Sometimes you need good cause to throw a leg over a motorcycle and plot a course. A jaunt to a food truck qualifies.
So on a cold evening, I set out on a ride to find a food truck that would serve up chaat. My Apple map shows at least four, so I pick one and ride several miles on the Lawrence Expressway that runs for a couple of miles at a time, between each set of lights—just perfect for cafe racers.
Cafe racing was a motorcycle subculture that evolved in the early sixties in Britain where rebellious rockabillies raced custom bikes—lightened up with chopped-off fenders and fitted with swept-back pipes and conical megaphone mufflers—between the droopy traffic lights of London. And yes, Triumph motorcycles were at the thick of it.
I turn into Homestead Road and pull up just under a mile from the one-mile circular spaceship headquarters of the most valuable company in the world and about two miles from Homestead High that graduated its iconic founder and most famous student, Steve Jobs.
At the corner of a convenience store lot, a food truck bears stripes that proudly make up the colors of the Indian flag and stands in the shady swath of a sleepy willow. New Delhi Chaat is its promise and I stop at the counter to verify.
A helpful young lady listens patiently as I succumb to the lure of the menu and change my mind several times, even as I remind myself that chaat always renders my eyes bigger than my belly. Payment must be made at the adjoining store, so I step inside and approach the cashier.
We start talking and I find out that he’s a Pashtun from the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar—due east of the Khyber Pass on the ancient Silk Road connecting East and West and the conduit for over two millennia of invasions into the Indian subcontinent—from Greeks, Persians, and Turkic-Mongols. Britannia, of course, ruled the waves and took the sea route!
The cashier spoke Pashto and Urdu, unlike his blood-brothers across the Afghan border who speak Pashto and Dari. We talk cricket and that invariably leads to World Cup winning cricket captain and current Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan—a Pashtun.
I walk back out and the girl offers me a hot masala chai—on the house. I clutch it for warmth and languidly watch a Hindi movie playing on a TV screen mounted at the side of the food truck that aims to keep customer eyes as busy as their jaws.
I look at the menu again as I wait for my takeout and the dahi batata puri catches my attention. A gear clicks in my brain. I realize that I have the perfect way to explain the distinctive sound of a Harley Davidson motor. So, allow me:
b-a-T-a-T-a!
Say that aloud! Go loud on the Ts and stay soft on the As and the B. Try it again and listen to yourself as you speed it up. Do it.
Congratulations! You are now mimicking a four-stroke Harley V-twin engine.
The aural magic comes from irregular timing: the second T quickly follows the first and there’s a gap before it starts over again. That’s exactly how Harley twin cylinders fire: unevenly.
The staccato you hear from any motorcycle engine is actually a series of sonic pops that come from puffs of exhaust gas as they get squirted out of the combustion chamber at the end of each cycle. This is the T in the baTaTa. When the pops are evenly spaced, you’re listening to just another motorcycle and when they’re uneven, you’re losing your hearing to a thundering Harley.
If you have trouble visualizing a piston engine, look no further than down your leg. Imagine riding a bicycle, standing up. Your thigh is the piston and it reciprocates by going up and down. Your knee is the wristpin that turns this into rotary motion and your shank is the connecting rod that delivers this turning motion to the pedal. The pedal spins a crank which drives a chain to rotate the rear wheel. That’s exactly how a motorcycle works.
The difference of course is the power. Since you’d rather slurp dahi batata puri than sip octane, you’re condemned to deliver puny human-power, instead of brawny horsepower.
Your legs are also constrained to work so that one thigh goes up when the other goes down, since they are connected to diametrically opposing pedals. A two-cylinder motorcycle engine does not suffer this constraint since each piston is connected separately to the crankshaft that it can independently turn (using its own crankpin). However, they are usually timed to be opposed—when one piston is at the top, the other is at the bottom—to keep forces balanced, vibration minimized, and the rider’s gonads intact.
The pistons in a Harley Davidson V-twin have 45-degrees between them and connect into a single crankpin (imagine a single pedal on your bicycle for both legs), so they are constrained to move together in a manner that one cannot be fully up when the other is fully down. So one cylinder fires shortly after the other and they both wait restively until the next cycle. That’s one reason why Harleys produce less power for their displacement and combust fuel less completely.
Bad Science! Bitchin’ Sound!
But it is exactly this drama that sends baTaTa pops into your ears and rastaman vibrations into your pants.
That’s the Harley way! Just have your children early.
Excellent wondering. Both physically and of mind!