The morning I almost didn't ride

The ridge road out of Gurgaon was empty and washed clean, and the scrub either side was properly green for once — that dark, dripping green you only get for two weeks a year here. Nobody was in a hurry. We rode into the Mangar lanes single-file, engines low, no horns, because that is the rule near the grove and also just how you want to ride a road with a skin of wet grit on every corner.

Aman was on his first ride with us and had told me at the petrol pump he was nervous about the group pace. Twenty minutes in he'd stopped checking his mirror every three seconds. That is the whole trick of a slow ride — it stops being about keeping up and starts being about the road, the smell of wet earth, a peacock picking across the tar in front of Deepak's front wheel.

By Damdama the sky had gone the colour of an old helmet and you could see the next spell coming over the ridge. The shoreline after a weekend is grim: bottles, chip packets, the foil trays the picnic caterers leave in heaps, broken glass pushed into the mud. Two friends of Sana's rode out to meet us at the lake, so eleven of us spread along about three hundred metres of bank and just started picking.

It goes quicker than you'd think with a group — forty minutes, nine full bags. Most went into the municipal bins by the road; the glass we bagged separately and carried out. Nikhil said the thing everyone was thinking: it'll look the same again by next Sunday. Probably. But it didn't look like that when we left, and eleven people had spent a wet Sunday morning together doing something with their hands.

The first fat drops hit as we pulled out of the Damdama gate, and we rode the last stretch to the chai stall in proper rain, grinning like idiots. Everyone was home before the real storm.

If you want to ride this yourself: fill the tank before you turn off the highway, there is no reliable pump in the Mangar–Dhauj lanes, and go early — by mid-morning on a Sunday Damdama is busy and in summer it is just hot. The full loop, the fuel gap and the leopard-belt note are on the Aravalli Backroads page.