Rakesh

I met Rakesh in college. Though he moved, in his own circle of friends,all through the year, he stayed with us before the final exams, for studying together with us bunch of friends who stayed within easy reach of college. Until then I hadn’t known him well, except a passing reference to him from our common friend, or when I saw him drive around on his old Yesdi bike. The Yesdi was a substitute for the Harley he wanted, which he couldn’t afford at that point in time probably. The Yesdi is an old bike, some might even refer to it as an antique, though being more charitable, a bike lover might call it, a classic.

It had 2 silencers and what it didn’t have in terms of pickup in relation to a modern performance bike, it made up in attitude. It had one of the most annoying sounds for a bike. To start it, like its compatriot the Enfield Bullet, you had to pump it with the kick lever many times before, before kicking it into life. The Kick start itself functioned as the gear lever too, which was a unique feature. When you kicked it into life, everybody in the neighbourhood would wake with that annoying “Ttun Ttun Ttun” sound. The smoke from the silencers was unbelievable, thick white smoke. In the late 70s’s and 80’s when bikes became popular among the young men in Kerala, the Yesdi was the bike of choice, except for Vijai super scooters with a pierced silencer. Though it didn’t match up to the bikes seen in English movies popular at the time like John Travolta’s in “Grease”, both made up with sheer noise and smoke, to create an ambience for the grand entry of the campus hero, on the bike or scooter, as the case might be. Both of these have ceased production, but even now I occasionally see an Yesdi around.

Rakesh used to call his bike his girlfriend and used to say, the reason that he didn’t have a real girl was, because “she wouldn’t let me ride her anytime I want, like my trusty bike”. Though to an outsider it might sound tasteless or insensitive, we were used to his foul mouth. We suspected he used foul language to hide his real self. We had found him to be a jolly chap with a sharp sense of humour. The girls in our gang too had seen through his rough and tough exterior. For all his dirty jokes and professed dislike for girls, they had a sort of affectionate indulgent attitude to him.

The ritual washing cycle we followed for our clothes while staying away from home, was a bit elaborate. It consisted of soaking all the clothes in one of 2 buckets we had. The guy who soaked his clothes in the bucket would continue to leave it there, till the next guy who needed to wash his clothes, would soak it in the second bucket. The next guy who needed the bucket would let loose a volley of the most colourful endearing terms he knew, and some which he used his own imagination to create. Depending on the impact of this attack, the 1st chap would immediately or in a little while, do a quick scrub, rinse and handover the empty bucket. One day, in the room I shared with 2 other friends, I was doing the weekly washing, while Rakesh was just outside the window, wiping his precious girlfriend clean. He was humming a familiar sounding tune, so I listened. He was humming Stevie Wonders song “Hello”. But, in true Rakesh fashion it had some embellishments. It went

“Hello,
is it me you are looking for,
I wonder where you are,
I wonder what you do,
Are you somewhere feeling lon’ly
Or, is someone loving you
…..and if he is, I’ll kicking his fxxxin balls off”- the last line, Rakesh’s own addition.