Last month, I went on a holiday. I didn’t want to go but I had to go and that was the first problem.

The second problem was that I decided, foolishly, to not take my laptop with me. I wanted to try going without too much internet access for a week, or maximum 10 days, the holiday was supposed to last.

It started fine. Like any other holiday. But I was bored pretty quickly. I had taken my sketchbook to draw from life but on the first day I didn’t even bother to take it out. I took it out on the second or third day and drew a little something. What I drew was so bad, so utterly ugly and horrible in every way possible, so inhumanely cruel and sick… okay you get the point; that I never touched the sketchbook throughout the entire holiday, no matter how bored I got. In fact, I had decided to give up on drawing and any kind of creative pursuit at all.

The third problem arrived when my mother got sick. Some kind of viral infection that led to fever and coughing. Could have been the newest virus that humanity bestowed upon itself. She got sick and that meant an extension to the holiday and my boredom and self-loathing.

Problem number four: I caught the virus and got sick as well. Further extension and suffering; on top of the boredom and self-loathing. Then my sister also got sick but she recovered quickly.

Fifth problem was that I was lying around in bed and feeling pretty shitty about everything and so I thought, a bath would do me some good, once the fever was gone. So, I went to the bathroom to turn on the water heater.

It was a tiny bathroom but as it turned out, not tiny enough. My sister had just taken a bath and the floor was wet. I didn’t want to get my bare feet wet. There were bathroom slippers one could wear but I just wanted to turn on the water heater on the wall so I didn’t put the slippers on. Instead, I stood on the floor mat and leaned forward. I was going to use one hand to lean against the wall and the other hand to turn on the heater. If the bathroom had been even tinier, I wouldn’t have had to lean. But I had to lean and as soon as I put my hand on the wall, I realized that the wall was wet as well.

Before I could think, “uh-oh”, my hand slipped on the wall. Simultaneously, the floor mat slipped under my feet. And I had a great fall.

I scratched my shin pretty well and also bent the fingers on my hand a bit. Other than that, different parts of my body smacked into different parts of the bathroom. I gave up on the idea of a bath and went back to bed.

What number were we on? Oh yes, problem number six was that after I recovered from the fever, I developed some kind of pain in my throat which made swallowing anything really hard. Eating food became a chore. And a painful one at that. This problem outlasted the fever and the pain from the tumble in the bathroom.

Finally, after many boring days, we finally recovered enough and then I walked right into the biggest problem of the holiday. Lucky number seven!

We decided to go on a little road trip. We had a car but it would have been a bit crowded so I decided to drive a borrowed scooter up a mountain on a steep, narrow, curvy road. Once again, I didn’t really want to go on this road trip, but I had to. And when I found out that the rear brakes of the scooter were dodgy, I didn’t want to ride up on a scooter, but I did anyway. I ignored every warning my gut was giving me and so my gut was like, “Fuck it then dude, do whatever you want!”

So, I got on the scooter with my 11-year-old cousin and her 3-month-old Shih Tzu. As we were going up the mountain, I noticed that there was construction of new houses going on in every village next to the road. India is developing after all. But it meant that trucks carrying sand and gravel were going up and down this road every day, lurching from side to side in the hairpin turns, spilling their load all over the road. The entire road up the mountain had sand and gravel covering most of it. When a road gets covered in debris like this and cars drive over it, the two channels where the cars’ tires are, become clean and all the debris gets collected on the sides of the road with some of it in the middle of the road.

Going up the road, I was like, “Oh man, this is going to be really, really, dangerous coming down this road.” Going uphill is still okay because you don’t need to use your brakes that much and your speed doesn’t get out of control anywhere. I kept riding in the channels made by the cars where there was no debris.

The only thing I thought was that while coming down, I can’t take my little cousin on the pillion seat. Or the puppy on the footboard. It’s too dangerous. But I never went further than that. If I was going to send my cousin in the car, then I’d have to take my sister as a pillion. What about her safety? What about my own safety? All I thought was, just go down carefully, drive slowly, brake lightly, and don’t go to the side of the road on to the sand and gravel. But if I had continued thinking, I could have asked myself, “That’s all fine and dandy but what are you going to do if a big vehicle comes up from the other side? What if a vehicle comes suddenly at a blind turn? What if you have to move to the side in an emergency? What will you do then?”

I never went that far in my thinking. I sent my cousin and her dog in the car and took on my poor sister as a pillion. Going down I realized that the rear brake is not just dodgy but on this steep a road, it’s completely useless. But my gut had given up warning me by now and I got kind of relaxed. I drove slowly, in the clear channels and avoided going to the side. I made it almost three quarters of the way down like this. Which relaxed me further. Maybe at some level I felt that I was worried for nothing.

Then it happened. I was relaxed and gabbing away with my sister. A steep and sharp curve. I was in the channel, close to the middle of the road. A large car showed up suddenly at the blind curve. I saw the gravel and sand on the side of the road and panicked. There was a decent fall on the other side of the road with no guard rails. I had no choice but to move to the side of the road while trying to brake as gently as possible with both brakes, while knowing that the rear is not doing anything. All the braking force is on the front.

Anyone who’s ridden a motorcycle or a scooter knows what happens next. Oh, BTW FYI, this 125CC scooter didn’t have ABS. Now you definitely know what happens next. The front wheel locks as soon as we hit the gravel. We low side. The front of the scooter falls from under me and all I can think of is, “Fuck! I knew it!”

Long story short, I had a crash. The worst crash of my life. But as far as crashes go, it wasn’t bad at all. Fortunately, my sister’s injuries were fewer than mine. That made me feel a little better. Still, as a rider who takes on a pillion, it’s super embarrassing, if nothing else, to cause your unsuspecting pillion any kind of injury or harm.

I got some decent scratches on my knees and hands. Since this was a borrowed scooter, I wasn’t wearing gloves. Thankfully, I was wearing my leather riding jacket just coz I like it and had taken it on the holiday despite no reason to think that I’d be riding. My right arm got crushed under my own weight in a twisted position so I probably tore some muscles inside it. Nothing too bad. It’s almost healed already. And again, thankfully, no broken bones.

After coming back from the hospital, I realized problem number 8. We would have to extend the holiday a bit more because there was no way I was going to be able to travel for a few days!

In the end I spent 17 days on this holiday I didn’t want to go on. I got sick and hurt and miserably bored and full of negative thoughts about my creativity and lack of skills. I had started building some good momentum in terms of work before the holiday. Which is why I didn’t want to go and lose the momentum. And when I got back, I had negative momentum. I think I’m finally starting to move in the right direction again.