My boyfriend and I took off on the motorbike, a Royal Enfield Bullet heavy with luggage, and purring. We headed first to meet his brother - also estranged until now - for a few nights of giant beetles flying into my hair and then north up the Western Ghats. The monsoon chased us. We’d mistimed our travels and no matter how fast we rode, the rains caught up. We stopped soaked and freezing in tea plantations, couldn’t undo the swollen ropes that tied our soaking gear to the bike, slept in roadside rooms fully clothed, never time to dry off. In Goa we looked for the parties that had already moved north. At the Taj Mahal we sat on marble away from each other. In Delhi we put on helmets and couldn’t see for moths. In Rajasthan we fell in love with green-eyed women and crashed the bike in sand. In Chandigarh we slept in a barn with twenty men, one of whom put his hand down my jeans again and again until I woke my boyfriend up and told him we had to leave. He agreed, but grudgingly; we weren’t friends, he and I. Already we were unhappy. From the night he unfolded the story of his kidnap to the last dusty road to his mother’s house had been a matter of months. We’d left England on an impulse, no plan except to find her. And we were children; we hardly knew ourselves let alone each other. At a chai stop in the foothills of the Himalayas we met an Israeli couple who invited us to stay. They had a Royal Enfield too. It had got us talking. We followed them, two Bullets chugging up the winding narrow roads of the valley towards Manali, the great drop to our right, the apple trees bending in the light, sudden rainbows bowing to drink from the river crashing below. They parked at a cow shed above which were some rooms. We followed them up the wooden steps. He cooked a meal on a camping stove, tomatoes, onions and green peppers. She unfolded their clothes and made the bed. We ate and then they gave us acid and suggested an orgy. I remember thinking how revolting. My boyfriend also declined. We went to bed listening to them laughing. The next day a friend of theirs arrived, the most beautiful man I’d ever seen; tendrils of dark hair, a soft pink shirt, faded jeans, he sat cross-legged on the floor and passed me a chillum. My boyfriend went out to get food. When he came back he found us together. I gave him only the most fleeting of goodbyes. He took the bike.
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He deserved the bike. Sorry Eleanor.
Wow...... a whole epic advenure captured in a paragraph! I loved how you said they gave you acid and you think you declined the orgy.....that's funny. He took the bike and where did you go next?