Motorcycle Explorer February 2015 Issue 4 | Page 127

on my maths GCSE, it was tempting to grapple with the fancy that if Ted changed colour, blood
red or just bloodless blue, this would give me enough peace to concentrate on the Algebra
module. But then mum fell over the sofa with a scream, so pissed she’d forgotten where her gin
was hidden, and that was the end of my quiet night studying.
In 1997 the average house price was £69 453 and a gallon of petrol cost £2.70. Prince Charles
and the Princess of Wales got divorced. In Brazil 38 million acres of rain forest were being
destroyed by timber cutting each year. On 15 June the IRA exploded a bomb in the Arndale
Centre in my home city of Manchester. I was still in India, riding all day and then late into the
night against a strong wind. All around me were cows and brown Brahmins, emaciated and
stringy. I rode around little boys who rushed in front of me, clearly unable to calculate my speed,
eager to see a big red racing bike and wanting to have the hot machine smells spread over their
faces from the fast rushing air. They were shrieking; I was laughing. They ran after me shaking
their hands, begging me to stop. The countryside whisked by in a blur of speed.
If there were to be any surprises here, they wouldn’t be topographical. I had seen it all before.
Stumpy, drought resistant shrubs lined the road and ochre-coloured soil dipped into valleys
browned on the edge of the Western Ghats. High on the Deccan Plateau the copper-coloured
citadels of scrawny mountains gritted their vertiginous teeth into a sky with little complexion,
except as a backdrop for the thorny savannah - deep bottle-green set against sepia. It was like
riding in a film society’s old movies, 16mm reality crisping in the sun. Everything seemed
dreamlike; I felt so out of context that it really was like being in another world.
“What is it that you search for when you go so far for so long?”
“The taste of death ahead of me.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit perverse?”
“Delicacies are fashioned best without dressing; to eat the comb of honey and drink the fresh
ferment of coconut with an unrinsed mouth is as much as I can expect from life.”
“What?”
“You heard.”
“You’re talking in riddles. You’re trying to do the Zen thing, and to be honest I never understood
the concept of the one-handed clap.”
“Neither do I, but I do understand the difference between the mechanical and the artistic. There
is something elegiac about pistons that behave like the poetic pieces of machinery the makers
intended them to be. An engine that screams for mercy as you accelerate to the limiter. But what I
don’t understand is how three pistons collectively turn the crankshaft through 216 revolutions
per second, 13 000 revolutions per minute, 780 000 per hour, or 14 040 000 every day.”
I knew then that to ask about the so-called meaning of life, whether via some multi-character
literary technique or otherwise, was quite the wrong question. The irrefutable evidence suggests
that however you lead your life, there is no escaping how it will end. My mother died not as a
sociopath, but as someone who was never given time to be understood. My father’s thinking
along with my own extreme curiosity intimidated her, and both contributed to her feeling of
alienation. There was a third but less provable factor - that her eldest son - my brother - had not
reciprocated the favouritism she showed him. He resisted the subtle foreplay of her more than
motherly overtures, instead turning to my father, who treated him as a drinking pal but nothing
more. Such is the sauce you are predisposed to taste from the platter put in front of you by your
parents. It shapes the taste of your life, always. It was nobody’s fault. Perhaps Pirsig had a point
when he theorised not about whether life has meaning, but whether it has value.