With the plans congealing for the weekend, we waited with sober and bated breath. Spent the night before neatening out the bikeyard and my balcony w/s. Woke at six and hung around, neat and sober till about 11:30 when Shukla turned up. He lives right next door and we stripped and re-assembled his roadking last winter. Shukla happens to be an authority on the RD350. Once while working for LML, he scoured the countryside in the course of his job buying entire lots of RD350 parts from spares shops he came across in small towns. He just sold his bike for a lakh (the sixth machine in India – Made in Japan on the gearbox and all). In a little while we heard the old familiar twin-port roar approaching and Chetan rolled in with Lalit and Ameya. Lalit brought his red Jawa, Ameya was on the same bike he rode in from Pune to Delhi (cost of fuel = Rs 3,500, he said). Soon we were alternating between parking the bike and swapping rides around the block on each other’s machines.