Why I continue riding my Vespa

This is a story about a 15-year-old journey during which my Vespa took me everywhere from Page 3 dos and political luncheons in Lutyens’ Delhi, to rockstars like Bryan Adams and Hollywood biggies like Pierce Brosnan. And why despite several accidents, I continue with my fatal attraction.

There was no blood. Only the sickening snap of a bone crack. I try getting up. Collapse. And why the f**k is my right arm so oddly angled? My right elbow twisted to the front. Is that my shoulder? A few notches down? Dangling like a piece of goat leg from a hook at the butcher’s shop? I try to move my hand. It’s “locked”. I try harder. I yell in agony. The helmet is lying a little ahead. I instinctively run my left palm over my head. No, there is no blood. With support from my left hand, I manage to stand up. Just for a nanosecond. Both my knees give way with a cluck. Oh god! This is it. The end of me. I give up.

It’s 11 in the night. The service lane is dark. Deserted. Who will come to help me out? Take me to a hospital? And then the pain again – more intense – shooting from the right shoulder all through to the finger tips. It’s a different kind of pain. My eyes start welling up. Hapless, hopeless, wounded, I lie still in that position. I can hear a cycle bell.

“Bhai,” I shout. He sees the battered scooter lying bang in the middle of the road. He sees a man lying by the divider. He stops. And then a car. It stops too. They have to. The scooter has blocked the road. The headlights reveal the limp body that I am. A couple, recently-married, comes out, lifts me. I collapse. My knees are gone. So the cycle guy and the car guy lift me again, my legs dangling above the ground, and helps me to the back seat of the car. “Thank you, sir, ma’am,” I tell the angels. “Would you drop me to the nearest hospital?” The cycle guy lifts the scooter and parks it on the side of the street.

I groan. I sigh. “Sorry for the trouble,” I apologise. They take me to the Yashoda hospital, near Anand Vihar bus terminus in Ghaziabad. I am taken to the hospital’s emergency entrance. They call for an attendant who comes in with a wheelchair. They move me, from the car to the chair.

“You go. I can manage. Thank you, thank you so much,” I tell them. They hesitate. Then they leave, leaving a number. Yes, I have a health insurance card. I give the card to the attendant as he wheels me to a room. Every move brings in a fit of pain. Am I going to walk again? Will I be handicapped for life? I am X-rayed, diagnosed by an orthopaedic surgeon.

Shoulder dislocation. Right arm fracture. Knee ligaments torn. Tissues damaged. “Will I be fine, doc?” “Yes, yes,” he says. I make a call to my wife. She lands up after an hour. Anaesthesia. Then nothing. When I wake up, the pain is gone, my shoulder back in place. Knee guards strapped around. And yes, I can walk. I mean limp. But it will be a month before I can move my right arm – it got locked in such a position that only physiotherapy can help. I stay home for a month.

Riding back home from the India Today office in Noida towards Vaishali (Ghaziabad), the scooter stumbled into an enormously deep pothole, totally invisible in the dark. I was hurled up like a volleyball, then down on the ground with a thud, rolling a few times over, only to hit the road divider. The scooter took its own course, metal on tar. Then seconds of silence. Then the groans.

It has extracted its pound of flesh

Prior to this, I had suffered two other serious scooter accidents. In one, I was a bloody picture. Soaked in blood. Blood from the knees. Elbows. Back of my hand. Forehead. From everywhere. The white pyjama turned scarlet. The kurta itself had been ripped to bits. A speeding car had just brushed by my scooter on the IIT flyover.

If there were no railings, I would have tumbled down the flyover to an instant end. Bruised all over, dripping blood, I headed home, yes, on the scooter with a handle gone terribly wrong. I stopped at a traffic light. People were watching me – this bloodied man with a ripped kurta that revealed half my torso – curious, concerned, shocked. I avoided their stares. I went home and cleaned up. Was that Kali’s wrath? I became superstitious. My kurta had an image of the angry goddess. No, I would never wear clothes that have gods on them, I promised. One should never wear gods.

The other accident at Khel Gaon Marg was a different ballgame altogether. You see, there was a ball, a metal ball. The ball was what my scooter had been reduced to. I was riding home from work when the car in front suddenly applied breaks. I, right behind it, slammed into the car, and the car behind me banged up the rear end of my scooter. Hit from both ends, you wouldn’t have believed seeing this piece of metal that anyone could have survived this crash. But I did. It was bizarre how I managed to get away without a scratch. I just jumped out of it instinctively, instantly.

My scooter is gone, I remember thinking. There is no hope in hell that it can be restored to its original shape. Anyway, I brought the ball home on a rickshaw, making sure to drop it at a spot near our house where my wife wouldn’t have seen. If she did, she would have freaked out.

That wasn’t the end of my scooter-related trauma. I had walked miles, thoroughly exhausted, pulling my Vespa in the dead of the night, either because it ran of fuel or tyres got punctured or the clutch cable snapped. I had sweated buckets trying to kick-start the vehicle in the sweltering summer. I had missed family outings because the scooter developed a technical snag and I was late home.

Did I give up the scooter after all these? Absolutely not. Aren’t these accidents enough to freak me out and abandon my scooter? A resounding “no”. The scooter is, in fact, my lifeline, not a deadline.

No bike. Only scooter

The year was 1999. The amount, Rs 30,000. “Here, take this,” said my uncle passing on the cash dad gave him to deliver. I had just started working and it was becoming very tiring to commute to my workplace or for various reporting assignments in crowded, stinky ovens called DTC busses. By the time you reached office, you were reduced to a shadow of yourself, the face covered by a layer of black. I really needed private transport and had asked for some money from dad for a two-wheeler. Dad obliged, but not without these words: “No bike. Only scooter”

“Cash or EMI?” the salesman asked me at the Lajpat Nagar showroom where I picked up a shiny gold-tinted Vespa NV. “Cash,” I said proudly, feeling the thick wad of notes in my pocket. Finally, I was mobile in Delhi. It was liberating. I would not have to depend on buses anymore. No haggling with autowalas. I could go wherever, whenever. And as I stopped at the first traffic red light, I remember looking at the driver of the car next to my scooter and thinking: so what you got a car, at least in terms of speed, I am on an equal footing with you. Yes, I have got speed now – something our public transport, pre-metro, could never provide.

Riding my way to Bryan Adams

There is no stopping me now. When I went to interview Bryan Adams at the Maurya Sheraton, I went on a scooter. When I went to meet former Bond Pierce Brosnan at the Radisson, I went on this scooter. And this is the scooter that took me to various venues to meet Bollywood A-listers like Akshay Kumar, Salman Khan and Anil Kapoor. I have visited five-star hotels for Page 3 parties, attended diplomatic functions in Chanakyapuri, nightclub launches in south Delhi, political luncheons at Lutyens’ bungalows and so on – my little scooter took me everywhere, often parked between Mercs with blue number plates, and white Ambys with red beacons.

Girlfriends on my back

From professional to personal, my scooter stood by me through every meaningful event of my life. It was the perfect vehicle for dating. Sometimes, it led to awkward situations. Dropping a date home late one night, I got down from the scooter to plant a goodnight kiss on her cheeks. “Öuch!” she yelped. Well, blinded by emotion, I leaned towards her, totally forgetting to take my helmet off, as it hit the girl hard on the forehead.

It is on this scooter that I rode Teena, another girlfriend, to various restaurants and dating hangouts. A year later, Teena would become my wife.

My famed pillion riders

And oh, did I tell you, even film stars like Neha Dhupia and Udita Goswami rode pillion on my scooter! That was, however, before they became film stars.

When I went for my first job interview in media, it was my Vespa that took me to The Indian Express building in the Qutab Institutional Area. “Since you have a scooter, you will be paid as per the km you drive,” said Sourish Bhattacharyya, the then national features editor of the Express. But how the hell did he know that I have a scooter? He couldn’t have seen it from his second floor cabin while I was parking it in front of the building! I never got the answer.

But the scooter worked well for my colleagues. Qutab Institutional Area was (and still is) an isolated forested area, not safe at all for women employees to walk till the nearest bus stop after dark.

“Nishiraj, are you going home? Can you drop me till the bus stop?” I would get regular requests like this from my female colleagues. No complaints. So every evening, there would be someone – juniors, seniors, interns – riding pillion on my Vespa.

The list is long: Sanchita Sharma, now health editor of The Hindustan Times; Menaka Jayshankar, Anupreeta Das (no idea where they’re now); Sweta Rajpal Kohli, now an NDTV anchor, Prerna, now social media head at India Today, Shikha Mishra, ex-HT City journalist, now in the travel trade; Aarati Thapa, ex-editor of Asia Spa; Shobita Dhar, a Times of India journo; ravishingly beautiful Mallica Singh...

But my favourite passenger was the intern Abhilasha Ojha, pretty and petite, shy, simple and soft-spoken with silky glorious hair, and now working for an art gallery. “You are the perfect wife material,” I used to tell her, as she sat side-saddle, her arms holding on to my back. I would go out of my way to drop her, not just till the bus or auto stand, but all the way to her house in RK Puram. “Nishi, it’s alright, I can manage. Drop me here only,” she would protest. “No, no, not a problem at all. Let me drop you home. I can’t let you go alone,” I used to say, hoping to impress her with my chivalry.

Why two-wheelers score over four-wheelers

It’s not just for the memories, experiences or emotion, that I have kept my scooter. The scooter (any two-wheeler for that matter), in fact, is a very practical mode of transport in cities. It comes in handy when you negotiate the congested bylanes of Khirki Extension or Munirka or try to locate addresses in posh Sundar Nagar or Panchsheel Park.

Two-wheelers are the easiest and the quickest mode of transport as you zigzag your way ahead through traffic jams. At times, I, like my fellow riders, even drive over pavements to get ahead. With a great mileage (mine gives 35-40km for every litre of petrol), it is also the cheapest mode of transport. It saves me a lot of time too: an hour long commute by car to work is reduced to 40 minutes if you use a two-wheeler. In fact, my scooter came in very handy during the odd-even traffic rule in Delhi: oddly enough, all my four cars are odd-numbered.

It is also less polluting than a car. In fact, two-wheelers should be encouraged to reduce pollution and traffic congestion (it hardly eats up road space). And yes, parking is never a hassle with a two-wheeler. It can fit in just about anywhere. You also have to pay less for parking – just about ten bucks. And if you happen to use toll bridges like the DND Flyway, you end up paying only Rs 12 per passage as against Rs 28 for a car. Whenever I need to go to several places one after another, I take the scooter which is easy to stop and park at various points.

All season ride

When I bought my first car in 2000 – a black Santro – friends told me to discard my two-wheeler. The majority of people do exactly that once they graduate to a car. It’s unsafe, they say. Possibly. I have had my share of bone-breakers.

But one needs to be careful. People, wifey included, would also ask: Isn’t it cold to drive in winter? Isn’t it too hot to ride in summer? Well, if you are fortified with thermal wear, gloves, windcheaters, mufflers, and of course, the helmet, trust me, you wouldn’t feel the chill at all. As for 40-plus Celsius summers, as long as you are in motion, wind across your face, you can easily beat the heat. And when you stop by at red lights, there is always a bit of shade on the street sides or on a divider: What are Delhi’s famous trees for? No trees, not a problem. Just stand next to a bus and you will be shielded from the sun.

How it evolved into a style statement: The avatars

And then came a time when I was beginning to be ashamed of my Vespa. I would rather be dead than being caught riding my scooter by people I knew. Especially by people I had just met at a high profile party at a five-star hotel. What would they think? This guy doesn’t have a car or what?

There I was well-dressed and hobnobbing with the fashioniastas, diplomats, the social butterflies, culture czarinas and the next moment I was riding out on an old Vespa complete with helmets, jackets and gloves. So I used to park my scooter as far away as possible from the Lexus-lined avenues.

You see, nothing defines a man’s status better than a car. I also didn’t want my office colleagues to see me on a scooter. “He drives this!” I could almost hear their derisive tone. Yet, I needed my scooter simply because it made my life so much more efficient.

What if I made the scooter something to flaunt about? What if I turned it into a style statement? What if I could ride it with pride? What triggered instant action was a chrome and pink Bajaj 150 I spotted in Chanakyapuri driven by a white guy. It was totally cool.

I surfed the net for ideas to give my Vespa a cool new identity. The first makeover, done in red and white, was an instant hit with friends, family and just about anyone on the road. Then two years later, after the colour lost its sheen, I went to Karol Bagh to get it painted in off white and yellow.

Rs 5,000 is all that it cost me. The third look happened when Harper’s Bazaar Bride magazine (where I was the executive editor) was celebrating its first anniversary. I volunteered to offer my scooter as a prop. Artists from Delhi Street Art painted it in gold in keeping with the wedding theme.

A string of blue creeper weaved across the side bonnets. The end result was stunning – gold with leafy patterns that take the shape of these words: Happy 1st B’day to Harper’s Bazaar Bride. The photo of the scooter was carried in a special edition of Harper’s Bazaar.

However, this golden version was a bit too ostentatious for daily rides. This look belonged more to museums or malls. That explains the latest avatar: a white and fluorescent green combo, complete with a visor. Giving it a new lease of life is so very satisfying.

Star attraction

Already a star on the road, the new look has been drawing stares, compliments and comments. “Ïs this a new model?” people at traffic lights would ask. “Where have you got it done from?” somebody else would ask. “What scooter is this?” yet another would want to know.

Wherever it goes, it brings out smiles, right from the rickshaw puller to the BMW driving dude. It’s specially flattering when gorgeous girls come up to me when they see me by it. “Löve your scooter,” a stunner said just the other day. “Really cool,” another said.

Of course, it continues to bask in the limelight. Very famous in CR Park, my neighbourhood, I use it often to run errands or drive around my eight-year-old daughter who would any day prefer its open-air independence to the confined AC comfort of my Honda City or Hyundai Elantra. My colleagues take pictures sitting on it. On Facebook, it is a sensation, drawing in hundreds of likes and comments. It has also made its appearance in India Today’s Woman’s Health magazine, a model seductively posing by it.

And those family rides...

“Look, look, look,” I overheard a woman telling her friend as I, along with wifey and Tara, my daughter, passed by them on the scooter. Yes, you must really take a look at us when we three go for those family rides on the scooter.

Very aware that it is making heads turn and lips smile, we make for quite a spectacle. To my wife’s credit, I must say, she has never hesitated or shied away from riding with me on the scooter. On a cloudy day, we three would suddenly take off on the scooter and drive through the forest road for a Sunday breakfast at a Suraj Kund hotel.

Or we would simply drive to the CR Park markets. It is fun. When Tara was younger, she would wait for me to get back home from work for her daily evening rides. Now I would often drop her at school on the scooter. In fact, she is so attached to this toy of daddy that she has never forgotten an incident nor forgiven the man behind the incident: a neighbour while reversing his car banged into my scooter and broke the windshield. So everytime she sees this neighbour, she would shout, loud enough for him to hear: “Papa, bad man, bad man. He damaged your scooter shield. “Shhhhhsh,” I have to hush her up.

I am what I wear

The Second World War helmet I picked from Vietnam is what I put on when I want to look retro cool. I wear a windcheater – a thick one for winter, a thin one for summer – so shirts don’t get dirty. I wear a Islamic skull cap before putting on the helmet – wearing one without a bandana or a cap, someone once warned me, may lead to hair loss. Oh, you need gloves too – for a better grip as well as to avoid grime, grease and dust on your hands. And shoes, not chappals/sandals, to kick-start the engine. And a hanky – very important – to wipe the dust/dirt off your face once you reach destination.

Cop story: Yeh saukh ke liya chalata hoon

Along the way, I have had my brush with the law. Two-wheelers tend to draw traffic cops like bees to flowers. I have been caught without a licence, without a helmet or without papers, and a few times, because the registration number is not inscribed on the front of the scooter. “Yeh photo shoot ke liye laya hoon,” most of the time I would offer this as an excuse and have managed to get away. Or “Yeh saukh ke liya chalata hoon”, I would say, as they inspect my scooter amused, bemused, confused what to do with me. And when nothing works, I end up showing my press card at which they would say, “Aap pehle kiyu nahin bataya. Jao, jao, bhai.”

And miles to go...

With a new look and an engine fine-tuned by south Delhi’s legendary Kalu mechanic, I am now all set to ride over the odd-even traffic rule in Delhi. My Vespa and me still have many miles to go, many moons to share. It takes two to tango, and what a tango it has been all along.

(This article first appeared here.)

(The writer is executive editor, City Spidey, the friendly neighbourhood app.)