My Father's Scooter Outlived Him
It still starts on the second kick, the way he taught it.
Eleven days after we carried my father out of the house, his scooter started on the second kick, and I stood in the parking shed crying over a machine like it had said his name. It is a 1994 Bajaj Chetak, grey, with a dent on the front mudguard shaped like a half moon.
Everyone in the building knew that scooter. It had a personality the way old machines do, which is to say it had rules. You tilted it to the left before starting, all the way, until petrol found the carburetor. You ignored the first kick, which was only a formality... The second kick was the real one. If it rained, you waited, because the Chetak did not believe in urgency and neither did my father.
He taught me the ritual when I was fifteen, in the same tone he used for everything sacred, which was the tone of a man explaining something obvious to a beloved idiot. "Left tilt. Wait. Second kick. Why are you rushing? Is the road leaving?"
He died on a Thursday in January.
Heart, sudden, sixty-one. The kind of death where the tea he had poured was still warm when the neighbors came running.
For the first month, nobody touched the scooter. It sat under its faded grey cover in the shed like a body under a sheet, and I am sorry for that sentence but that is exactly what it looked like, and grief does not let you choose your comparisons.
My uncle suggested selling it before the paperwork got complicated. My mother said, "Ask the boy." I was thirty-two years old and everyone still called me the boy, and the boy said no so fast it surprised the whole room.
I could not have explained it then... The scooter was worth maybe eight thousand rupees. But my father had touched that machine every single day for twenty-seven years. The handle grips had worn into the shape of his hands. The left one is smoother, because he gripped harder on the left, a thing I only know because my own palms found the smoothness later and understood.
For a year, I did not ride it. I only started it.
Every Sunday morning I went down to the shed, pulled off the cover, tilted it left, waited, and gave it the second kick. The engine would catch with that sound, that exact ridiculous beloved sound, somewhere between a cough and a purr, and I would let it run for five minutes while I stood there doing nothing. The watchman thought I had lost my mind... Maybe I had. A friend who lost her mother once told me she still charged her mother's phone every night, and I never asked why after the scooter, because I knew.
Grief is a machine you inherit with no manual. Some mornings it refuses to start, and some mornings it catches on the second kick, exactly the way he taught it.
The turn came at the service center, of all places.
Month thirteen. The clutch cable had frayed and I took it to Iqbal Auto Works, the shop my father had used since before I existed. Iqbal bhai is seventy now, half glasses, hands permanently the color of engine oil. He saw the scooter come in and put down his chai.
"Where is saab?" he asked.
I told him... He was quiet for a while, wiped his hands on a rag that made them dirtier, and then he told me a story I had never heard.
For six years, my father had stopped at this shop every morning on his way to work. Not for repairs. There was a boy, Iqbal bhai's sister's son, who studied at the municipal school two kilometers past my father's office. Every morning the boy waited at the shop, and every morning my father took him to school on that scooter, and every afternoon a tempo driver brought him back.
Six years. Rain, winter, board exam days. When the boy passed his twelfth standard, my father attended the little celebration at the shop and ate two ladoos and told nobody at home.
"That boy is in Pune now," Iqbal bhai said. "Civil engineer. He asked about saab last Diwali."
I rode home very slowly. There is a man building bridges somewhere because my father had a scooter and a spare seat and never once thought it was worth mentioning at dinner.
I searched my memory for six years of mornings and found nothing, no clue, only my father leaving at the same time every day with his tiffin bungeed to the back. You think grief is about losing the person you knew. Nobody warns you that you also lose the person you were still finding out about, one story at a time, from men in oil-stained shops.
That night I wrote about it, badly, at two in the morning. I had never written a poem in my life. It came out anyway, twenty lines about a spare seat. I posted it on a community wall for poets because I could not say any of it to my family without my voice breaking, and strangers are sometimes the only safe container. A woman I have never met replied that her mother's sewing machine still had a dress half finished in it, and she could not decide if finishing it would be an act of love or a trespass. We are everywhere, we keepers of running machines. Later I read everything I could find about grief, and the poems helped more than the advice did, because poems do not tell you to move on. They just sit with you in the shed.
This winter, on his second death anniversary, I woke at five and could not stay in the flat. I took the scooter out onto the highway service road. January fog, the thick kind, the kind he used to ride through to get milk before any of us woke up. The road was completely empty. Streetlights hung in the white like dissolving tablets. Visibility thirty meters, maybe less, and the Chetak's weak yellow headlamp making its small honest effort.
Somewhere on that empty road it stopped being sad.
I cannot tell you the exact moment... The engine held its note, the fog opened thirty meters at a time, exactly enough road to keep going, and I heard myself laugh inside the helmet because that is the entire lesson, that was always his entire lesson. You do not get to see the whole road. You get thirty meters and a machine that starts if you respect it, and you go slowly, and you carry whoever needs carrying, and you keep the biggest kindnesses off the record. Everything I know about memory lives in second gear.
The scooter is twenty-two years older than the man who bought it ever got to be with it. The paperwork finally says my name, which feels like a clerical error the universe made and I am not going to report.
Last Sunday my nephew, who is fifteen, came down to the shed with me. I showed him the ritual. Left tilt, all the way. Wait. Ignore the first kick, it is only a formality.
"Why are you rushing?" I heard myself say. "Is the road leaving?"
Second kick... It started, of course. It always starts. It was taught by a careful man.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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