Homi Bhathena -- In Pursuit of Life

Homi Bhathena was one of India's cycling champions. A sportsman like many others who loved and toiled at a sport relatively few follow. He died in a tragic road accident a little over a month ago.

Homi Bhathena died because of you and me. You may have done a little. I did nothing.

How do you reach out today to a friend you should have yesterday. How do you change the present to sustain a life that shouldn’t be in the past? How do you strike the right note for a death so wrong?

The Homi Bhathena I knew ranked among a few good men, and I knew him before the jazz played in his life. It has been nearly 30 years but I still see it clearly.

Those were younger days for Pune, me and Homi. Ours was then a sleepy tonga town of bicycles and Greenfields. No not the farms, but the Bhathena restaurant on Main Street that churned up some of the finest milkshakes.

I met Homi by chance, sometime around July 1980. I’d bunk Herr Francis D’Mello’s early morning German tuition class. For him I feigned illness, my parents were none the wiser.

Instead I’d sit on the weathered Dastur School wall hour upon hour, day after day, weeks on end simply watching my world go by.

Time would stop for the glint of spokes, and the whir of wheels of sleek bicycles zipping up and around Moledina road. Among the riders Homi and Ashok Captain, all gritting and grinding, training for the Independence Day lap race.

Watching me watch one day Homi and Ashok stopped to chat. That was the beginning. From seeing them suck on condensed milk stuffed in toothpaste tubes, to sitting for chai at Café Diamond Queen, I learned more than I would in any German class.

If Ashok was philosophical, Homi was comical. Quick with a quip, generous and caring, rarely without a smile, Homi made his life count and he made a difference.

Ashok Captain won the Independence Day lap race, Homi went on to win others, and both became cycling champions. I bought the Peugeot Homi raced on when he got a new bike, but I never managed to hold onto his wheel.

To pursue his love for cooking Homi moved to Bombay. A few times when races were on I’d join Ashok and go over to stay at his Dadar flat. He’d whip up a gourmet meal or a great dessert. On one such visit he made a butterscotch soufflé but forgot the gelatin, and so it didn’t firm up. To this day it is the most delicious soufflé I’ve ever tasted. Later that night before race day to return the favor I blew his geyser by mistake. He made do heating water on the stove and taking a bucket bath. Of course being Homi he never missed a chance to rib me about it.

Those racing days went by, I moved abroad and the years drifted by. We didn’t keep in touch, but whenever I came back to Pune and met Homi he was always his gregarious smiling self.

Through the years true to character he pursued his every dream with passion. From winning races to starting his own restaurant, from marrying not a Parsee to bringing and keeping his love of jazz throbbing in Pune, Homi touched a multitude of lives.

The Homi I knew made it a point to make his life count, and I believe in his death he’d want it no other way.

That is where you and I come in. We can lament his loss, but for Homi that wouldn’t count. For his death story is a story told daily on hundreds of roads across this land, a tragic story that can and should be cut short.

Homi Bhathena could be your father, your brother, your son, your daughter, your mother, your friend. So let us end this road madness, write to those responsible, make authorities accountable, expose the corruption at licensing offices, vote, make your voice count.

It isn’t good enough to say this is the way it is. That wouldn’t be Homi’s way. To make change it will take the proverbial village and then some. And if you and I try to make a difference you’ll have done a little bit more, and I will have turned nothing into something.

In an absolutely senseless road accident that could have been avoided jazz lost a lover, cycling a champion and many of us a friend. Most of all, a son far too young lost a father, a wife a husband, and humanity a good soul.