Ever since I clung on to my dad’s belly on that rusty old Jawa, making her way through the village roads like, for the lack of better knowledge about animals, a wild cat in the fields chasing rabit, I have been fascinated by motorcycles. And dogs. Dogs since my trusted, old, pure desi, devoid-of-any-fancy-breed, Dog would follow the smoke spewed by the two pipes of that noisy Jawa, t o our fields. Fascinated enough to shed a tear or two when the dog died in the front-yard of our home and silently pray that my father would not let the Jawa go to a unknown guy from a place, unidentifiable on the map. But he did and so my trips with him to the fields stopped. No Jawa , no Dog, you see.
So the Jawa went away but my love for it’s ilk didn’t. In fact it only grew with the length of my pants! And one fine day when my brother was toiling hard pedaling our way to our farm, on a good old Atlas, the only two wheeled transporter left in the house, with my bum firmly on the steel carrier at the back, I heard a loud noise of a motorcycle approaching us. Approach fast, it did. But went away even faster, or so it appeared. I could barely see the color of the bike. But could hear it long after it left a web of smoke behind. Yamaha RX, my ever knowledgeable brother quipped, gasping!
That was my first spotting, spotting by the ears that is, of an Yamaha RX in my life. And boy, did it make an impression!! The impression just grew bigger as I went onto wear full length pants from half and moved to big, bigger and even bigger cities — ‘in search of dreams’ or ‘following the herd’, depending on the side of the coin your looking at. And as the radius of the inhabitant land around me increased so did the number of RX spotting. She was on the road and on the Internet. She made noise on the road and people made noise about her on the Internet. And all this noise started sounding like sweet music to my ears as if Salma Hayek was talking in her sweet spanish accent!
And soon enough the music grew so loud that I wanted to have my own music system. I found it soon enough, alright. But not before I shifted my base from Kolkata to the city of RX, Bengaluru. And when I finally found her, the joy was limitless. I felt an itch in my hand to twitch her accelerator to let out that roar of joy. And twitch her, I did!
But, on an annoying Monday morning when she refused to come alive, from the slumber of the weekend gone by, I almost found cursing for getting her. She seemed like one of those chicks out there who look HOT but are costly lot to maintain a company with. But during yesterday’s rainy evening, on sparsely congested tarmac, when she, under my command, was cutting through the Innovas, Indicas and the Pulsars of the world just like a hotshot model would catwalk the ramp, it was quite evident that in spite of her lazy startups and drinking addictions, she’s lot more fun than many things on two wheels.
And of course we all know though the Megan Foxes of the world have taken over, the boys still haven’t lost their infatuation for the Salma Hayeks of the world!