Bhasad

Another classy new word I have learnt, bhasad translates roughly to ‘fuck up’ but I’m not too sure about the exact meaning, a friend of mine who works with Microsoft in technical support taught it to me. The reason I mention where he works is just to illustrate in what situation it would be used. Everyone who has ever use windows, has at one time or the other come across a situation which could be summed up as ‘bhasad ho gaya”.

Yesterday was bhasad, everything that could go wrong went wrong. For those who have read my previous posts you can guess where all the problems started, with my bike. My grandparents live in Gurgaon, Delhi’s fastest growing suburb, (read Mr Nose & Mr truck for more details) and I try visit the at least once a week. Yesterday as I was leaving for Gurgaon, I noticed that the chain of my bike was rattling against the chain guard; I would have ignored it as I was running a bit late but as fate would have it, the chain got stuck. When I removed the cover I found the chain had gotten stuck on the cover twisting it out of shape. Since I hadn’t much time, I took the cover off and left it at home, planning to fix it when I got home. Running the bike without the chain cover isn’t much of an issue, particularly since I didn’t intend to keep it uncovered for long. Considering the issue resolved, I set off for Gurgaon.

The road to Gurgaon runs through some rather dusty stretches, also, the roads aren’t always in the best state of repair and there a lot of stones lying on the road. I have been hit in the face by these stones often enough to force me to drive with my visor permanently down. Since my visor is pretty badly scratched today I had the bright idea of wearing my glasses while driving, unfortunately since I cant put the helmet on while wearing my glasses, I put them into my pocket and promptly forgot about them. I only remembered about them, five minutes into the trip, reaching for them, I found to my dismay that my pocket was empty. Stopping, I searched through my pockets, bag and anywhere else I may have put them to no avail, bugger, they were bloody expensive. Somewhere along the route I must have lost them, probably over some speed bump (which I have a tendency to tackle with much enthusiasm). Depressed I continued, I love driving and I soon forgot about the loss and enjoyed the drive as I always do.

Thanks some random whim of the Haryana police, in order to get to my grandparents place, I actually have to drive a kilometre past their house, take a U-turn and drive back. I like this U-turn; mainly because on my bike I can take it easier than people in cars and generally rip out of the turn, while cars that started the turn with me must carefully navigate around the median and watch for oncoming traffic. Taking the turn as usual, a wrung the throttle hard and my bike leapt forward, I might have released the clutch a bit too fast for my front wheel left the ground briefly. This only made me happier, thus lost in contemplations of how wonderful my bike was, I didn’t notice something was going wrong. I was brought out of my reveries by a loud ‘growl’ from the rear half of my bike, accompanied by a sudden loss of power. Thinking I had hit a false neutral while shifting, I desperately tried to shift into gear, tapping up, tapping down, even sideways; nothing happened. An Innova was coming up my left, fast, shit scared, I frantically signalled with my left hand to get him to slow down, seeing he had, I guided my bike left, across the road to the pavement. Stopping to look, I could see the sprocket on my rear wheel, empty. I was a bit confused, where was the chain? Putting my bike up on the main stand, I moved the wheel back and forth hoping to find the chain. It took a while for me to realise the chain must have broken. Walking back to the intersection, I was just in time to find a rag-picker retrieving the chain from the middle of the road and putting it into his rickshaw, luckily, he gave it back to me.

Greasy chain wrapped around my hand, helmet hung off my wrist and heavy bag across my shoulders, I had to drag my bike more than a kilometre in the sun till I found a garage where I could get the chain fixed. Correction it wasn’t a garage, it was just a guy with a box of tools and a sign that said ‘puntchur repair’, it took him about 15 minutes to put the chain back on, during which one guy offered me a stolen Nokia N-series and another guy offered me his sister. Though both were tempting, I had but enough for the work being done on my bike.

The chain has held though, I managed the trip back today without incident, though I did have to drive slowly, ignoring all temptations to do otherwise.