Mountains have a unique way of altering your perception; or rather, making you more aware, more sentient. The valleys, snow-capped peaks—everything surreal, yet somehow the most natural—defamiliarize you from reality. I often find myself wondering, “Is this really in front of my eyes, or an illusion? Perhaps just a screen? How do I view it differently than I would any such scene on a television?” You yearn for a grasp on the present, yet beauty has a way of slipping through your fingers, only becoming tangible once it has passed. These thoughts absorbed me so completely that I hit a pothole, jolting me back into the present, my eyes sharply focusing on the road.
I’m not the kind of person who gives lifts to strangers, but there was something about this figure, standing by the roadside, a magnetic peculiarity I couldn’t ignore. He had an air of perpetual youth about him, as though time had somehow overlooked him. I had stopped the bike before I even realized it.
“Are you going to Almora?” he asked, his voice bright with an innocent confidence, his
words lightly buoyant, like someone unburdened by the weight of years. “Uh... yes,” I replied hesitantly. There was something about him—some kind of transparency, like the barriers we build around ourselves didn’t exist for him.
“Oh, don’t worry. I won’t take much space, I’m not heavy,” he said, laughing in a way
that felt... genuine. There was no pretense in his laughter—just a raw, childlike honesty. Yet his laughter lingered in the air longer than it should have, like an echo that wasn’t supposed to be there. There was a strange emptiness in the way he said it—a lightness, a vagueness—and I laughed with him. I couldn’t place why, but something about his words pleasantly unsettled me.
He looked young—too young—but there was something timeless about him.
It struck me then: when was the last time I had heard laughter like that? Real laughter. I
hadn’t realized how long it had been until I heard it again. Without another word, he climbed on the back of my motorcycle. “Chalo,” he said simply, childishly, beautifully. And so we went.
As we rode, a realization slowly dawned on me. For someone who calls himself a
motorcyclist, I hadn’t truly been enjoying the ride in a long time. His laughter, the sheer joy in it, made me see that. I had forgotten the exhilaration—the “yaayyy” feeling—at every turn of the road, lost in the routine of it. Routine numbs sensation. What I fain would have seen earlier, now I saw unseeingly. But for him, every turn seemed like an adventure. His joy was palpable, and I realized I couldn't quite match it. Maybe I once could have, back when I was a child and the world was fresh and new. But now? Now I had become numb to it. I was alive, sure, but he was fully alive.
“Child is the father of man,” Wordsworth once wrote, and in this moment, I understood it. He hadn’t lost that essential essence, even as he grew older. He knew what life required of him, but he also knew how to live it.
“It's fun because it's not safe,” he said at one point, breaking the silence. Was he talking
about motorcycling in general, or my riding? I’ll never know, and perhaps neither did he. I
usually avoid taking pillions—too heavy, too disruptive to the rhythm of the ride—but he didn’t weigh me down, not at all.
He filled a void I didn’t know I had. Suddenly, the world felt vibrant again: the turns, the smiles, even the dust kicked up by the wheels. His arms barely clutched at my waist, and yet, I felt his presence only in my heart, as perhaps a soul too vibrant for the time he was born in.
There was something about him that seemed caught in time, like he had been wandering these roads for far longer than his youthful face suggested. His laughter didn’t belong to this place. It was too free, too untouched by the world’s weight.
He gave me that gift, the gift of truly seeing things, so casually, so effortlessly. It was as though a switch had been flipped inside me, reigniting a spark I had long forgotten. And yet, he gave it without intention, without even knowing. He was just living, fully alive and completely present, while being right there behind me.
By the time we reached his stop, he hopped off. “Thank you,” he said simply.
“Thank you,” I wanted to say, but the words stuck in my throat. Maybe because I knew he didn’t need to hear it. Maybe because it would have felt trivial. He didn’t need my gratitude.
For him, life was about the experience itself, not the acknowledgment.
“It's dangerous, yes,” he had said, “but it's fun.”
And he was right. It all is. I don’t have his name. I don’t have a picture. In fact, now that I
think of it, did I ever really look at his face? But I have this feeling, this trace of him inside me, reminding me what it means to be alive. He left me with a feeling, an uneasiness mixed with a strange peace, and an odd absence. Was he even real? He certainly was more real than most presences in life... I don’t know. But I do know that because of him, I felt alive again, and I will continue to, as long as he exists in my memory.
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Jyotirmoy Joshi is a Ph.D scholar at the Department of English and Modern European Languages, Univeristy of Lucknow. His research interests include Fantasy Literature and Mental Health. A motorcyclist and self-confessed Walter Mitty, he proudly identifies as a Liberal Humanist, Ravenclaw, and a Bardolater. A unique blend of idyllic fantasies and dark eccentric thrillers has shaped his perspective. He enjoys films, doodling, Enlightenment literature, F1, MotoGP, and motorcycling through the Himalayas. His work has been published in The Criterion, Rhetorica: A Literary Journal of Arts, Film Comment, Science Fiction Book Reviews, and Fantasy Café.
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