Two machines, one retired

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I did not buy Basanti to be fast. I bought her because a friend who had ridden to Khardung La three times told me the Himalayan was the only bike he trusted to break down somewhere he could actually fix it. That turned out to be exactly the right reason.

She is slow on the highway and I have made peace with that. Where she comes alive is the stuff that scares other bikes: loose gravel switchbacks, river crossings above 4,000 m, the kind of broken tarmac that isn't really tarmac anymore. The long-travel suspension soaks it up and the torque low down means I almost never have to think about which gear I'm in.

Forty-two thousand kilometres in, she has been dropped more times than I'll admit, ridden through one hailstorm I should have sat out, and started first kick at −6°C in Sarchu when nothing else in the camp would. The name stuck after the second puncture in Spiti, when a mechanic in Kaza patched the tube, looked at the odometer, and said "yeh toh Basanti hai, chalti rahegi." She has.

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Frankie was the first bike that was properly mine, and he taught me almost everything I got wrong before I got it right. Sixty-three thousand kilometres, most of them learning: how to read a fuel gauge that lied, how to pack light and still overpack, how a thumper's beat changes just before something needs attention.

He was never built for the high mountains and I stopped pretending otherwise after one overheated crawl up a Ghat in August. But for long, warm, tar highways at a steady 80, there is still nothing I have owned that makes distance feel as unhurried.

He is retired now, not sold — parked in the corner of the garage where I can see him. Some bikes you move on. This one stays.