English Literature – Articles ☆ 🏍️ The Blue Bike ☆ Shri Jagat Singh Bisht ☆

A Father, a Son, and the River of Life

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Prologue — The Blue Machine in the Corner

There is an old motorcycle standing quietly in a corner of our parking space.

It is not the most beautiful motorcycle one could see today. It has none of the sleekness of the machines that now glide along our highways, nor the thunderous authority of their engines. Its glory belongs to another time.

It is a modest CBZ—blue, slightly weathered, carefully covered, and strangely alive.

Every now and then, when my son comes home, he lifts the cover and looks at it.

He does not merely look at it.

He looks back.

And perhaps the old motorcycle looks back at him too.

For a moment, the years disappear. The grown man standing there seems to become the young boy who once came to me with a request that sounded innocent enough.

“Papa, I need a bike.”

That was how it began.

Or perhaps it had begun much earlier—with a boy who loved the outdoors, games, friends, speed and the sheer exhilaration of being alive.

We had moved from town to town with the transfers that were part of my working life. But by then we had arrived at a place where, perhaps for the first time, we thought we might stay for a while.

My son had just passed out of school.

College awaited him.

And, as it turned out, so did the open road.

—

 🏍️ Chapter One — CBZ: Wheelies, Stoppies and the First Taste of Freedom

 My son placed his request before me with the solemnity of a young man presenting a matter of national importance.

 He would not go to college by bus.

 He needed a bike.

 And not just any bike.

 A CBZ.

 And it had to be blue.

 The colour, apparently, was not negotiable.

So began our little pilgrimage.

We visited motorcycle showrooms in every nook and corner of the town. One had every colour except blue. Another had blue, but not the model. Yet another promised that the blue one would arrive “soon”—a word whose meaning in the world of automobile dealers is sometimes considerably longer than the word itself.

Still, we searched.

There was something almost comic about a father and son wandering through the hot streets of the town in pursuit of a particular shade of blue.

And then, one sweltering afternoon, came the news.

A distant dealer had one.

A blue CBZ.

We did not stop to consider whether the afternoon heat was suitable for such an expedition. We simply went.

Perhaps the gods of youthful dreams had been waiting for us.

There it stood.

Blue.

Beautiful.

Waiting.

My son looked at it, and I knew that the matter was settled.

Some purchases are made with money.

Others are made with the heart.

This one was certainly the latter.

Soon the blue CBZ began its daily journey to college, usually carrying my son and, on occasion, one of his equally adventurous friends.

But I gradually began to suspect that college was not the principal reason for which the motorcycle had entered our lives.

One day, I heard him telling someone:

«“I have always wanted to be a biker, but Papa insists that I become an engineer.”»

I smiled when I heard it.

A father often believes he is raising a son.

The son, meanwhile, is quietly raising a completely different future for himself.

Studies, engineering, career—all these were my plans.

For him, perhaps, the road itself was a syllabus.

Sunday mornings revealed the truth.

While respectable fathers and sons were still asleep, my son and his friends were already heading towards the outskirts of town. They had given their group a suitably formidable name:

Throttle Xtreme.

There, on quiet stretches of road, they practised the sacred arts of youthful foolishness—wheelies, stoppies and burn-outs.

The CBZ, which I had imagined would merely carry him to college, had apparently discovered a second profession.

It had become a performer.

Sometimes, from the safe distance that fathers instinctively maintain from their sons’ adventures, I watched with a curious mixture of pride and apprehension.

The boy was growing.

The motorcycle seemed to know it.

And perhaps, in those early mornings, while the tyres whispered against the road and the engine sang its youthful song, the boy and the machine were teaching each other something about freedom.

I only hoped that both would eventually learn about brakes.

—

 🏔️ Chapter Two — Pulsar: The Road to the Land of High Passes

 Years passed.

 By God’s grace, my son graduated and entered the world of work.

 The boy who had once performed wheelies on the outskirts of town was now a young professional.

 But the road had not forgotten him.

 Nor had he forgotten the road.

 Soon there appeared another blue machine in his life—a Pulsar.

 And this time the road was no longer merely the road outside town.

 It was Ladakh.

 The Mecca of bikers.

 The land of high passes.

 The place where mountains rise like ancient walls and the sky seems to begin almost at one’s feet.

 In those days, the Atal Tunnel had not yet been built. The journey to Ladakh via Manali was therefore an adventure in the truest sense—a long negotiation with mountains, weather, altitude and one’s own courage.

 They rode upwards, towards a world where the air grew thinner and the mountains grew larger.

 And then came Khardung La.

 There are places one visits.

 And there are places one remembers for life.

 Khardung La was one of the latter.

 Somewhere among those immense mountains, my son must have felt that peculiar exhilaration which only a biker knows—the sensation that the road is no longer something beneath the wheels but something flowing through one’s veins.

 And then there was Pangong Tso.

 The lake seemed to stretch beyond geography and into imagination. Its vastness, its changing hues, the barren mountains standing around it in solemn silence—all combined to produce the sort of beauty before which even a restless biker becomes quiet.

 They came back.

 But Ladakh had evidently left a door open behind them.

 Because once was not enough.

 They went again.

 This time, the return journey took them through the magnificent Kashmir Valley.

 The road changed.

 The landscape changed.

 The mountains changed.

 But perhaps the rider remained the same—still carrying within him that old boy who had once looked at a blue CBZ and thought of nothing but the road ahead.

 I sometimes wondered whether, while travelling through those vast Himalayan landscapes, he ever remembered the father who had taken him to a distant dealer on a scorching afternoon to buy his first blue motorcycle.

 Perhaps he did.

 Perhaps the mountains reminded him.

 For memories, like mountains, have a curious habit of appearing when one least expects them.

 —

 🇳🇿 Chapter Three — Ducati: Wandering in the Land of the Long White Cloud

 Then came another turning in the river of life.

 Higher studies beckoned.

 And the destination was far away—almost at the other end of the world.

 Aotearoa—New Zealand.

 The Māori name itself has a poetry of its own: the Land of the Long White Cloud.

 I sometimes wonder whether my son went there principally for higher studies.

 Or whether the possibilities of adventure sports had something to do with it.

 There was, after all, bungee jumping.

 And there was an entire country waiting to be explored.

 A young man does not always distinguish very carefully between education and adventure.

 Perhaps he considers both forms of learning.

 And somewhere in that beautiful country of mountains, lakes, green valleys and endless roads, another motorcycle entered the story.

 A Ducati.

 The very name has the elegance of a whispered promise.

 The Ducati is not merely a means of transport. It carries a certain style—a certain confidence, a certain European flourish.

 I do not even remember its exact colour now.

 But knowing my son, I suspect it must have been blue.

 Why should it not have been?

 There is something about blue and him that has persisted through the years.

 Perhaps blue was never merely a colour.

 Perhaps it was the colour of freedom.

 So he rode through the Land of the Long White Cloud, amidst scenery that looked as though some generous painter had been given an entire continent and told to use his imagination.

 The young biker from India had travelled a very long way.

 The boy who once rode a blue CBZ to college was now riding a Ducati beneath distant skies.

 And somewhere, quietly, a father was smiling.

 —

 ❤️ Chapter Four — First Love Never Really Leaves

 The Pulsar is gone now.

 The Ducati too.

 Both have travelled onwards into other lives, as all possessions eventually do.

 But the old CBZ remains.

 It stands quietly in our home, wrapped in its cover.

 Today, it was taken out, washed and polished, and given a new cover.

 There are clear instructions regarding it.

 It must be kept spic and span.

 It must be preserved.

 It must not be treated as an old motorcycle.

 Because it is not an old motorcycle.

 It is My First Love.

 Whenever my son comes home, he looks at it fondly.

 And I have often wondered why.

 After all, he has ridden machines far more powerful, travelled roads far more spectacular and seen landscapes far more magnificent.

 Yet this modest blue CBZ still possesses something that no expensive motorcycle can ever acquire.

 It possesses memory.

 It carries the dust of college roads.

 The laughter of friends.

 The thrill of wheelies and stoppies.

 The impatience of youth.

 The dreams of a young man.

 And perhaps, tucked somewhere beneath its old seat and inside the quiet machinery of its engine, it carries the laughter of a father and son who once went searching through the town on a hot afternoon for a blue motorcycle.

 —

 🌊 Epilogue — The Games Have Changed

 A lot of water has flowed down the river of life since that day.

 The little stream that once began among the hills of childhood has gathered strength, passed through bends and valleys, crossed many bridges, and travelled a considerable distance towards the ocean.

The boy has grown into a man.

The biker has grown older.

The roads have become different.

The motorcycles have changed.

Life, too, has changed.

But perhaps growing older does not mean that we leave childhood behind.

Perhaps we merely carry it more quietly.

There was a time when happiness meant a blue CBZ.

Then it meant a Pulsar and the road to Ladakh.

Then a Ducati beneath the skies of New Zealand.

Today, happiness may wear a different face.

But the heart remembers.

And that is perhaps the most beautiful mystery of growing older: our first loves remain young even when we do not.

The old CBZ knows nothing about age.

It does not know that its rider has grown older.

It remembers only the boy.

The boy who wanted a blue motorcycle.

The boy who rode into college with dreams larger than the classroom.

The boy who went searching for mountains.

The boy who travelled to the other side of the world.

The boy who once believed that the road went on forever.

And perhaps, when my son looks at that covered motorcycle, some small part of him becomes that boy again.

That is the quiet magic of memory.

A father may spend his life trying to give his son a future.

But, in the end, it is often the son who gives his father something far more precious—a past filled with moments worth remembering.

I look at the old motorcycle and smile.

The engine is silent now.

The wheels are still.

The road is elsewhere.

Yet, in some mysterious corner of the heart, I can still hear it.

The faint roar of a young man’s motorcycle.

The laughter of friends.

The sound of tyres on an empty Sunday road.

And above it all, the laughter of a father watching his son grow—not quite knowing where the road would take him, but secretly hoping that wherever it did, he would always find his way home.

For life is still fun.

Life is still marvellous.

It is only the games that have changed.

🏍️❤️🌄🌊