Sleep in guidebook territory and you meet fellow travellers. In India I try to stay where Indians stay. Indians are immensely hospitable and I have been immensely fortunate in those I've met; friends of the road have become friends for life. I first explored India in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Returning in 2010, I toured solo by motorcycle some 10,000 miles. Now I am back near Delhi as the grateful and impecunious house guest of one of India's leading educationalists and his mother, and preparing to ride a motorcycle home to Colwall in Herefordshire.

I never ride motorcycles in England – the weather is too vile – so this will be my first time on a bike in three years. The machine is a tough 125cc TVS Phoenix worth £700. I need biker luggage. Delhi markets sell everything from diamonds to spices and kitchen pots; Karol Bagh shopping centre is biker heaven.

I had planned to accustomise myself to the bike by riding sedately down the broad toll road to Agra. An Indian TV producer requests an interview with me in the saddle. I fear falling off. My fellow house guest and friend says I'll be fine. He is Bhutanese. I imagine him as a samurai. He has that square stance, strong in himself, immovable. After postgraduate study at Columbia university in New York, he worked in Washington DC for the World Bank before returning home to serve the crown prince (now king) of Bhutan. He speaks of fulfilment in serving his nation – such were the ambitions of Indians of my generation.

Now parental pride lies in having sons working in London for Deutsche Bank and running a hedge fund on Wall Street. Even academia is judged increasingly by the ability to successfully harvest grants, as exemplified at a book launch for a historian. The temperature in Delhi is 46C; he wears national dress from the high Himalayas and listens humbly to the reading of his many grant-fed university sojourns (he has prepared the introduction himself), yet is unable to hide a bedrock of self-satisfaction.

Today is my wife's birthday. She is enjoying the Hay literary festival in Wales. I have been invited to talk travel to a bunch of wealthy riders of Royal Enfield motorcycles, who have found me on the web. An ancient Brit on a bike is a curiosity for India's community of passionate leisure bikers. Enfields are 1940s English classics which have been built in India since 1956 and have been minimally modernised since. Their exhaust boasts a deep bubbly rhythm. They have status. Sikhs ride them.

My host at the talk is a Sikh. His apartment is in the stratosphere of a high high-rise building in a gated community within a gated community. The sculpture in the living room is a Royal Enfield 500 Bullet on a Persian prayer mat. Bernadette's birthday cake is served on its saddle. We drink her health in Glenfiddich and sing happy birthday. Tomorrow comes a return to my reality of a severely limited budget and the road …