Unlike yesterday, today there was a plan, but just because there was one didn't mean things went according to it. The plan was to ride to a site where those who dared could ride their bike off-road.
But first, we all trooped out for a tour of Vishu's plantation. Under the tall trees, the coffee was growing rich and dark, its little red beans almost ready for picking. The mood was carefree and everyone was laughing and joking, as we all posed for a group photo straggling up and over a fallen tree trunk.
Laddish behaviour burst through at the sight of a tree and soon everyone was clambering over it, vying to get to the top. Boys and trees. There must be some primal hard-wired connection that makes the sight of one just too irrestistible. Even if said tree is on its side and leading nowhere, a man in possession of two legs will feel an instinctual urge to climb it. So that's what they all did. I squeezed into a small space left over and, fists and voices raised, Vinod captured us in our giddy excitement.
We set off for the off-roading. I'd arranged to go on Dipsi's bike, as CP told me he didn't want to risk damaging his bike. In the end he and everyone, apart from Anu, came along anyway.
Like CP's bike, Dipsi's was a sports bike, but more of a scrambler, so better suited to the riding over rough ground. I climbed on, hoping it would be more comfortable than CP's saddle. It was. I knew that believing in the initial comfort was tempting fate after the first two days' experience but as the off-road location wasn't far I thought I 'd be fine.
The road there was rough enough for my liking anyway, as pot-holed and rutted and stone-strewn as the day before and I was pleased that I wouldn't be able to share the bike when we came to the place, as my additional weight would be too much of a destabilising factor.
The road wound through the same leafy-green jungle we'd passed through to get to Vishu's plantation and it was a lovely, cool, if bumpy ride. We jolted past plantations, bumped through villages, thudded by farms and bounced up and down hills. Sometimes there were miraculously smooth stretches, where we sped river-swift over the miles, but these would suddenly, unexpectedly, rudely disintegrate into dirt and dust, flecked only occasionally with patches of Tarmac.
Eventually we turned off the 'road' onto a red dirt track. It was clearly the route between two places, used by local people on a daily basis. How on earth did they manage? Last year's monsoons had cut deep grooves into the road, shifting mud and silt, to leave a rock- and boulder-littered surface that looked more like a dry riverbed than any form of surface suitable for wheeled vehicles. We went a few hundred yards up the steepish stretch of hill. The bikes in front whipped up billowing clouds of choking terracotta dust that clung to everything. Dipsi accelerated to gain momentum and tugged and pulled the bike first one way, then the other, trying to find the smoothest route up the slope. 'Smooth' is not the word to describe the experience as pillion, however. Clinging to the hand-grip behind the seat, I was thrown about and lurched from side to side, grimacing in ugly concentration. Each time I regained a modicum of comfort, I was again thrown to one side, or forwards or backwards. I was sure I was only a minute away from losing my grip completely and tumbling off he back of the bike with a loud yelp, arms and legs cartwheeling through the air, before landing with a dusty thud, a broken, bruised, wrecked creature. But it didn't happen.
The very same hill I thought would cause my literal downfall, was what saved me from it. The higher we scrambled, the steeper and more rutted and ruined the road became, until Dipsi's bike could get no further. He motioned me to get off, then he did too and pushed his bike up to a flatter, smoother area. I trudged wearily after him through the dust, relieved that the ordeal was now over for me. I'd come along to watch the others ride from a clean, safe distance amyway and had not counted on risking injury and indignity in the process.
'I'll meet you at the top,' called Dipsi, as he hopped back on. I nodded and waved him on. He roared off, dust billowing out behind him. I walked on, spitting out bits of grit and brushing off the icing off the icinf of dust he'd deposited on my hair. When I got to the top, Dipsi had gone on without me. Good! A few others were there, fixing one of the heavy Enfields that had been injured in the ascent. They weren't really suited to the terrain but that didn't stop the guys having a go. After all, what was the point of having a great bike if you didn't test it to its limits.
I sat down gratefully in the shade to wait. They'd picked a good spot to break down.On one side of the track, the ground sloped down to a still, green pool, its surface patched here and there with flat green lotus flower pads and spring-green grass. Tall, slender, silver-trunked trees grew up out of the pool, their shade dappling and dancing on the water. On the near bank, low bushes sprawled, freckled with little fire-red clusters of flowers, humming with scurrying insects and bees. For once, I was happy to wait and have nothing to do.
Some of the other guys seemed to have extended yesterday's rest day mentality. Leaning against a fence post, was Param, still wearing his shin-pads, a red bandana and sunglasses. Resting his head on Param's stomach, Biren lay in an attitude of total relaxation, while CP was stretched out beside the two of them, one hand behind his head. All three were looking on as one of the Sanjays tinkered with his bike. It was quite a touching scene. They were sort of piled on top of each other like a litter of puppies, no hint of awkwardness about invasions of personal space, just an easy familiarity that comes of the trust created through sharing good and bad times with friends.
When the bike was fixed we moved on, this time with me on the back of Satish's bike as Dipsi was nowhere to be seen. The group had somehow got broken up, as some people had stopped riding, others had gone on ahead and we were somewhere in the middle. This was the start of where things began to go wrong.
We moved on to an area by another pool where ther was a small waterfall, gushing cold and clear over the black rocks. At the foot of it, the branches of the trees overhead cut the sunlight into broad, hazy ribbons. It was a magical, ethereal place.
There were only a handful of us there, out of about 20, and every time we moved on to another area, some of the others had already moved on, so we were constantly trying to catch them up. We eventually met back up with them again back at the bottom, where we'd started, only to discover that Abinanden had gone missing. Sanjay raced off to look for him on his dirt bike, but he was nowhere to be seen. Long discussions followed while we waited, getting hotter and hotter, thirstier and thirstier in the little shade we could find. Deep in the hills there was no phone signal either, so we couldn't ring him and even if we could, we couldn't be sure he would have a signal either.
While we waited for any news we tallied up the damage on the bikes. Kaushik had fallen and snapped a wing mirror, so now his Enfield looked like a beautiful shiny butterfly with a broken antenna. I was quite surprised to find out that Satish had also not escaped unharmed. His wing mirror had cracked in a fall.
Satish always seemed to be the sensible one in the group. He had told me on the first day that right from the beginning of 60kph, when he was one of the founding members, he'd always ridden tail in any ride and always would do.
'The tail makes sure everyone is OK, but after the tail there's no-one,' he said, half-seriously, half-smiling. And you couldn't wish for a better tail. Satish was calm and composed and had infinite patience to wait for any stragglers still taking photos, or lagging behind at a chai break. He would sit quietly on his bike, just taking in the scene, waiting while the others goofed around and had the fun. Satish was the ever-present 'glue' that held eveyone and everything together.
And it wasn't just when we were on the bikes either. Satish knew eveything and saw everything. He reminded me of the wise owl in a poem my grandfather used to say:
There was an owl lived in an oak,
The more he heard, the less he spoke,
The less he spoke the more he heard,
Now wasn't that a wise old bird?
At any mealtime, Satish knew who had eaten and who hadn't without asking - even though there were 24 of us - and if one of the guys (or girls) came back for seconds before everyone had had firsts, he would quietly but firmly discourage them until everyone had had a helping. He was also vigilant on behalf of the vegetarians , or 'the veg guys' as he called them. If a spoon that had served meat was seen to hover close to a veg dish, he would carefully give the offending meat-eater another spoon to avoid contamination.
On an earlier occasion, we stopped by a mountian spring to refill our water bottles. A couple of lads brought out snacks to eat. When one of them had finished, he casually tossed the wrapper on the ground. I was a bit shocked at such blatant littering, but didn't feel it was right for me to say anything, so I let it pass. But Satish had seen too and he wasn't going to let it pass. He quietly told the person to pick up their litter, they did and the matter was forgotten. He never berated anyone or made them feel small, just calmly and quietly made sure no awkward situations arose.
Satish was sensible and responsible, so to see him with a broken mirror, having risked his bike in the off-roading was a surprise, but it showed me that he was as keen to have fun as the others and if that meant a little reckless damage then he accepted that with his usual quiet calm.
There was still no sign of Abhinanden, so it was agreed that we would all go back to the farm, in case he'd gone back there, as well as sending someone to the nearby village to see if he'd gone there. We all bounced our way painfully home and by the time we got there, to find a bewildered Anu, wondering where we'd got to, we'd had news that he'd been found safe and well.
The land we'd been off-roading on was the private land of other coffee plantations which we hadn't sought permission to ride over. Some of the farmers seeing hoardes of bikes roaring across their fields had panicked. Apparently in Karnataka state, there was a new movement for farmers' rights and the group was using violent tactics to get their message across. The farmers thought we were something to do with that, so when they stopped Nanden to talk to him, they had taken away his bike keys and refused to give them back. He tried to explain the situation, saying he would call his friends to prove he wasn't a 'farming terrorist', but there was no signal. Eventually they had let him go but not without getting very angry first. Luckily Nanden spoke the local language Kannada. If it had been one of the others, who only spoke Hindi or English, which are not widely spoekn in the state, anything could have happened.
It was a sobering lesson in the importance of keeping the group together. Safety in numbers meant safety in general. Nanden didn't seem too affected by his ordeal and the drinks were soon flowing to celebrate his 'release'.
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