the glare and the heat were still there but I was fresh. I knew that the heat would wear off soon. The Beast, I remember, spluttered into life without protest and, from there on, it was all smooth. I don't remember much by way of specifics, just the pounding engine and the smooth road, leaning into curves and gliding along the straights in a sort of ballet on wheels.

And most of all, the SPACE. It's not there any more, the highway is crowded. But that's the best memory of that day, of the Beast and the wind in my face and that feeling of space and the taste of freedom. No wonder I saw beauty in the Beast.

Illustration: Dominic Xavier