LOST IN THE HOMELAND

We ride the Honda Africa Twin back to its roots. Well, sort of

- Ruman Devmane

The night before was nothing like this warm, happy picture you see here. Nobody was laughing in the grimly lit hotel room I had hesitantly walked into, and I certainly wasn’t when the lights went out well past midnight amidst a severe thunderstorm. Seated uncomfortably on a plastic chair across from one Paraza Yasharahla OliverSrson, a man with an acceptable New York accent who, chomping on three pomegranates in quick succession, looked straight out of Botswana or Namibia. To my deeply conditioned Indian eye, there’s no difference between the two. It didn’t really matter in that moment, I suppose. He wasn’t from either, anyway.

What on Earth was I doing in the hotel room of a stranger who looked nothing like me, with a name unlike any other I’d heard before, in the dead of the night, that too? I think I kept asking myself that question every five minutes or so as well. Paraza was a well-meaning American national, but years of ingrained racism made it hard for me to think so at that time. Not helping was his broad, beefy frame or that he was wearing an Agbada, a traditional African robe. The colour of his skin overshadowed his patience with answering all my vague lines of inquiry. I didn’t know my experiments with discovery would start off with fighting myself. This was a first.