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Tiruvannamalai Beckons: Old Dreams
Chapter 3/17
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This is the 3rd chapter of a 17-chapter serialised travel story.
Previous Chapters:
And if you only need to refresh your memory, then here are the last few paragraphs from the previous post.
Just as the new song began, a bike sped ahead from the fast lane on the right. Then two more bikes followed suit from the slow lane on the left. The bikes from the left curved in and switched two lanes until they were tailing the first bike in the fast lane.
Three black bikes. Bikers wearing black leather jackets and helmets with a dark visor. Two of them were riding solo while one had a pillion.
After a minute, two more bikes passed us, then one more, and then five more. In the next ten minutes, about thirty bikes had sped ahead.
It was quite a scene as they sped by on their monster machines, leaving my ten-year-old Maruti Swift hatchback coughing on the road.
What’s going on? I wondered. Was this one of those secret races a friend had once told me about? I had heard about underground race clubs and their often dangerous bike races. Was I witnessing one of those clandestine events?
Old Dreams
I think the cop read my puzzled look.
“They’re going to Goa,” he said, pointing at the bikes. “I see these people regularly at the tollbooth. Mostly as the weekend approaches…,” the cop took a sip of water from his bottle and continued. “These bikers are from Mumbai. They go to Goa around the weekend and return on Monday. Riding long distance is a hobby for them.”
“These look like pretty expensive bikes,” I remarked as two more bikes whizzed past us.
“Yeah, they cost about 5 to10 lacs. Sometimes even more,” the cop informed me casually, as if every second person in the country owned expensive bikes.
Long-distance travel was my dream too. Just like there are cat-people and dog-people, or coffee-people and tea-people, I think one can categorize road travel…
