The Promise
A father, a son, a 1991 Royal Enfield, and the trip to the village that kept getting pushed to next month.
The first time Harsha said next month, it was March, and the mango trees along the outer ring road were just beginning to flower.
“Next month, Nanna. Definitely. There’s a release on the twenty-eighth. After that I’ll take three days.”
His father, who was sixty-four then and still rode the Bullet every morning to the vegetable market in Kukatpally and back, purely for the pleasure of the sound, nodded and said, “Next month is fine. The village isn’t going anywhere.”
In April there was a production issue. In May it was too hot; everyone agreed you could not ride to Nalgonda in May, the tar would melt under the tyres. In June his cousin got married. In July the monsoon came, and his father said, reasonably, that a Bullet on a wet highway was a good way to meet God earlier than scheduled. In August there was a reorganisation at work and Harsha’s new manager was a man who sent messages at eleven at night with no punctuation. In September, in October, in November, there was always something, and every time, his father said the same thing.
“Next month is fine.”
And then it was the next year.
The Bullet was older than Harsha by two years. It was a 1991 Royal Enfield, black, with thin gold pinstripes on the tank that his father touched up with a tiny brush every Deepavali, and a chrome headlamp, and a seat that had been reupholstered three times by the same man in Erragadda who had since died and been replaced by his son, who did it slightly worse. It lived under a plastic cover in the narrow parking space beside their building, and every morning at six, his father pulled the cover off, folded it into a square, and kicked it alive.
The kick was a ritual. You did not simply stamp on a Bullet. You found the compression first, easing the kick lever down with your foot until you felt it go stiff, then the decompressor lever, then one more gentle push, then, and only then, the long swinging kick. His father had taught him when he was fourteen, holding him by the elbow so he would not fall over. Harsha had got it on the eleventh try, and the engine had caught with that sound, thump, thump, thump, slow as a heartbeat in a big chest, and his father had laughed out loud in the parking lot at six in the morning and woken half the building.
The village was called Peddagudem. It was a hundred and forty kilometres away, off the highway towards Vijayawada, past Narketpally, then thirty kilometres down a district road and eight more down a road that had been promised tar for as long as anyone could remember. His father had been born there in a house with a tiled roof and a well in the yard, and had left at seventeen for a polytechnic in Hyderabad, and had gone back many times when his parents were alive, and then fewer times, and then, for the last nine years, not at all.
“One ride,” his father had said, the year Harsha turned thirty. “You and me, on the Bullet. The way I used to take you when you were small, on the tank. I want to see the place once more before it changes completely.”
“Of course, Nanna,” Harsha had said. “Next month.”
In the second February, his father went to the eye hospital in Banjara Hills because the newspaper had started to have holes in it.
That was how he described it. Not blurry, not dark. Holes. In the middle of a line of print, a word would simply not be there. When he looked at Harsha’s face across the dining table, he said, the nose was missing.
“Very rude of you,” he said, “to come to dinner without a nose.”
The doctor was young and kind and spoke for a long time about the macula, with a diagram. It would not get better. It might get worse slowly or quickly; there was no way of knowing. There were injections that might help hold it. And he should not ride the motorcycle any more. Not to the market, not round the block, not anywhere.
His father listened to all of it with his hands folded on his knees, nodding, and asked one question, about whether he would still be able to read the Ramayana, and was told yes, with a magnifier, slowly. Then they went downstairs, and he stood on the steps of the hospital in the sun for a long time, looking at the traffic on Road Number 2, and did not say anything at all.
That night Harsha opened his laptop and applied for four days of leave. He did not wait for his manager to approve it. He closed the laptop and went into the front room, where his father was sitting in the dark with the television on mute.
“Saturday,” Harsha said. “We’ll leave at five. Before the heat.”
His father did not turn his head. “You’ll ride?”
“I’ll ride.”
There was a long pause. On the television, a man was silently selling a mattress.
“You still remember the kick?” his father said.
He did not remember the kick. It took him nine tries on Saturday morning, in the parking space in the blue half-light, with the watchman watching and his father standing beside him saying, “Compression. Find the compression. Don’t fight it. You’re fighting it.”
On the tenth try it caught. Thump. Thump. Thump. The sound bounced off the walls of the parking area and up the stairwell, and somewhere above them a baby started crying and a window slammed.
His father laughed out loud.
He climbed on behind Harsha carefully, a hand on Harsha’s shoulder for balance, and settled himself, and put his hands on the grab rail behind him, the way a passenger does. It was the first time in Harsha’s life his father had ever sat behind him on anything. He felt it like a weight on his back that was not a weight at all.
They went out through the gate and turned east, into the beginning of the sun.
The city let them go slowly. Past the closed shutters, past the flower sellers setting up at Dilsukhnagar with their baskets of marigold, past the last of the flyovers. Then the road widened and the buildings fell away and there were fields on both sides, green with young paddy, white egrets standing in them on one leg, and the air came cool over the windscreen and smelled of wet earth and diesel and somewhere, faintly, of jaggery being boiled.
At Choutuppal they stopped for tea at a stall with a tin roof and a hand-painted sign. The tea came in small glasses, very sweet, and his father held his up to the light, though he could not have seen much, and said, “This fellow’s father had this stall. I used to stop here when I was your age. Same glass, I think.”
The man at the stall said it was his grandfather, actually, but did not argue about the glass.
Somewhere after Narketpally, his father’s hands moved from the grab rail to Harsha’s shoulders. Harsha felt it happen. He did not say anything. He thought of being seven years old on a cushion tied to the petrol tank, his small hands on the hot metal, his father’s arms on either side of him like the walls of a house, and his father’s chin coming down on top of his head at every speed breaker, and his father saying, at every speed breaker, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” and laughing.
They ate mirchi bajji at a roadside hotel near the turn-off, sitting on a bench under a neem tree. The bajji were long and green and split down the middle and stuffed with tamarind and onion, and so hot that his father’s eyes ran, or that was what he said.
The last eight kilometres were still not tar.
The village had changed, as his father had said it would, and more than he had said. There was a mobile tower now where the threshing ground had been. The tiled-roof house was gone; on its plot stood a two-storey concrete house painted pista green, with a satellite dish and a gate with peacocks welded into it. The well had been filled in. A woman came to the gate when she heard the Bullet, and said yes, her husband had bought the land from someone’s cousin, years ago, and was there a problem?
“No problem,” said his father. “It’s a very nice green.”
The school was still there, and smaller than either of them expected. The temple had been painted orange. The man his father had wanted most to see, a friend from boyhood called Rangaiah, had died three years before. Nobody had told them. Rangaiah’s wife, a tiny woman with a voice like a bell, recognised his father immediately, in spite of everything, and cried, and sat them down on her veranda and brought buttermilk with curry leaves and green chilli floating in it, and told stories about the two of them stealing guavas that his father said were all lies, and laughed at.
Afterwards his father asked to walk to the canal.
It was ten minutes along a bund between the fields. He held Harsha’s arm, because the bund was narrow and uneven and the holes in his eyes made the ground untrustworthy. The canal was low and brown and quiet. A boy was washing a buffalo in it, standing up to his waist, scrubbing the great black flank with a coconut husk while the buffalo closed its eyes.
“I learned to swim there,” his father said. “My father threw me in. That was how it was done. You either swam or you were a very sad story.”
They stood on the bund for a while. A kingfisher went past, low, a blue so bright it seemed like a mistake.
“I’m sorry it took so long, Nanna,” Harsha said.
His father did not answer immediately. He was looking out over the canal, or towards it, in the way he looked at things now, slightly to one side, so that the edges of his eyes could do the work.
“I didn’t come to see the village,” he said finally. “You know that. I knew the house would be gone. Rangaiah wrote to me, last time, that he wasn’t well. I knew.” He shrugged. “I wanted to ride with you. That’s all. Once more, the two of us. I just didn’t think it would be you in front.”
Harsha did not know what to say to that, so he said nothing, and after a while his father patted his arm twice, briskly, the way he used to pat the Bullet’s tank after a long ride, and they walked back.
On the way home, on an empty stretch of road between two villages, with fields of cotton on either side and the sun beginning to go down orange behind them, his father tapped him on the shoulder.
“Stop here for a minute.”
Harsha pulled over onto the gravel shoulder. His father climbed off, slowly, and stood beside the bike.
“Get down.”
“Nanna.”
“Get down. I’m not going to ride. I’m not mad. Just get down.”
Harsha got down. His father swung one leg over, a little stiffly, and sat on the rider’s seat, and put both hands on the handlebars, the right one on the throttle, and the left one on the clutch. The engine was still running. Thump. Thump. Thump.
He did not move. He sat there with his eyes half closed and his hands on the bars and listened, his head tilted the way it tilted when an old song came on the radio. A lorry went past and he did not open his eyes. A boy on a cycle went past and stared. The light went on going orange and then pink across the cotton.
Harsha stood on the gravel and waited. He found he did not mind how long it took.
After a few minutes his father blipped the throttle, once, gently, so the engine coughed and then settled, the way you clear your throat before saying something important. Then he took his hands off the bars, and climbed down, and patted the tank.
“Good,” he said. “Okay. Let’s go home.”
They rode back into the city as the lights came on. His father’s hands were on Harsha’s shoulders the whole way, and at every speed breaker his chin came down on the back of Harsha’s helmet, and every time, he said, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” and laughed.