Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
He walked around the bike again before announcing, “We'll have to check it. There are
many causes, and it's not just the spark plugs that we check when the bike is not starting. It
could be a lot of things.”
It could be a lot of things—not the response I was looking for, yet I maintained hope, as
only a fool would do, “So can you fix my bike?”
At this point, more young men had joined the head mechanic. I couldn't tell if they
also worked in the shop or were just intrigued by the pseudo-Bollywood star sitting in the
middle of the garage, but the group of them began to wobble their heads in affirmation. I
looked to the head mechanic to see if he agreed with his newly arrived sidekicks. He looked
up and cocked his head to the right, “Yes.”
“But there's one thing I need to tell you . . .” I began.
After the group heard that I had no money, they all convened to discuss the matter in
Hindi. From time to time, one of them would point in my direction—some eyed me like I
was a lamb off to the slaughterhouse. Others gestured toward me with more compassion.
My fate was in the balance until the head mechanic uttered the two most beautiful sen-
tences on earth: “We can fix it with no money. You are driving famous bike machine.”
All right, confession time. There was another reason why the mechanics thought I was
famous. So far on the trip I had asked my camera crew to hang back, but on this one, I
asked them to step forward. I wasn't just asking these mechanics for a bite to eat. I was
asking them for a full-fledged motorbike overhaul. I didn't know what was wrong with the
bike. All I knew was that it was something big that needed to be fixed. And something I
was hoping would be fixed that day.
If that meant bringing out the camera crew, well, sometimes you just got to cheat. And
sometimes cheating works. The magic of my little Bollywood star (and my production
team) had charmed its way into the hearts of a small army of Indian mechanics.
Over the next eight hours, they took Kindness One apart. Literally, the bike was lying in
pieces all over the dirt floor of the mechanic's shop. I went outside like a worried relative at
the hospital. As I found out, the problem went much deeper than spark plugs (though they
weren't in the best of shape, either). It went right into the filtration system, which, as one of
the mechanic's assistants tried to explain, “was much hardness to fix.” After running for so
many days, I didn't know how to sit still. I spent most of those long hours pacing, hoping
that Kindness One might make it out of this alive.
Finally, one of the mechanics came out and announced, “Sire, we must need presence of
your good self.”
