I FEEL GOOD

The Royal Enfield Classic 650 is a bike that isn't and shouldn't be defined by numbers alone

- By Pablo Chaterji

It's early in the morning, the kind where the cold nips at your neck and you wonder if bed would have been a saner choice. The mist wraps Coonoor in a familiar embrace, threading through the tea estates with a quiet I've known since boyhood; I grew up in the Nilgiris, having gone to boarding school here. I'm astride the Royal Enfield Classic 650, a bike that's been loitering in my head since Kartik rode it in the UK last year, the lucky so-and-so. Back then, it was all cows-and-meadows and ye olde pubs an English idyll that perfectly suited its retro swagger. But here, in the Nilgiris, it feels like the bike's come home to a place it didn't quite know it belonged. Coonoor, with its colonial bungalows and roads that meander like a drunk uncle, feels like it's been saving a seat for this bike since the Brits left their teapots behind.

Now, I love big retro bikes and I cannot lie, the kind that make you feel like you're starring in your own 1950's movie, with a soundtrack of crackling vinyl. The Classic 650 is that bike. It's not about numbers and sundry specifications those have been dissected to death after the UK ride, and I'm not here to bore you with horsepower or torque curves (but, just in case, the bike makes 46.4 bhp and 5.33 kgm; that's all you really need to know). No, this thing is about the cliched. 'feel' of it, the way it settles into your life like a well-worn bomber jacket.