A Bengaluru family lost their son to a tragedy but made sure he lives on

Hareesh Parandhaman and his family spent just about 13 years with their son, Shreyas. Thirteen years of seeing him grow up from a child struggling with his studies to a driven teenager immersed in the dream of raising the national flag on the podium of MotoGP, the Formula One of motorcycle road racing.

Parandhaman watched his son grow into his racing career, cheering him on from the sidelines. Those thirteen years had gradually seeped into every corner of his life until, in 2017, he gave up his job as the head of business development at Resil Chemicals and devoted himself to nurturing the racing prodigy.

What was once for this father a speeding and swerving dream that drove him, of his child reaching closer to put India’s flag on the finish line of the race track, is now a quiet lonely trudge through empty days. As he lives on the floor above his teenage son’s memorial museum, with shelves filled with trophies and pictures and framed newspaper cuttings, each day is a struggle to reconcile with the death on the race track of his 13-year-old son that he was racing to conquer.

That day, Parandhaman was left hollowed out. His centre of gravity was gone. Shreyas would have been 16 this year. It has been a long three years since then, but Shreyas’s memories are everywhere in the home he shared with his parents in Sahakara Nagar, North Bengaluru.

All of his possessions, his bikes and trophies, have been moved from his room to a dedicated memorial museum on the ground floor of the house — a monument to the racing prodigy. There’s a deck of Pokémon cards, a heavy-duty digital watch, a gaming console attached to a bike racing simulator.

There is also a poster from the movie, Taare Zameen Par. Shreyas was on the spectrum. “He was not dyslexic but somewhere on the border. The poster was his way of saying that though he was not gifted in studies, there was something else that he was great at.” Parandhaman recalls the first time Shreyas got on a bike.

He was barely seven. “There were three kids learning to ride that day. One of the kids kept falling off the bike, and his father held him the same way you hold a child who is just learning to cycle. Shreyas just sat on the bike and rode off.

I never had to hold his hand or teach him,” Parandhaman says. Soon Shreyas was competing, when racing is likely to have felt like an exhilarating game. But the early races revealed how gifted Shreyas was. At 11, Shreyas made his national debut in motorcycle racing in 2021.

He won the inaugural MiniGP India series in September 2022, going on to reach the top-10 spots in the qualifier round at the world final in Spain. He also bagged the fourth and fifth spots in another Spain-based international tournament.

In February 2023, he was felicitated by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and the then Union Sports Minister Anurag Thakur at the Uttar Pradesh Global Investors Summit in Lucknow. Shreyas was determined to bring the medals home while continuing his schooling around race schedules.

For a country, where motorcycles are a part of everyday life, India is yet to produce a rider capable of rising to the top of the professional circuit. India currently has no major footprint in the premier class of MotoGP.

Shreyas wanted to change that. Parandhaman recalls how on his way to drop his son at school, when the two-wheelers on the road would whizz past them, Shreyas would say, "Daddy, everyone rides a two-wheeler in India. But in MotoGP, we are a zero." On the day of the tragedy in Chennai in August 2023, nothing had seemed off.

Shreyas had won the first race of the year in a dominant fashion, and his father remembers feeling somewhat relaxed. “As the fastest rider, he had qualified for pole position (starting a motor race from the very front of the grid).

Then, in the race, his bike fell near the first corner, and he was getting up,” says Parandhaman, the ache audible in his voice. “But the rider behind him rolled over him. It (the accident) crushed his ribcage and punctured his organs.” On the way to the hospital, Shreyas bled a lot.

He still had a slow pulse. But by the time he reached the hospital and was lifted up, the pulse went away. In the months that followed, Parandhaman and his small family barely survived. “I would just lock myself up in a room… eat and drink there,’’ he recalls.

”Then my health started getting affected, from bouts of cough and acid reflux. That’s when I decided that I have to fix things and get on with life”. He decided to return to his job in the biotech field, something he had left to devote himself to his son's dream.

“It took me three months just to update my CV,” he says. Yet, he is still looking over his shoulder for his son. “There are times when I am watching a movie or something, and I see a kid like Shreyas or find some connection to his story,” he says.

The only way to pick himself up on such days is to think about his son's fighting spirit. "My son was a fighter. Even when he fell on that day, his first reflex was to get up and pick up the bike and get back into the race,” he says.

Shreyas’s racing number was 39 — the inverse of what his idol, Marc Marquez (#93), a Spanish professional motorcycle road racer who, having secured seven World Championships at the MotoGP, is widely regarded as the best of this generation, wore.

Number 39 has been retired from the Indian National Championship, organised by the Madras Motor Sports Club (MMSC) and sanctioned by the Federation of Motor Sports Clubs of India (FMSCI), as a mark of respect to Shreyas.

Parandhaman still maintains his son’s Instagram account, updating it with news about racers Shreyas knew as well as past memories. “Until the Indian national anthem plays at MotoGP, I think we will continue to keep the page alive,” he says.

Shreyas’s mother Sandhya and his sister Manisha have come up with their own way of coping – grieving silently. No one in the family, however, blames this high adrenaline sport for their loss. Instead, they are...