Click on image

This book will be read because there’s a photo of this scruffy senior-citizen type with an impish grin at the back. What on earth is this chap doing with a bike up on Khardung La? And it seems he’s a speech therapist! Must find out more.

It fills you with the urge to live life to the fullest! To stop idly daydreaming and talking about what you want to do — and go out and DO it!

Ajit Harisinghani had a client who’d had a stroke. As he gradually worked to coax him back to his former communication ability, they discovered they had bikes in common. When he came for his last session, he brought Harisinghani a book, Keynote, written by JRD Tata with one line highlighted: "the thrill and sense of self-fulfilment obtained from living a little dangerously."

Shortly thereafter, Harisinghani took a month off work and climbed onto his Enfield and travelled all the way from Pune to Leh and on to Jammu. He did not, however, leave his packet of cigarettes behind. Later, he wrote this book and dedicated it not to his patient but to JRD. It tries to convince you that an Enfield is actually a person. According to the author, it’s a temperamental woman disguised as a motorcycle and the relationship is not exactly one of convenience. Sometimes she can be adamant and uncooperative and very difficult to reason with. She can even, he insists, sense his moods and intentions.

You won’t have to sit down with your dictionary or get a headache trying to concentrate on what exactly he’s trying to say. The book has an easy flow and though it offers a few occasions of glee to English-teacher-types, allowing them to indulge in a supercilious sneer or two (”This hotel sure was different from the Taj Intercontinental!”) and some rather giddying skipping between tenses — by and large the language is simple, direct, unpretentious and great fun (Hyenas howled for their mates all through that night but I had mine and didn’t need to). It might make the Richard Dawkins brigade slap their foreheads in exasperation. Near Pali, Harisinghani meets a fakir cycling all the way from Vasai to Ajmer and then to Mecca. They share a few moments of peace and communion — and, if you’ll pardon the prim rebuke — a BIDI as well.

This Sufi king’s blessings apparently save him from being turned to keema by high-beaming trucks as night falls on the NH8, and then again later when he finds himself wedged, still seated on his bike, between rocks in a fast-flowing river in Ladakh.

At Khardung La, Harisinghani revels in the complete lack of vegetation, and the sound of the breeze whistling “OM” between the multicoloured rocks and stark white snow. He feels awed reverence (and refrains, thank goodness, from lighting up).

Even Leh’s only Enfield mechanic later glumly urges, “Trust in god.” To be fair, though, the book has less of illogical cause-and-effect than it has of quiet peaceful moments (including representations from a range of religions, and Vipassana, and even “conscious delirium”) and is largely dominated by a quality of peace and one-ness with existence — from the sound of the roaring river Parvati and the caress of the breeze through the deodar forest on the road to Manali — of which Dawkins would thoroughly approve. There’s also a neat “Fauji se kabhi maar khaya hai?” dialogue which even the most ardent chest-thumping Dawkins groupie couldn’t help grinning in satisfaction at. It has something special to say to the Sindhis! This sadly diasporic community left most of its stories behind. Harisinghani manages to work in a lovely, lovely one that his mother told him about her father, a doctor in Larkana.

And it shows how good things come to those who know Marathi. At a little farm in the picturesque valley of Thunder where he found accommodation, Harisinghani sat at the top of a staircase. Two soldiers climbed up, chatting in Marathi, one with a bottle of rum in his hands. “Vikaaychi ahe ka?” he asked with loving eye on bottle. So delighted were these Latur boys at this voice from home that they gifted it to him, proclaiming him “aapla Marathi manoos.” Harisinghani also gives other useful tips such as how to get accommodation for the night in a camp for Scouts, which villages in Goa have a tourist population entirely European, Korean or Australian, and then makes you laugh at his descriptions of how to deal with the pigs when you’re perched on a pig toilet.

By the time you finish, you feel you’ve made a friend. Harisinghani’s writing comes from the heart and reading his book, you get a clear sense of an uncomplicated, sincere guy with easy priorities and no hang ups.