Two wheels in the city

Body in motion

The wind strips me of everything I am; in this moment, I am against it and it against me, pushing against each other, not with our weights but without them. The onlooking green wave in support, blurring my vision until I lose focus of all the greys and I can only breathe in the smell of garlic from a nearby restaurant. It is in me and I in it until the shrill unmistakable jerk of a vehicular horn cuts my connection loose and I can feel the weights pull me back down, feet on asphalt again.
– notes from 2019

I was telling a friend the other day that the anger one feels on the road, slowly disintegrates into one of passivity. You unplug and dissociate so you don’t feel the rage. I’m sure a lot of riders/drivers feel this way. For instance, a rider wants to get onto the footpath and you’re in their way and they honk until you have no choice but to scream at them but ultimately you watch them get onto the footpath anyway and zoom away. I call this trance travel. Your senses are all intact, but you’re not actively observing. You’re on auto pilot mode.

my mind isn’t really on the road,
though my eyes are.
My scooter is moving
on the mental map I’ve created so far
know exactly when to turn
and when to brake before a pothole,
it’s muscle memory, you learn
a passive observer, of the droll satire
a new diversion, metro construction
without thinking
I fly over and pass under
and I’m at the destination,
the route to which
my body will remember.

It has been a little less than two months since I stopped riding the scooter. It was only fitting that I wrote a little something mourning the access it gave me to the city and the bad back I suffer from it. Unfortunate as it may be, (considering I advocate public transport any chance I get), as a young woman the two wheeler provided me my first taste of unhindered*, unscheduled means of navigating the city. The bus used to be my earlier mode of gallivanting across town but it came with it’s own restrictions and delays.

*exempting of course, potholes, speed breakers, raging riders and rickshaws, an apparated pedestrian, dividers, puddles,…

It took some getting used to, especially the giddiness that comes from not being reliant on anything (except fuel) or anyone while out and about. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a romanticized lamenting of a lost love – I didn’t love riding the scooter, it’s the things I could do and the people I could be as a result of riding it.

I have worn different helmets and jackets. First came the rebellious, angsty teenager skipping classes and riding to different parts of the city to make art, act in short films and loiter around Bangalore University getting to know a boy. Then with a scarf and a balaclava, came the confused, careless 20 year old woman weeping in front of a traffic police on a bad day and no money on her, having been pulled up for speeding. Donning a new helmet, this one supposedly ISI certified, was a woman who longed to leave the city and overthought every thing in her life as she waited at traffic signals, making many a life decision this way. But the woman whose torn rain jacket I am now folding, is one who chose to stick with the two wheeler because it took less space on the road, so much so that it was invisible to a swerving auto rickshaw that he dragged it down and drove away. With that memory, I am folding the parts of me that longed to not be seen, on the road and otherwise. Someday, I might stitch it all back together to create the cloak of invisibility, but until then, I am going to try the fit of a woman who’s seen and heard.