Why?! Why persist with motorcycles? They’ve damaged my body rather frequently (and my mind, on an ongoing basis), ensured that my bank wonders where the overwhelming majority of my income goes, and generally made the people closest to me wonder if I have it all together inside my thick skull. I’m not quite sure of that last part myself because this is the first time ever that I’m writing about a motorcycle I’ve never even seen in person yet. What makes it all the more baffling is that it’s mine. But there is a history of hope to be told here.
***
A few salary cheques after I joined this magazine in 2008, I bought this motorcycle… well, that’s inaccurate — I bought a motorcycle, some critical parts of which still find themselves on this bike. It was a Yamaha RX 135, with a banged-up expansion chamber, and came standard with the previous owner’s confident boast that ‘it easily goes to 140’. Of course, I’d been a sceptic long before that and I obviously didn’t believe it, but that wasn’t even the point. For the first time in my life, I could buy a motorcycle with my own hard(ish)-earned money, and I did. And then, as has been the story of my life, I set about making it my own. ‘Stock is for suckers’ was the rule I lived by then, and I think I still do now, whenever I can spare the thought.
Almost overnight, the bike was painted in the blackest black; bodywork, chassis, wheels, engine, you name it. It was the cheapest way to get it looking acceptable, you see. By way of tribute to the place that gave me my life and continues to do so, there was a big red ‘BSM’ that ran along the top of the tank, something to look down at and be grateful for at traffic signals. Soon after that, almost as if on cue, the engine started conducting a re-education camp of the mechanical kind. Coming from a meagre trickle of paternally-imposed four-strokes, despite my best efforts to the contrary, it was a bit of a shock to the system. The engine needed a complete rebuild, and since I only had enough money to support either myself or the RX, I chose the lower road and myself.
***
Honestly, I don’t remember the above introductory episode all that well. It is a real memory, but today it feels like it belongs to someone else. However, I can report a bit more accurately on the next chapter of this motorcycle — it has to do with my terminal infatuation with café racers. Somehow, I found one of the best two-stroke wizards possible, and convinced him to not only rebuild the engine but also to fashion the end result into something that resembled the form of those portly British singles that chased each other between London jukeboxes.
And so, on went the first-gen Yamaha R15’s sticky tyres on 17-inch rims that were never the right width; R15 clip-ons were mounted onto the triple clamp, not without a bit a ingenious tinkering; an all-new bore-piston set was thrown in, gratefully accepted after a phone call to Yamaha India, when the company still used to do that charitable act on order; a Suzuki Access front mudguard was installed as the rear hump for the single-seat setup (yeah, you’d be surprised how right it looked); a garnishing of then-available aftermarket anodised Yamaha bits and bobs went on; and finally, the whole thing was painted in silver and metallic blue.
Back then, it was almost like riding a superbike. I remember this one time, on the way to the office, a car-borne lady with children in tow lowered her window to exclaim, ‘That is a beautiful bike!’ And she wasn’t wrong at all. What was even more beautiful was the way the RX left everything for dead; one time, Ruman and I lined at a traffic signal on a straight road, him on the then new Hero Impulse — after a few seconds, I found myself shouting at him after he’d caught up; ‘Why didn’t you pin it?!’ His reply? ‘I did!’ That is essentially how the RX was. And then my commute went from a 15-km one to a 93-km one.
***
Needless to say, the tiny RX’s café racer proportions didn’t lend themselves to that kind of everyday riding. And so it stood in the garage, always ready for a gratifying short run, but otherwise more or less neglected, as life took over. And ten years after I’d first bought it, I put it in a car and took it to Bangalore to my friend, Karan Lokhande, who runs Motomatic R&D. Along came an entire Impulse front end and a whole assortment of parts that’d go on the bike to turn it into a street tracker. Or something like that.
Of course, enthusiasm often gets the better of experience, and both Karan and I would go on to learn that to this day. Well, at least I did. It was supposed to be a straightforward project, but things rarely turn out that way, right? Several brainstorming sessions, shattered metals, discarded components and severed cycle parts later, it simply settled into the limbo that’s attracted to all ambitious plans, one way or another. I think he went through two RX chassis, including the original one, to find the right feel for the bike. And one day, luck came knocking.
***
Right, that’s it for the past — this is where the bike’s at right now. Only the crank and its case remains. Everything else is… I don’t even know where to begin. The complete rolling chassis is a Yamaha XT 250, which Karan found in Indore, of all places. The engine, whatever remains of it, contains a TKRJ square-port piston that should ideally be in one of the barrels of an RD 350; hence the 175cc displacement. There are things that I don’t even understand that have gone into the engine, to be honest. And a bunch of custom-made parts find themselves attached to the bike. I have no idea if, how or when the bike will run. All I know is that it promises to be wheelie-happy — in most of its gears, no less. And, well, illegal in just about every sense of the word. The motorcycle is absolutely unrecognisable from what it began as. Then again, so is this guy who first bought it.
***
I found this motorcycle at a time of my life when I really didn’t know who I was or what I’d be doing in the future; I still don’t. However, along the way, I found people who helped me become myself. Also, many people have come and gone, but the bike remains a comfort, no matter where or in what state it is, and even if I’ve only done a total of 3000 km on it, in its various guises. Nostalgia, after all, is nothing but persistence over time. And this is a transformation that’s still in process, for as long as it needs to be, one that melts time into nothingness whenever I think of this much-reshaped. Isn’t that what motorcycles are all about?
PS: Just remembered, I’ve never written about a motorcycle that didn’t even have an exhaust pipe on it. There’s always the first one, eh?
