Anonymous Notes

The car had before now found a charity gala being held at one of the hotels outside of town. They were very helpful and allowed us in even though we had not booked for the gala. The proceeds were to go for an orphan home(if I remember correctly). I washed the many scratches and dirt from the road. At exactly 0000hrs on 1st January 2006 I was digging into a plateful of fried rice.

Slowly it began to sink in. The facts were stacked up and here is the tally

• It was the only 15 mins in the whole 24 hour ride that I did not have my helmet on
• It was the only 15 mins in the whole 2 hour ride that I did not have a pillion rider behind me
• People do not come out of 85 kms/hr (50 miles/hr) without anything to show for it

We headed back into town after dinner. The town of Pondicherry comes out on the streets to greet each other for new years. The scene must have been exactly as I had seen it 8 years back on my first trip here. But, this time I didn’t notice.

I went into a secluded silence. We headed for the city beach and hung around there for a while. The others were chattering away about something or the other the whole way. I don’t remember much of what happened except that we did make it back to the Hotel at around 2-3 am. And there I slept…

So we got back onto the East Coast Road to head back towards the city. I had been riding with a pillion all the time, But this time as we left the parking lot Shashank sat behind Anubhav while I rode alone. None of us had our helmets since the car had driven away with them.

The East coast road at this hour is pretty deserted it’s around 11:25 and not a single vehicle is in sight. Everybody has reached the place where they will start the new year save us. This road has no street lights. No traffic in either direction and it’s pretty straight. We are riding along at 60 kms/Hr when I decide it’s time to get back to highway cruising speed 85 kms/hr. I accelerated to 85 with Anubhav about 50 mts behind me. I’m riding on High beam so I can see uptill half a kilometer ahead.

Suddenly I see a jet black object around 20 mts ahead which I did not spot because the background is jet black and using a single light source(my bike’s headlight) its near impossible to spot. For a moment I froze and said Oh shit!! It was of course the cow in front of me.

For that moment I had given up all hope. I had talked to my mom only an hour back and now I did not expect to see her or any living soul ever again. The whole life flashing before your eyes thing happened and before I knew it I had lifted off from the seat of the bike.

So here is how it went down.

1. I start to get up from my seat and manage to just lift my butt off
2. The headlight of the bike smashes into the cow’s side
3. The cow lifts off into the air from the impact
4. The bike decelerates and I go over the handle bars in a sky diving Geronimo! pose
5. The bike slides and causes sparksto start flying
6. I fly over the bike and my torso (from chest till thighs) hits the cow
7. The cow goes on flying and drops on it’s side
8. The bike slides to a halt behind me
9. I Land on the asphalt mid way between the two

Anubhav and Shashank who were on the other bike say that all they saw was a flurry of sparks. They did not see the cow and it seemed to them as if I had hit an invisible wall. They stopped their bike and came running to the spot. They expected to be calling an ambulance immediately when they saw me getting up on my own. The cow too got up and gave me a wierd look and moved off to the side of the road.

In the mean time I had managed to figure out that through some miracle none of my body parts were torn, numb, disemboweled, obviously broken or in any pain. I ran my hands over my entire body and having figured out the above immediately looked for my camera phone. I got the camera phone out of my pocket and went after the cow.

The others saw me and thought I must have lost it completely. They made me walk, jog, prance and do breakdance steps to make sure everything was where it was supposed to be. All I had suffered from was a few scratches and not even a single bruise. Having convinced them I was ok we got the bike off the road. The cow had in the mean time found some bushes and was peeking at us from behind them. I tried to get a snap but my camera didn’t have a flash and hence I was unable to get a picture.

Anyway, we called the car back and figured out that my bike was still in an albeit distorted but ridable condition. They put me in the car and had Amit Ji ride my bike back.

The time was 11:45 pm on 31st December 2005.

Sorry for making everybody wait this long. But here goes

We crossed the border into Tamil Nadu. Around 3 am we stopped over for tea. nothing much happened there. There was a stray dog which kind of took a fancy to us, but thats it. I was riding my bike this whole time. I had had very little sleep in the past 2 days but I was adamant that I should ride the whole way. Anyway so we drove all night. Took 2 or 3 halts and around 10 am reached Pondicherry.

Once there we were all very tired and went hunting for a place to stay. we finally found a place at around 1 or 2 pm, a Hotel Sooriya International, which had these 2 rooms into which the 8 of us piled in. And obviously went to sleep immediately. Only when we woke did we start the task of figuring out what we would do for new years. The options went thus.

• Go to one of the numerous hotels holding their gala
• Hang out in the city’s public beach
• Go to a beach party being organized by the various resorts outside the city

We finally decided that the beach parties outside the city seemed the most attractive and picked a resort called ‘James’. We arrived there around 10 pm, motor bikes et al. We bought entry passes for the 8 of us and entered.

The resort had promised a Buffet dinner, a Disk Jockey and availability of booze. What we found inside was some food which none of us thought we could stomach, Blaring Konkani/Other South Indian language songs which were being played from a cassette player, and only Beer.

Also the distribution of the sexes was skewed beyond recognition. There were groups of local guys dancing with each other as if there was no tommorow. Not exactly my idea of fun though. So we marched out of there within 5 mins of coming in and demanded a refund for our entry passes. Which of course the management of the place promptly denied. We haggled and we threatened but they wouldn’t budge.

Finally we decided to cut our losses and started pawning the tickets off to other people. By 11 pm we had disposed of all but 3 of the tickets. By now we needed another place to start the new year. So we sent 5 of the guys out in the Qualis to find another place to have dinner. 3 guys stayed back Anubhav, Shashank and myself.

We managed to sell off another 2 tickets by around 11:20 pm on the 31st of December 2005. We decided we had had enough and would head back to town behind the car. That is when we figured out that our Helmets had been in the boot of the car.

To be continued …