(Warning: a very self-indulgent post)
Right in the dead of the night, a music piece begins to haunt my mind space, and slowly but steadily pierces straight down to my heart - cliché.
I get up and for the next few hours there's no sleep. another cliché.
I twist, turn and try to shut my eyes. But the strings of that music piece don't shut. Life is cliché.
The music 'moves' you, stirs the insides of you... nudges the drudged soul and makes it travel... travel back to those 'wonder' times! "De Usuahia a la Quiaca" - Gustavo Santalola. What an amazing piece of music that is! One through which myriad images are born. Several memories and still more stories. The stories happened a few years back but the hour of the night was same...the same as the time this night - right now as I write this.
The times, when we traveled like refugees across the border, like no one would spot us - but with the gay abandon of the aimless wanderers, the hippies without their hash... It was life that had happened, it was life that we were high on...
And in the book of life, these night rides would fall under the chapter "discovering ourselves"
If we sum the distance traveled every night, we could well reach somewhere near where the heart truly resides inside.
We took to roads at deep into the nights, rode along till early mornings on those empty streets of that wonderful city.
We drove ourselves into a different city, which presented itself to only those who seek... not for 'a cause', but through exploration...exploration for the sake of exploration!
"How could I have known that this city was tailor made for love?" as goes the monologue in the film Hiroshima Mon Amour.
We traveled on our motorcycle, when people with homes in the city were in deep slumber-safely guarded by their dreams, when the politics of the roads changed - when ferocious dogs ruled those vacant lanes, when the barricade police too had dozed off sitting on their wooden benches, when the tired lampposts were waiting for the dawn to break and the bonfires lit by watchmen were living their final sparks.
And this is not romanticizing. This is romance!
Our most reliable companion - our 'Mighty One' - our motorcycle was neither very brand new, nor an old haggard, neither too flamboyant nor dull... but much at peace with itself – and yes probably our only witness of those wondrous nights.
It still is the only witness. And if she (the motorcycle) had the power to write, she could have well written the closest outsider account ever.
She had shown us the city in its pristine form - and the city at its glorious best - its huge flyovers spreading across like veins and arteries that ran into the heart of city, its under-passes, like the mouth of a hungry dragon, its intimidating empty roads and the striking life that blossoms on them. Once, I remember... she wasn't perhaps in the best of moods - or beings - or just in the need of some plain attention! She made us walk the wide stretch at 4 30am on a December morning – We took it carefully, holding onto her...right in the middle of a cold night in search of a petrol pump!
But she was always there when we most needed her.
To open skies, cool breeze, heated discussions, empty roads, frank opinions, thunderous rains, beautiful places, dark clouds, heavy traffic and the heart.
I am missing her even as I type this.
I can get her with me again.
I think I will bring it to this Big City, but then - I don't want her to choke herself in the black smoke of this Big City, I don’t want it to get herself lost in the many many traffic snarls here.
I don't want to be its "beginning of the end".
Is it about her - the motorcycle - or is it about the journey that nurtured the most important relationship – the journey that traveled the crucial distance… that from the heart to the soul and back!
conclusion: the love story is on, but the motorcycle is being missed.
© Copyrights 2009 www.bhaandgroup.blogspot.com. All Rights Reserved. Hardik Mehta
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