“Perception is never purely in the present — it has to draw on experience of the past.” — Oliver Sacks
February 2006. IIT Bombay.
My friends and I had built a small race car around a 3 cc internal combustion engine, essentially a supercharged RC car with a tiny ICE bolted on. We had put months of time and money into it. We were from a tier 3 engineering college in Bhilai, and we had made it to a tech fest at IIT Bombay, one of the best engineering institutions in the country. A few of my school alumni had studied there, so I’d grown up hearing about it. Being there with a project mattered. Our college had expectations. The night before the event we were sitting outside the hostel block trying to make the engine run reliably. It would sputter to life, hold for two seconds, and die. Sputter, hold, die. We had no idea what was breaking the cycle.
I was twenty years old and completely wired on motorsport. Michael Schumacher’s V8 screaming to the redline before a shift, Valentino Rossi’s MotoGP machine at something north of 300 km/h, that sound of an engine being pushed past the point where most people would back off had become the thing I measured everything else against. It gave me goosebumps every time.
Sitting there on the ground with the little engine, I heard something from a distance. Faint at first, then unmistakably sharper. An inline-four at speed, the same scream I’d heard Valentino’s MotoGP machine make on television, except now it was real and close and somewhere in the streets around me. It swept past a lane or two away. I never saw the motorcycle. Growing up in Bhilai, bikes like that didn’t exist on our roads. This was the first time it wasn’t coming through a screen, and it was gone before I could process it.
Something settled in me at that moment. Not a plan, not even a conscious thought. Just that sound, lodged somewhere I didn’t know existed, waiting.
We got the car running well enough for the event the next day. We didn’t win. Fixed the actual problem a couple of months later, back home, when we finally had the time to think clearly.
June 2022. Lavasa.
A friend and I were riding to Lavasa on a rainy weekend. Lavasa is a ghost town near Pune, a privately planned hill city that stalled after environmental clearances were revoked and the finances fell apart. Empty buildings, unfinished condos, streets with nobody on them. There’s something fascinating about a city that was supposed to house hundreds of thousands of people and ended up housing almost none. I’ve seen similar places in China through videos, but Lavasa is right on our doorstep. The roads getting there are good for riding, and the city itself is good for photography.
We had stopped at a village shop on the way for water and wafers. I was talking to my friend when I heard it, a low growl building around the corner, getting sharper with each bend down the winding road. I’d heard sportsbikes before. Plenty of times. But something about that particular sound, on that particular afternoon, pulled up a memory from sixteen years ago without asking permission. A cool February night outside a hostel at IIT Bombay. Grease on my hands, a small engine that wouldn’t run, and somewhere in the dark, a motorcycle screaming past that I never even saw.
The roar snapped me out of it. A Triumph Street Triple RS came around the bend and into view.
I don’t know if it was the triple-cylinder note specifically, or the rain, or just the right moment finding the right person. Maybe it was a sign from the universe. Maybe it was just some chemical misalignment in the brain. Either way, something that had been lodged in me since that February night in 2006, behind all the race weekends spent rooting for Rossi and Schumacher on a small television and my father reaching for the remote to switch over to cricket, suddenly had a name and a shape and a price tag.
I was standing next to my Interceptor when it passed. I gave the rider a nod. He gave me a thumbs up. I turned to my friend and said, without particularly thinking about it, “I’m going to buy that bike.”
July 2024.
Two years after Lavasa, I brought home my own Street Triple 765 R.
The college student sitting outside a hostel at IIT Bombay, covered in grease, listening to a motorcycle he couldn’t see, and the guy standing next to his Interceptor on a rainy afternoon watching a Triple disappear around the corner — the same person, sixteen years apart, tied together by a sound. The sound of freedom, of the world flying by at breakneck speed, of a dream finally answered.
Twenty years since IIT Bombay. Sometimes when I’m out riding, I think about that February night and the sound that swept past before I could even see it. Somewhere out there, on some road, there’s probably an eighteen-year-old hearing a sportsbike go past for the first time. I hope that sound lodges somewhere in them the way it did in me all those years ago.
See also: Snowpiercer — The Photographs
