Novel intro - motorcycle crash in India

Calcutta, Bengal

Mo opened the throttle and aimed the bike dead ahead. He spat an insect into the dust and pulled the old Enfield straight, right down the middle of Sudder Street, Calcutta. It was early morning and dawn's promise was submitting to the dust and clamour of a new day. Chaos consumed Sudder Street and Sudder Street consumed Mo. He needed food, he needed petrol, he needed a smoke, but most of all he needed sleep. The all-night ride from the hills had wiped him out and he was now riding on auto-pilot. He spat out another fly, blinked away the dust and heaved a sigh. The city meant civilisation. It meant hotels. It meant rest.

    His Enfield Bullet flew past a group of children loading food into a cart. They seemed barely to notice Mo in the sensory soup that is early morning Calcutta. He yawned and another insect hit him in the face, making him swerve towards a cow looking on in unblinking silence from the side of the street, ruminating, oblivious.  He pulled in the clutch and kicked the Bullet into second. Its engine groaned to a higher pitch as he held a straight course, the bike's frame rattling, its handlebars wrenching his arms right up to his shoulder sockets. He tightened his grip, straightened and leaned back as the Bullet accelerated and dragged itself and its rider forward. He glanced left and a Hindustan Ambassador rolled into view alongside him. He gassed up to pass it. The driver matched his acceleration and Mo peered left again to catch his eye. 

Behind the wheel sat a middle-aged white man in a safari suit and neatly-trimmed grey beard. The driver didn’t return Mo’s gaze and so he opened up the Bullet all the way, lurched ahead of the Hindustan and pulled in front to take a left. He looked up the street. A cow directly ahead of him stared back and chewed with indifference. Mo braked. The bike swung left and started to fall away. He held on and heaved upwards as the engine screamed in protest. The tyres screeched. The cow looked on and chewed. The Ambassador kept on rolling.  

As Mo struck the the Ambassador's radiator grill, he felt the bike drop from beneath him, spinning away. He tried in desperation to grab hold of something, but there was nothing left to grab and he clawed at space as he rushed upwards and forwards to the Hindustan's windscreen. He found himself paralysed, stationary and stranded in a snap-shot outside time. He could see people around him looking on in half interest, the cow as it chewed, the beaten old Enfield, broken but raging amid the wreckage of a food cart by the road, and the Ambassador’s driver staring, neither in fury nor in fear, but in disbelief, at Mo pivoted on the bonnet and gazing back at him. Their eyes locked in a moment's shared terror, etching the driver’s image into Mo's consciousness. The driver just stared. And Mo stared back. The freeze-frame switched back to motion as the windscreen smashed into Mo's face. Both side windows blew out like fireworks in a Bengal sky as Mo’s legs whipped into the air behind him and catapulted him onto the car’s roof. He slid along on the side of his head, then down into the shattered rear window. The glass caved in and the edges dragged like a cheese grater along his face. He sprang free of the car’s back shelf, fell feet first to the rear bumper, then dropped broken and semi-conscious in the road behind. 

In the white-out of pain and shock, Mo was vaguely aware of something rubbery in his mouth. He coughed it out, and what looked like a rolled rasher of bacon flopped impotently onto the ground in front of him. Mo just had time to register that it was an ear before the nausea overtook him. He wanted to vomit, but his convulsions produced only spasms of flesh and broken bones. His right clavicle stuck out from his throat, but the adrenaline and fear conspired to keep him conscious for a few seconds more and as blood and darkness descended over him, blood and glass filling his eyes and his consciousness fading. He mustered his remaining senses. Squinting through the grains of windscreen glass, focussed on trying to read and repeat to himself the number and make of the car, which was already revving its engine and spitting oil and exhaust into his face as it fled, its horn blaring, its engine racing in desperation to get away.

The first thing to leave Mo was the sound of the crowd gathering around him, followed by all feeling from his legs and lower body, then finally the lights went out and he was left in a pool of oil and glass, broken and alone in the dark.