Thirty Seconds
Any evening, Brooklyn Apartments, Mumbai
You hear him before you see him, and you hear him before he turns into the lane.
There is no other engine that does what that one does. It doesn't hum or whine; it thumps — a slow, unhurried beat that comes off the walls of the buildings and arrives in the flat a good half-minute before he does. Mum hears it from the kitchen and puts the tea on. I hear it from wherever I am and stop doing whatever I was doing. Nobody in this house has ever needed a doorbell.
Then the engine cuts, and the flat fills with the small sounds of arriving: the groan of the centre stand, the click of the chin strap, and afterwards, for a long time, the tick-tick-tick of the metal cooling down.
The helmet lives on the shelf by the door. Hard as a pot on the outside, and inside, a sponge the color of weak tea. When I lift it — with both hands, because it is heavy — and put my face into it, it smells of him — Pappa. Sweat and hair and a thin edge of petrol, and something else I have no word for, which is simply the smell of a helmet that a man has been wearing in the sun.
On Sundays we are four on one bike, which is what everybody is.
I get the tank. This is the best seat in the city and I know it. My hands go on the handlebar in the middle, between his, which is where the pilot's hands go, and if I keep my elbows just so I am not being carried anywhere — I am flying this thing myself, low over Andheri, wind coming straight into my face and making my eyes stream. Mum is behind him, sideways, her sari gathered in one fist, my sister between them. The road goes under my feet at a speed nobody mentions. At a signal, the engine idles and shakes right through me, thump, thump, thump, like something with an opinion.
By the time we get home there is dust on my lips. I can taste it. There's grit in my scalp that will still be there at bath time, and my hair has gone into one solid shape, and my ears are warm and ringing from the wind.
Then one year my head is in his line of sight and I am moved to the back.
The back is a different country. Nobody looks at me there. I hold the rail behind the seat, and the city goes past sideways instead of towards me, and I get to do the thing you can only do as a pillion — which is to go entirely somewhere else. I read hoardings without meaning to. I count the white marks on the road. Whole plots unfold back there, whole conversations I plan to have and never do, and at a long signal I put my forehead against his back for a second, and he doesn't say anything about it, and the light changes.
Everyone is safer now, and I'm glad of it — helmets for all, seatbelts, four doors, nobody's child on a tank at forty. I wouldn't undo any of it.
But the car is quiet, and the new scooters downstairs are quieter still, and my phone tells me when someone is five minutes away, which is more accurate and less useful. The engine that announced Pappa is gone, and with it that half-minute — the thirty seconds the whole house had to be ready for him, to put the tea on, to stop what we were doing, to be already happy before he walked in.
Editor's Note: The author conceived this article from her lived experiences and drafted it with assistance from Claude, using her own inputs and reflections. The illustrations were generated with Midjourney.
(Kanchan Shine is a daydreamer with a notebook. She reads more than is sensible, watches people slightly longer than is polite, and has never lost the habit of asking how a thing works — or when it quietly stopped working that way. She's an author and former entrepreneur, now serving as Chief Learning and Innovation Officer for Hurix Digital, where her weekdays go to learning design and artificial intelligence. She's also the author of Sticky Learning: From A to Z. Here, she's off duty — writing about whatever she's noticing at the moment.)