I wasn’t supposed to be riding on Friday. It was a holiday that existed because HR told me it had to. A week earlier I’d had an email saying I had too much leave pending and needed to bring the number down, so I panicked, opened the calendar and randomly scattered leaves from September through the end of the year. Friday was one of those days. I turned the alarm off the night before, slept till ten, made coffee and opened the laptop, because apparently I can’t take a holiday properly. I was working when a message came in from my Australian teammate. Mate, were you not on leave today? I said I was, but I didn’t have any plans. He wrote back that a man with a motorcycle shouldn’t depend on a plan, and should just start it and ride anywhere. He has a Yamaha V-Star Classic 1100 that he restored himself and takes out at weekends, so he was speaking from a position of some authority. That was enough to get me out of the chair.
Snowpiercer was at the service centre for its major service, which left the Interceptor. I put on a T-shirt, jeans and my Birkenstock Martons, picked up the Wayfarers and left. No helmet, no gloves, no riding boots. If I was going to ride Mashooqa like it was 2021 then I might as well do the whole thing, which was neither safe nor sane, and the only consequence was a couple of flies hitting my bald head at speed. I pulled the cover off and she started on the first press, the way she always does. I don’t ride her often now but I do maintain her properly. First stop was the petrol pump for fuel and tyre pressure, and standing there I realised I had no navigation, because the BluArmor is on the helmet I’d left at home. That narrowed things to roads I already knew, so I pointed her at Saswad.
There was roadwork most of the way and I spent it in second and third, which meant thirty minutes to reach Dive Ghat. Then the ghat ended and the road opened out. I moved up through the gears and we settled at 100 to 110, and somewhere in that stretch it came back to me that this used to be every weekend. The long straights, the noise the twin makes when you rev it hard, the wind pushing my beard from one side of my face to the other. I’d forgotten how much of the pleasure was in that rather than in arriving anywhere.
Dark clouds were building towards Jejuri so I turned off towards Panvadi Ghat, which has become my second road after Tamhini, fresh tarmac and almost nobody on it. The difference between the two motorcycles was obvious within a few kilometres. On Snowpiercer I’m in attack mode the whole time, looking for the next corner. On Mashooqa I was looking around. Riding without a helmet made that worse or better depending on your view, and I’m aware this is an insane argument in favour of not wearing one. I should probably buy a half-face at least. The clouds followed me and it started to drizzle, which I wasn’t dressed for. A T-shirt soaks through in seconds and my leather shoes weren’t going to enjoy it either, so I opened the throttle and hoped to cross the ghat before it got serious. Then two ducks walked into the road. They took their time crossing and joined two goats who were working through a pile of cucumbers on the other side. I stopped and shot a video of all of them on the iPhone, which is the other thing that gets easier without gloves.
The ghat itself is short but steep, with a few good hairpins. Coming out of one of them I saw a man walking up, and he turned around when he heard the twin. He looked finished. I’d decided to stop before he gave me the sign. I haven’t given anyone a lift since I got the Triumph, not out of anything except a sense that nobody wants to sit behind a stranger on a crotch rocket. The Interceptor doesn’t have that problem. He got on and said something in Marathi I mostly didn’t catch, though I understood that he was a technician and they were installing a generator somewhere nearby. The rain was heavier by then. I knew there was a dhaba on the far side of the ghat and decided to sit it out there, and as it came into view I pointed and told him main yaha ja raha hoon. He said mera generator ka kaam bhi yahi chal raha hai.
I’d noticed Panvadi Heritage on an earlier ride and never stopped, because there was always somewhere to get to. This time there wasn’t. The place was empty, which it would be on a Friday afternoon. The first thing that reached me walking in was the tadka coming out of the kitchen, burnt spices and hot oil, and I trust my nose on that more than I trust most reviews. The seating is an open garden with mountains around it, three or four tables, goats and chickens and ducks moving through, and pigs somewhere out of sight making themselves heard. I sat down, saw the drinking glasses on the table and asked whether they had beer. They didn’t. They had Royal Stag. I hadn’t touched Royal Stag since college ended in 2008, and since I was already several years into the past on everything else that afternoon, I ordered a quarter. It arrived immediately. I poured a peg into a disposable glass, filled it to the brim with water, took one sip and regretted the whole idea. I’d already sent a photo of myself alone at that table with the quarter in front of me to my girlfriend and to the friends group, and both came back with the same question in different words, which was why I was drinking Royal Stag, and why in the afternoon. Nothing else was available.
The server came back to ask how I wanted the gravy and I said theekha, and he asked again to be sure. While I was waiting a hen walked in through the gate with the air of a manager arriving to inspect the arrangements, so I started filming her. I hadn’t noticed that music was still running on the phone. When I played the video back at home the hen was walking towards the camera in perfect time with 505, which is the funniest thing I have ever filmed by accident. The thali arrived not long after, pandhra rassa and tambda rassa, mutton sukka, bhakri and raw onion. The first thing I do with mutton is try to pull it off the bone, and if it comes away easily I’m ninety percent sure about the rest, because getting the masala right is the easy part and cooking the meat properly is not. It came away easily. The food was hot in both senses and very good, and the Royal Stag stayed on the table more than half full. The bill was about eight hundred rupees, which against what I pay for lunch in the city is nothing.
From there I carried on towards Kaldari, another road I can ride without maps. Something changed on that stretch. I started stopping, three or four times, for the motorcycle or the landscape or both, and I hadn’t done that on a ride in about two years. What I’d been doing instead was picking a destination, riding hard to reach it and riding hard back. This was the other thing, fast where I felt like it and slow where I didn’t, stopping for anything that deserved it. There’s a noise the Interceptor makes once the exhaust is properly hot, a crack and a pop somewhere in the middle of the rev range when you roll off, and it makes me smile every time. I’ve thought about changing the exhaust more than once and been talked out of it by the stock note, and by every obnoxiously loud Enfield I pass on the road, ridden by someone who seems convinced the noise is doing something for the performance.
There’s a spot in the ghat with a cliff on one side and tall trees on the other. I stopped and photographed the bike there, and the frames came out well enough that I decided I should be in one. That meant balancing the iPhone on the guardrail above the cliff, setting the timer, walking back to the bike and arranging myself into something meant to look unplanned. It took a few goes. I usually know when I’ve taken a photograph worth keeping, and both of those were.
A few kilometres on I stopped again for the paddy fields. Then, on the plateau just before Kaldari, I passed a mass of roots at the side of the road, tangled into a rough brown and green ball, and something about it looked familiar. It looked like what the inside of my head feels like most of the time. I rode a few hundred metres, turned around and went back for it.
At Parinche there’s a choice. Left goes back through Saswad and home, right is the long way. I took the right. Veer Dam is twenty minutes from there and the best part is the run after Veer village, sugarcane on the left and the dam wall on the right, which I went through at eighty and ninety. The backwaters were higher than they’d been the month before when I rode out on the Triumph. I skipped the vada pav and chai at the food truck, which is unlike me, but the thali had settled that question. The road past it has finally been resurfaced, and on the new tarmac I passed a red building that looked as though it had been lifted out of an English village and dropped there. Big garden, two stone pillars at the gate, a red cottage in the middle, and a rolling shutter where the front door should have been. I’ve been thinking about shooting a short series of red buildings, so I turned around for it.
That backwater road eventually runs into the Pune-Bangalore highway and there isn’t much to look at on the way. What there is, when Mashooqa is moving, is attention. She has road presence and people give her a second look, and I don’t blame them. In 2021 and 2022, before the twins were everywhere, I’d stop in a village or at a viewpoint and somebody would come over to ask about the bike. That doesn’t happen on the Triumph. It’s the more expensive and meaner machine, but I think the Interceptor looks desirable and obtainable at the same time, and a sportsbike puts a line between the person looking and the person riding. Once I was actually on the highway I started regretting the decision to leave the helmet behind, because riding without one on an empty village road is a different proposition from doing it beside trucks. I settled at eighty to a hundred and got on with it. After the toll I took the long way through Pashan instead of the Katraj exit, went into the tunnel on dry road and came out to find two-wheelers stopped at the mouth of it waiting out a shower. I waited with them for a few minutes. Last stop was Café Peter near Chandani Chowk for a hazelnut frappe and a cinnamon bun, because they were out of French toast, which I’d developed a craving for somewhere around Veer.
I got home at half past five, having left at twelve. About 160 kilometres, five and a half hours, and the longest ride Mashooqa has had in more than two years. She didn’t miss a beat, but she still has all the same problems, the brakes that ask you to plan ahead and the tyres that look like a gym bro who only trains his upper body. What I took from the day wasn’t really about the motorcycle. It was that I’d spent an afternoon with nowhere to be, and that I should ride the Triumph that way too, stopping more and hunting destinations less. I wrote a piece about her a few months ago that ended with me not knowing whether to keep her or let her go. I know now.
