I was riding the bike at a breakneck pace, without a
helmet, sans the least care in the world, with only one thought – rebellion –
directed against the whole world.
The gusts of wind that buffeted my unprotected face,
blinding me with their intensity, forcing me to squint and blowing away my hair
backward, seemed to whistle in my ears in an eerie fashion.
The stretch of asphalt in front of me, robbed of some
of its sun-baked hotness under the coolly overcast sky, went ahead, snake-like,
peppered with gentle undulations that often tried to jolt me off the seat as I
would never slow down.
I would attempt to ape the manoeuvres of
super-bikers, making the bike lean to one side, my knee almost grazing the
tarmac, then quickly straighten up again, only to lean towards the other side
with the next sharp turn in the road.
In the frenzy induced by the drug of adventure, mounting
a flyover seemed to be a conquest of the most Himalayan task in my life and as
I achieved it, I took my hands off the handle-bars, beating the air with my
fists, celebrating a facile victory.
Little did I know what awaited me as I descended – a
speeding car that appeared out of nowhere, hit my bike broadside-on with such
force that I was sent sailing over the kerb, landing in a heap amid a row of
trees, finally waking up to write this piece with a week-full of pills and
intravenous shots in my bloodstream that befuddled my brain but never doused my
creative fire.