I couldn’t get a flight home for Diwali. Every option was either sold out or absurd. I sat with it for a while, then opened Google Maps, looked at the route from Pune to Bhilai, and thought: why not.
Bhilai is my hometown. 1,050 kilometres from Pune, give or take. I’d done that ride before on my Interceptor. I’d bought it in Bhilai and ridden it back to Pune, stopping overnight in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar because it got dark and I still had 250 kilometres to go. So I knew the distance was doable in a day. What I didn’t know was how much easier the Triumph would make it.
I packed a bag, threw it on the bike, and left at 5 AM. The first hour was dark, so I rode conservatively. Then first light came, visibility opened up, I gave the throttle a little more, and the kilometre stones started flying past. By 2 PM I was having lunch at a dhaba a little before Nagpur, where I’d planned to stop for the night. With 700 kilometres already done, it made no sense to stop. So I didn’t, and at 6:15 PM I was opening my parents’ gate in Bhilai.
Parked outside, walked straight to the kitchen. My mother was making sweets for the pooja the next morning. I stood behind her and asked, “Kya ban raha hai, acha lag raha hai?” She spun around and saw me standing there with a backpack and a helmet, and for a moment she didn’t say anything at all. That’s what this motorcycle is to me.
You can read about the 765cc triple in any review, how that three-cylinder engine sounds when it’s revving hard and how fast it goes when you open the throttle all the way. All of that is true. What matters to me is that when I decided on an impulse to ride 1,050 kilometres to surprise my parents on Diwali, the only thing I had to think about was whether I wanted to do it. The bike was never the question.
A few weeks ago I pulled into a tea stall after a run through Tamhini, and a young rider who’d been going back and forth through the ghat was already there. He wanted to know everything about the bike, why this one and what else I’d looked at. The real reason goes back to a sound I heard at IIT Bombay in 2006, but I gave him the practical answer. Coming off the Interceptor, which weighs over 200 kilos dry, all I really wanted was something light enough to manoeuvre at a standstill. I’d tried the Street Triple, the Kawasaki Z900 and the Ninja 1000. The Z900 felt as heavy and bulky as the Interceptor, the Ninja was slightly out of my budget, and the Triple checked every box.
I bought it in July 2024, in Crystal White, and named it Snowpiercer after Bong Joon Ho’s film about a train carrying the last survivors of the human race around a frozen planet, never stopping. It seemed right. This bike doesn’t want to stop.
It isn’t perfect. It drinks fuel once you open the throttle, and I’ve never bothered working out the mileage. Haathi liya hai, toh khilana toh padega. If you buy an elephant, you have to feed it, so I accept whatever double-digit figure it gives me. It also runs hot. In bumper-to-bumper Pune traffic the coolant bar sits close to the maximum, and on the highway it settles back to the middle. I don’t know if that’s my engine or every 765. The rest of the running costs are in The Cost of Ownership, and they aren’t small either.
Two years and 25,000 kilometres later, I still grin every time I take it out, and it still feels like a dream. A few years ago, if you’d told me I’d own a sportsbike, I’d have told you to stop pulling my leg.
See also: Snowpiercer — The Photographs
