It is always in the witching hours that the ghosts of the past assemble, crowding around me as regrets to torment my sleepless mind. I recall the roads not taken, the sights not seen, the words left unspoken and the hills not climbed. I agonise over what might have been. The regrets surge in a sudden flood, banishing any trace of drowsiness. And suddenly I am fully awake, wondering what it was that rudely jolted me to the present from my wanderings in the past.
So, I lie in bed, uneasy in liminal wakefulness, still poised between insistent ‘what ifs’ and some half-remembered dream. A question mark hangs over what could have nudged me to wakefulness.
It must have been some sound. It returns—closer now, insistent. Without warning, it swells into a deep, throaty roar. Even though muffled by the double glazing of the windows and the balcony door, it seems to be the deep growl of a motorcycle. I silently curse the unseen rider and others who tear along the straight stretch near my building, shattering the night’s fragile peace.
Motorcycles—that is another regret! When I was young, so very long ago, I had the great ambition to ride a bike that could roar like that! A Harley-Davidson, perhaps, or an Indian Chief. Even a Royal Enfield Bullet would have sufficed; but none of my friends owned even that.
Illustration: Job P.K.
While I am recalling my yearning for bikes, the nightrider makes one more pass under my balcony. Though loud, the ‘Whroooom!’ is still too muffled for me to identify the machine. I wonder if it is a BMW 1000, or could it be a Kawasaki Ninja? Or is the biker a discerning rider and prefers the torque advantage of the Harley over the raw horsepower of the Kawasaki?
I don’t know where the biker lives, but it must be nearby. He comes tearing down the road, easily over 100 kilometres per hour by the sound. He then brakes hard for the U-turn at the crossroads a kilometre away. As the machine aggressively downshifts gears for the turn and accelerates again, the decibel level shoots up further. The growling monster then races past my apartment on the opposite carriageway. Night after night, between two and four in the morning—when only devils and demons prowl—he makes five or six such manic circuits beneath my balcony.
Last Saturday, when sleep eluded me for no reason at all, I resolved to unmask the source of that confident roar. I stepped on to the balcony and waited for the ghost rider.
From my penthouse vantage, the view was serene. The streetlamps splashed circles of light on the deserted road, stretching into the distance. A solitary dog limped along, sniffing the base of each lamppost. The traffic lights at the crossroads blinked amber. On the footpath of the far carriageway, a lumpy bundle of rags and blankets lay huddled. Perhaps it was a beggar, the same one who seeks alms at our condo gate, sleeping perilously close to speeding traffic.
Standing alone on a balcony in the middle of the night can be a strangely metaphysical experience. The silence invites philosophy: listing regrets, counting small mercies. After midnight, odd thoughts rise unbidden from forgotten corners of the mind, half-dreams corrupted by wakefulness. Gazing at the beggar huddled by the roadside, I recalled an old, bitter aphorism: if the poor were paid to die for the rich, they might finally earn a decent living.
I was still lost in these strange thoughts when I heard the growl of the approaching nightrider. With a jolt, I realised it was not a motorcycle at all. It was a car. It came with a rush, and I saw that it was a squat road-hugging monster, built for brutal power. It flashed past below: low, wide, predatory. A Lamborghini, almost certainly the Revuelto.
The car shot past under my balcony, then screeched a kilometre away as it did a U-turn, before thundering back on the opposite side, missing the bundled sleeper by mere inches. Headlights flared again moments later, this time on my side of the road. I stood transfixed as the machine completed five frenzied laps at ferocious speed, each pass more aggressive than the last, before vanishing with a final growl.
I remained on the balcony long after the sound had faded, reflecting on regrets and improbable mercies.
I wondered whether the beggar, wrapped in his thin rags by the roadside, ever silently thanked fate that no speeding car had ever veered on to the pavement.
I wondered whether the owner of that Lamborghini ever regretted the purchase—never having the guts to drive the high-performance machine.
I wondered whether he regretted the absence of an endless straight road where his dear son could race the car at 300km/h.
I even wondered whether some desperate driver somewhere regretted that the Richie Rich Baba had not struck the sleeper—for then he could have claimed to be at the wheel, and Baba’s Daddy Ji would have provided generous compensation to him for taking the rap.
That balcony is indeed a strange place. In the dead of night, it breeds the strangest thoughts!
K.C. Verma is former chief of R&AW. kcverma345@gmail.com