Quetta in the 1980s: the battle of the Kawasakis

My love of motorcycles is old. It started in the early 1980s in Quetta. That’s when I got my first motorcycle, a Yamaha YB-100. I was in high school then and had been asking my father to buy me a full size bicycle since I had outgrown my old junior’s bike, a 14 inches red Sohrab. Instead, my father got me the motorcycle, which was a sweet surprise. The Yamaha cost us Rs. 13000, if I recall correctly. There were only two Yamaha dealers in Quetta then, both located on Jinnah Road. And it was the best-selling bike in Quetta, in fact, in the entire province then. In big cities like Karachi and Hyderabad in Sindh and in other populous cities in Punjab, the Hondas ruled, especially the unbelievably fuel efficient Honda CD-70, available only in black in those days. The “mighty black mules” they were called. The day after the purchase, my motorbike was registered at the nearest motor vehicle registration office and soon after that I received a brand new pair of number plates, for front and back, marked: QAB-5098 (Quetta-B). 

In the absence of the Internet, smart phones and the 24/7 on-line games and social media culture---Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc.--- it was either outdoor sports like soccer, cricket and field hockey or, motorcycles that were the rage among the young and the young-at-heart then. Those who could afford and were into music either had their Sony Walkman or the cheaper Sanyo, Akai or Aiwa clones of the popular portable music player---the iPods of those days. Like most things then, TV channels for example, there were not many bike models to choose from. There was also the strict government set limitation on the engine size or horsepower of the motorcycles--- the “CCs” as they were called. The allowed engine size was 200cc then.
The biker community in the city included people of different ages and professions, and its activities revolved around few well known personalities, mainly the mechanics and some daredevil types---the stunt riders, or the showmen. There were also the collectors, the loaded guys who waxed and licked their rare machines but hardly rode them! Among the mechanics, three or four stood out who were loved and respected by the bikers. They were all uncanny characters, eccentrics in their own ways.  There was the famous Haji Ustad whose repair shop was on Masjid Road. Anybody who had some kind of connection with the universe of motorcycles knew him, directly or indirectly. A short guy with a gentle demeanor, always smiling but with sparkling, probing eyes, this highly skilled mechanic was the wizard of carburetor tuning, which meant he had the magic in his hands to make a bike race-worthy or race-ready.  I don’t think anybody among the bikers knew his real name. He was just that: Haji Ustad. The waiting line of racing enthusiasts at his garage was as long as that of chronic heart patients at the posh clinic of Dr. Manaf Tareen, the most qualified, and therefore the most expensive, heart specialist and, if my memory is not failing me, the sole heart surgeon in Quetta in those days. Getting your bike tuned and test-driven by Haji Ustad was like getting a Fender (guitar) tuned by Eric Clapton or a Stradivarius (violin) appreciated and confirmed for its concert-readiness by Yehudi Menuhin!

There was also Munir “Cowboy” Ustad. He was a real character. With garage on one of the side streets off the main Suraj Ganj Bazar, this mechanic was never seen wearing a shalwar kameez. He always wore ragged blue jeans, soaked in engine oil and grease, and colorful T-shirts. He had long, scraggly hair, in the hippy style. Soft spoken and a real laid-back guy, he resembled the legendary folk-rock singer Neil Young, the Canadian grand-daddy of grunge music. He was also a sort of rival of Haji Ustad. Typically, the bikers gravitated around one of these two motorcycle gurus. Munir Ustad had an old but immaculately maintained Yamaha DT-100 Enduro and was also considered its expert. The Enduro was a particularly popular bike and what made a good bike of this model stand out from the rest was the booming sound from its exhaust pipe that neatly ran along the main frame under the seat, it being a trail bike. No disrespect to Muhammad Rafi or Talat Mahmood, in terms of acoustics the Enduro was clearly the Kishore Kumar of the motorcycles. I say Kishore because it was only Kishore Kumar whose voice had both the power and the resonance, especially in his joyous songs, a quality of sound also present in the Enduro and which set it apart from the crowd.   

Mention must also be made of Deedar Ustad, the youngest of these mechanics and who had actually migrated from Hyderabad, Sindh to Quetta. For a while he worked with Munir Ustad, as his assistant or “chotoo”, but later on he opened his own joint on the eternally crowded Abdul Sattar Road.  His expertise was in overhauling old engines in such a way that, in terms of speed and power, they would actually outperform the new ones!

While there were many places where we used to race the bikes, the best place was this straight stretch of road, about 3kms long, in Spizand on the Bolan national highway that went through Mach and Sibi to Sindh and connected to the highways in the Punjab province. Mostly used by goods transporting heavy duty trucks that usually came along in pairs every thirty minutes or so, it was a cruel stretch of asphalt, flanked on both sides by a wide expanse of barren land called the “dasht" (desert). The icy winter winds that blew in this dasht cut through the bones. This patch of land that is swept by Siberian winds every winter was once host to the migratory houbara bustard that made its grueling journey to it from that extremely cold northern province of Russia. Yes, the same near-extinct bird called "talour' in the vernacular tongues and which the royals of the Middle East so lovingly hunt in Balochistan despite the numerous warnings by many credible international environmental and conservation organizations. These unsustainable hunting expeditions have continued to this day, mainly because the ruling elites of this country, including those who now preach the mantra of "naya Pakistan", keep receiving compensatory hush money from these obscenely rich and spoiled Arabs, often in the form of "unconditional" financial packages. 

Back to our story. It was the Kawasakis that reigned over these races on this runway-like track. Two models were particularly fast: the swift 110cc road-bike GTO and the high saddled off-roader KE-175. The latter model, especially when tuned and raced by Haji Ustad, was unbeatable. These races were essentially the battles of the Kawasakis of different models tuned differentially by the expert mechanics, meaning different oxygen-gasoline ratios for optimum combustion and performance. The nearest rival of these quick Kawasakis was a beautifully styled Yamaha road racer with a buzzing sound, then newly introduced and called the RX-115.

There's an interesting little story about what happened on one such racing day. On a freezing February morning the racers, their friends and sidekicks crowded the starting spot on that desolate track in Spizand. It was a sunny day but the wind was brutal, as usual. The bikers were on their Kawasakis, their Yamahas (the RX-115s) and a couple of Hondas were there, too--those perennial CG-125s. Haji Ustad and Deedar Ustad were present but Munir Ustad did not show up on that day. The Kawasakis raced the other Kawasaksis and also the other bikes. For more than three hours the bikes were raced and tested with different riders. Then, towards the end of the day, something really interesting happened. A young guy named Zulfi was accompanying his friend, a proud Kawasaki KE-175 owner, on that day. This Zulfi, who was a resident of Nawabshah, Sindh and was visiting his grandparents in Quetta, had an old machine, a Suzuki GP-100, with a loose rear mudguard and a broken right side front indicator. The bike was a piece of junk, and it made a painfully shrill sound, like that from an embarrassingly cheap electric guitar played by some punk pretending to be a guitar ace for some heavy metal band! So, came along this young man Zulfi with his re-incarnated Suzuki---the engine had been recently overhauled by the one and only Deedar Ustad----and parked next to a screaming GTO at the starting line. There were six or seven bikes at the start line, all throttling and ready for the final race of the day. The slightly chubby Zulfi on his lowly red contraption---the only “untouchable” in the line-up of high caste machines---looked cool, chewing calmly on his shocking-pink sugary Mayfair bubble gum. The flag came down and off they went leaving behind a cacophony of putt-putt, vroom-vroom, and boom-boom sounds and quickly disappearing into a pungent cloud of bluish white smoke. It was usually a two way race. They had to race the 3km stretch and then return to the starting line to complete the race. After a few minutes of silence during which the chilly wind screamed into our almost frozen but attentive ears, we began to hear the faint buzz of the returning bikes. Then the small dots started taking form, with a red thing leading the pack. At first, the glare of nickel and steel reflecting off the polished wheel rims, spokes and other parts of the bikes made it difficult for us to identify the leader. But within the next few seconds, it was clearly Zulfi’s Suzuki that was way ahead of a second place Kawasaki KE-175, also red in color. That rickety jumble of scrap metal, rubber and plastic, the GP-100, had beaten the mighty Kawasakis! Among the bikers, it became the talk of the town for many months and years after that day. Zulfi disappeared soon afterward and so did the old Suzuki.

Although now I don’t own one, I still love motorcycles, especially the furiously fast Kawasaki Ninjas.  But every time I see a Suzuki on the road, I feel a cold shiver run up and down my spine. And as I recall that fateful February day in Spizand, a spontaneous smile appears on my face.  My wife and kids look at me, I point to the Suzuki on the road, and they also smile with me.

Originally published in Balochistan Voices.

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Note: Deedar Ustad passed away recently. Apparently he was trying to fix some electric device and the shock from electric current was too strong. May he rest in peace in his final abode and may the bereaved have sabr and patience. 

Quetta in the 1980s: The Bikes!