In one evening Abhijeet inspired him further along with Sanjay's prodding, to make hasty calls to the only gunsmith that we can call a gift to our shooting sport the very humble ' Bobby Siddhu." So we drove to Patiala early in the morning and for me it was a real sacrifice cause I hadn't slept most of the night. I had almost thought about calling up Nishant (our fellow conspirator) and canceling out. But then I decided that the rifle was really going to be worth it and some how made it.
We zipped of to Patiala with a tea break in between at Haryana Tourism Resort. We chose the resort just to ensure that we didn't spoil ourselves and wanted to observe the Haryanavi Govt. owned enterprise interpretation of service.
They were very helpful in keeping up to our expectation and had only , idlis, omlettes and no pranthas on the menu.
As in all journey's the first half was made up of polite chit chat and very general talk about shooting, licensing policies etc. Once we hit Patial;a we enjoyed the game of which dumb f$%^&k told us to turn right or take the non existent underpass. So blaming each other for everything that had happenend we reached Bobby Siddhu's place just before resorting to hair pulling and name calling (somehow the journey had brought out the school boy in all three of us).
And so when Bobby introduced himself to us, I kept looking over his shoulder waiting for the real one to turn up. This young slim warm guy just couldn't be him...to make things tough for him we demanded homemade lassi (we Delhi wallah's had to keep up with our customary crudeness after all). Bobby had anticipated this and soon his man Friday appeared with the glasses. Lassi's glugged Olly got down to the paper work as I tried to appear knowledgeable while fondling this beautiful Ashani pistol that he had worked on. It was blued, had lovely walnut grips and even the magazine had been made by him. My informed attempt at taking the magazine out earned me a five star fool rating from Bobby. What else do you call someone who turns the pistol upside down, points the barrel at his own stomach and then fiddles with the magazine? A considerate fool at the most.
After having had our fill of the pistol, we checked out the IOF .22 that he had worked on, heck I almost ran away with it. It was slick and just like a BRNO or CZ what have you. Then Bobby brought Olly's 30 06 out and we went ape.
The rifle looked really sweet, the action was slick...it had been sorted from a batch of rifles and didn't look like it needed any cosmetic surgery.
My only fear was that it was darn light, something even Bobby agreed added to the jump. We had no idea what he meant and so he proceeded to drive us to his farm so that we could try the rifle out. We were armed with 180 grain ammo and my research the night before warned me that the shoulders would remember the experience for a while.
So after demonstrating how to load the rifle Bobby handed it to us, empty and on safe. I casually passed it to Olly...after all it was his. (I was following new rifle testing rule one-let someone else do it first
.)So for some strange reason I stood behind Olly wearing the ear muffs while he decided to shoot it without. We had decided to shoot a brick at say 15 yards just to get a hang of the rifle. So Olly shot, I felt the shock wave, saw the brick shatter and saw Olly smartly execute a 180 degree pirouette (if a six foot, 200 pound man could be imagined doing so) and calmly hand the rifle to me. While we were congratulating him on the shot, he said heck it kicks more than a shotgun. And then he revealed that actually the recoil had spun him around hee...hee...hee.
And so without any further ado I quickly handed the rifle to Nishant, who didn't seem to be going thru the mental anxiety that I was. He picked it up and pointed it in the right direction without doing his usual number (shall i tell them Nishant?) and let fly, this time I felt the shock wave as I was standing on the side and without hearing protection you really hear it. Nishant looked elated and it seemed like even he loved this cannon and still had his shoulder in place.
Since there was no way I could squirm out of it I picked up the rifle with a soft nose 180 grain cartridge and aimed at the stone I was provided to pulverize, so holding really firm, I squeezed the shot off. The recoil was commendable and since I was more than a quintal in weight, it wasn't unpleasant. After the euphoria died down Nishant pointed out that I had missed the stone and cackled with laughter. Well I had to excuse him as he is still sore for losing the medal at the last Delhi State even though he tried to make his pet bee drill holes in the target for him. Told you he was ingenious.
After this we actually shot at a target at a hundred meters, it was an air pistol target mounted on a one foot by one foot frame. All three of us managed to get the target, though only Olly managed to shoot a two shot group. The two bullets were cutting each other. This clearly showed us that the rifle has potential and Bobby laughed away our fears about heated barrels etc. He said used the old Clint Eastwood dialogue ," Shoot don't talk." So after four rounds each we were done. And we pronounced the rifle a hit. Naturally, we shall shoot more as soon as we scour more ammo, right now the cost isn't really wallet friendly.
Thereafter we bid adieu to the gracious Bobby who wanted to treat us to lunch but he had a prior commitment. We decided to have an authentic (gawd knows what that means) lunch and chow down on roti, palak paneer, shahi paneer and raita. I also succumb to a huge scoop of ice cream and we all share it. After which it was another five hour ride home, we again spent the time telling ribald jokes, cussing each other out (the other two ganged up on me and made fun of my age) so I was compelled to abuse both of them by a few generations up and down. Hey, if you wanna bond nothing like doing an all male drive, carrying a big booming rifle with you for company.
Dev
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Olly with his spanking new rifle.
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Me in the process of psyching myself to shoot.
