350 CC's of Pleasure and Pain

The 350cc Royal Enfield with out of state plates sitting outside my apartment building has been with me for almost six years. I arrived in Pondicherry on my third trip to India on a mission to make my name as a writer. I had a tentative contract with a magazine back home promising me big money if I could piece together an adventure story about taking a motorcycle from the southern tip of the country where the Arabian sea meets the bay of Bengal all the way up to Delhi. It was 2001 and before the national highway system--the golden quadrilateral that connects the metropolises on the four corners of the country--had been finished. What passed for highways at that time were beaten concrete tracks spotted with rubble-strewn potholes and homicidal lorry drivers.

At the time my sister was working on a sustainable development project in Auroville. For the previous two months she had been constructing composting toilets with a project sponsored by the University of Washington and was part of a group of about 20 graduate students, who, when they weren't hip deep in a muddy trench, crowded the illegal pubs and nightclubs that had sprung up on the East Coast Road. It was their first time in the country, but they paraded around like old hats. They besieged the small community on rented scooters, motorcycles and mopeds--kicking up record amounts of dust on the still-unpaved roads.

My first order of business after I arrived was to get a bike of my own. The word on the street was that the only one up to the task was a Royal Enfield Bullet. The guy my sister was dating at the time, a scrawny, longhaired Aurovillian named Mahesh, knew of a mechanic in the city who could broker a deal for me. The three of us--my sister, Mahesh and myself--showed up at Felix concrete shop and looked at two bikes. One was slathered in chipped green paint and looked like it had been on the road for the last 12 years without a wash. Felix said it had a good engine. The other was chrome colored beauty that wheezed a little when I opened up the throttle. Felix said I should take the first bike because it was in better condition, but I ended up siding with the shinier one because I was told that the papers would be easier to transfer into my name.

I wonder how my life would have been different if I had taken the other bike.

For the next six years I drove the bike over the width and breadth of the country. I sailed though the riots in Gujarat, over high-mountain passes in the Himalayas, urban ghettos and the fertile coasts of Kerala. At my best I could manage 800 kilometers in a day by getting up before dawn and never letting go of the handlebars until I almost passed out at midnight. At my worse--which was more often than I would have liked--I would spent hours or days at a time watching roadside mechanics dissect my engine and shake their heads gravely.

On long trips I never managed to go more than two days without some major mechanical failure. By the time I got around to swapping out the old engine for a brand new one I had already replaced just about every moving part on the machine twice over. I've left broken clutch plates, wheel bearings, breaks, pistons, oil pumps, transmissions, carburetors and spark plugs and left them on the side of just about every major highway in South Asia.

Which brings me to two weeks ago. I have been contemplating putting down the old Enfield for a few months now, and spending money that I don't have on a brand new bike or car. The bike was wheezing more than usual and every now and then huge clouds of poisonous smoke wafted out of the engine.

I took it to the dealership in town and asked them for a diagnosis. After several days of looking it over they decided that the whole engine would have to be replaced. It wasn't too expensive--about $150--but I was a little bit wary, who is to say that the new engine would be any better than the old one?

Well it turns out it wasn't. Last week I took a trip with my wife from Chennai to Ooti and Pondicherry. On the way there the brand new clutch plates melted together and had to be replaced in an outpost on the side of the road, and on the way back the bike started breathing a metallic death rattle from somewhere deep inside its guts. Padma and I were covered with grit for most of the trip and now we are thinking of dropping the bike off at a dump.

Alas, I have an appointment tomorrow morning with the Southern Motors in Gopalapuram. They'll tell me the problem can be fixed for a thousand rupees and I'll figure it's cheaper than buying a new bike and dole out more cash so the bike can breathe for a few more days.