Motorcycle Diaries

There are not many things that I think are good old fun, but riding on the back of a motorcycle in the afternoon sun through Indian traffic is one of them. Aside from the wind in my face, the best part is India watching. One of the stranger American cultural influences in Guwahati seems to be the prevalence of Oakland Raiders apparel. I don’t know – maybe it was an Al Davis marketing campaigns a while back. The first man I saw with a Raider’s jacket was at a wedding. The second was yesterday on our way downtown. For those uninterested in football, the Raiders are bad in a sad way, not in a cool way that would make their stuff fashionable, so even in the US it’s unusual to see Raiders fans anywhere outside of Oakland.

We inquired about a basketball hoop at the sporting goods store and one of the guys ran to the warehouse and returned with an orange metal regulation hoop, just like we have at home. The owner insisted that it was used upside-down, with the hooks facing up and it was good to feel like an expert on something other than English. A little part of the hoop was broken so the guy ran back and got another one. We hung a red white and blue Team USA hoop on it and bought 2 basketballs for a total of Rs 2500, about $45. There were five employees in the tiny shop (though the American understanding of “employee” is a little different) and we talked in broken English about my height and how little Assamese I knew. Just before we left, the middle-aged woman with a beautiful smile ran out and got coffee for Prasanta and me in little plastic Nestle™ cups. She spoke to me only in Assamese so a bald man told me that the woman wanted her very tall fifteen year old daughter to come to the United States and that maybe we could get married and then she would be my mother-in-law. I don’t know what she really said, but he insisted we would be family. When we left we were all friends and I shook hands with everyone on the way out.

The trip home was smoky and dusty, illuminated by garbage fires and flashes of magnesium light from the welding shacks. I loved it. Riding on the back of motorcycle with a basketball hoop slung over my shoulder justifies a little staring, though the novelty is still mostly the white guy. Equally stare-able would have been the nine goats on leashes being led across four lanes of traffic or another motorcycle passenger carrying a fifteen foot pole like a lance. Or the Raiders fan that we passed again. But none of these things attracted much attention.