Event Horizon

Day 1
Mumbai-Pune-Ahmadnagar-Aurangabad, 380 km

11.00 am: Tripmeter 0
The destination: India’s geographical centre—Nagpur’s Zero Mile, 900 km from Mumbai. The timeframe: Three days. The Mighty One: A 250cc, twin cylinder Kinetic-Hyosung Comet.

12.36 pm: Tripmeter 60
Your nose tells you when you’ve escaped the urbanscape and exchanged the stifling hood of grimy sweat for a crunchy salad bowl of blue sky. Bright mid-day heat sandblasts you like a disinfection chamber door lock, and the physiological response is to twitch your throttle wrist. The NH4 cracks a smile as the Comet whooshes easily past 120 kmph, stable as a gunboat in a lagoon. Hi ho, Silver.

2.42 pm: Tripmeter 167
Entering Pune, a Luna rider swings across the road, giving a damn about my coming-through-and-fast honks. Everywhere else but on the chaotic roads, Sunday afternoon drowsiness lurks in Maharashtra’s No 2 urb: A small restaurant near the University lays down water glasses and then tells us there’s no food available; the German Bakery staff in Koregaon Park would rather serve large European women ordering with loud gestures. A little Parsi restaurant finally conjures up a burger, seemingly made with leftover chicken dhansak.

5.25 pm: Tripmeter 226
The Hyosung’s thrumming engine warms my calves as the State Highway whips under us like a conveyor belt. Trucks groan up the ghats as I overtake and brake, looking out suddenly to see a vast spread of valley the colour of dried blood. As the road straightens, syrupy evening light starts to melt over the arid landscape. Time for dhaba tea, a magical substance renowned for its ability to dissolve backaches. Tip a mug of water over your head, stretch out on the cots, watch the odd Sumo or Hero Honda go by… life slows down when you make it.

7.02 pm: Tripmeter 298
When the longhaulers’ high beams flash by, the crescendo of airhorns and diesel engines doppler past, and you crawl back onto the tarmac, spitting invective, the moon casts consolatory pearlshine on a world in shutdown mode. The night road is an unforgiving kung fu teacher, with only occasional nods of acknowledgement for a task well learnt.

A stop, as much for cold water and tea as to rest tired eyes, at the only lit-up place in a small highway village called Godegaon. At halts through the day, knots of people have gravitated towards the Comet to ask its ‘average’, price and speed, in that order. This time, we leave to an appreciative crowd of about 40 men, some waving us a safe journey.

9.10 pm: Tripmeter 380
Biker maxim: The first hotel is always the best. The city of Aurangabad opens half a trenchcoat and says, ‘Psst, want some chiselled caves and a mini-Taj Mahal?’ Thanks but no thanks, a bed and two pillows is all we want to see.

Day 2
Aurangabad-Jalna-Buldhana-Akola-Amravati, 380 km

1.12 pm: Tripmeter 451
We play spot-the-green-farm as we blow down the two-laner; when that proves painstakingly slow, we try spot-the-farmer. The score stays love-all. How does this land, vacillating between dusty brown earth and cement half-constructions, feed its people, let alone the relentlessly hungry nodes of all those sweltering miles behind us? Nearly leafless trees seem to shrug their branches.

A packed Tempo taxi hurls around a bend, nearly clipping my leaned-over, apexing bike; I notice the driver ignores the turbaned villager, waiting for transport by the roadside, trying to flag him down.

4.24 pm: Tripmeter 558
Someone got the theory mixed up and laid out more speedbreakers than dhabas along the road through Chikli and Buldhana. And now and then, I suspect my photographer is taking revenge for my bumping him over a few dozen breakers and

rumbler strips at a good 40 kmph more than the road engineers’ best intentions—he sets up a pan shot and makes me do 10 runs before saying, actually, let’s try it from another spot.

We stop at a tiny place, about eight or nine small buildings, and eat some marble-sized bajjis, which is all that’s on offer. So many dusty, decrepit little towns. I don’t see their names, and even if I did I wouldn’t remember them.

What is life like for these people, my countrymen? Do they grow up, make love and die in these handfuls of rough buildings and crusty teashops? Do they savour the snail’s pace, or pack a bundle of clothes one fine day and end up on a Mumbai pavement?

7.00 pm: Tripmeter 682
Upped the pace on joining National Highway 6—at least until the sun sank off into the periphery. Now it’s survival instinct and disc brakes versus one-eyed trucks, blindly overtaking cars, A-bomb yellow fog lamps… A pox on everyone but the one solitary Haryana-registered truckie who lowered his headlight beams for me.

8.20 pm: Tripmeter 720
Dhaba food makes you want to grab a steering wheel and rumble across to Kolkata. Hot, fresh rotis, rice, spicy dal and tomato sev curry had pretty much the same effect on us as that lightning bolt did Frankenstein. Even gave me the patience to try and explain the concept of a bike that costs Rs 1.8 lakh and gives 30 km to the litre to a man who simply could not grasp the concept of style or performance. Straddled the chunky red machine to his incredulous conversation about this ridiculous new idea.

9.30 pm: Tripmeter 760
Respect given to the clock, a well-surfaced bypass skipped, the lit-up entry road takes us through Badnera and into Amravati. Stop for a moment to watch a boys’ night cricket match or bed down for the night? No contest really.

Day 3
Amravati-Nagpur,150 km

12.45 pm: Tripmeter 762
A creaky cycle-rickshaw ride to the Ambadevi temple. I was expecting an old, intricate monument, but instead confront a concrete shrine heaped with the garishness of modern ‘taste’. Cheap paint in a dozen bright colours festoon a building surrounded by poky shops selling framed pictures of 50 different gods, religious booklets and mounds of kumkum—a Lonely Planet photographer’s dream.

Inside, noticeably poor devotees eagerly offer plates of tied bangles, raw rice and coconut. Round the corner, little naked kids play and laugh as wet, black pigs run past towards an open gutter.

I can neither mock nor empathise with being genuinely faithful, or genuinely carefree; I choose to drown my vacuousness in a glass of brackish orange juice from a roadside vendor.

3.31 pm: Tripmeter 816
The landscape grows surreal in patches—a triumvirate of black road, blue sky and wheaty-cream elephant grass or dense ranks of thin brown trees. Sometimes the road snakes about, at others dips and falls like man-made dunes. By now there is a synergy between man, machine and path: Urban irritants are as far as possible avoided, peace returns only when there is uninterrupted motion. And passing vehicles, with their belching exhaust and intrusive grunting, are a reminder of the chaos we come from.

6.00 pm: Tripmeter 886
A meaty 20-odd km burst of 100-130 kmph cruising, a long halt at Karanja where a mob gangs up on a chap over the minor issue of some fish, another hundred questions about the bike—on we go. As the milestones bring Nagpur closer, weary anticipation battles with reluctant closure. At the last tea-halt we make—a comatose one-bar shop cluster where the most thrilling thing going on is a game of carrom—a bunch of seven or eight little kids run up excitedly: “Dekho, Dhoom gaadi!” I have to gently refuse their demands that I exit with a wheelie.

7.05 pm: Tripmeter 912
Into the Orange City. Dunno why but I thought Nagpur would be quite nondescript, maybe even unkempt. On the contrary, it’s surprisingly neat, with decent roads and lots of trees. We ask our way to the Zero Mile, which turns out to be a stone pillar about 15 feet high, with a hexagonal base marked with distances: Hyderabad 318 miles, Jubbulpore 170… Hey, where’s Bombay? I stand at the base of the pillar, and take a look around.

A petrol pump, a busy junction, a small restaurant called Zero Mile, a call booth, a fish market office with a bust of one Jatiram Barve, a spiky monument to 114 people killed in a 1994 stampede. So, this is the epicentre of my land. Why, then, do I feel I left it behind somewhere along the way?