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No, and it is a deliberate choice rather than something missing. A calculator has to assume a charge, a term and an approval, and none of those three are ours to assume. A shop that guesses all of them has produced a number that flatters the shop.

What is on the page instead is the arithmetic you can do yourself. Take the price, take off your deposit, divide what is left by the number of months, and you have the floor. A bike at 42,000 with a third down leaves 28,000, which is about 1,556 a month over eighteen months. Send us the machine, your deposit and the months and a person replies the same working day with the whole breakdown in writing.

You choose the machine and the term, we send you a written breakdown, and a financier decides whether to lend. We are the shop, not the lender. We do not set the charge, we cannot promise an approval, and we have no arrangement with any financier and take nothing for an introduction.

What we do is set out the price, your deposit, the balance, the plain monthly division at your chosen term, the fees that are genuinely ours, and which parts depend on somebody else agreeing. We will tell you what documents are usually asked for, and we hold the machine for three working days while it is looked at. Nothing is paid to us until the finance is settled, so there is nothing to unwind if the answer is no.

Plan on somewhere between a quarter and a third of the price, and treat more as better since everything after that gets cheaper.

The financier sets what they require, not us. What we can tell you is the effect: on a bike at 42,000, a third down leaves 28,000 to spread and a quarter down leaves 31,500, which at eighteen months is a difference of about two hundred rufiyaa a month before any charge. If you are close to a round figure, waiting a month to add to the deposit is often worth more than any discount we could give you.

For four families out of five in Malé or Hulhumalé, a 125cc automatic. It is light enough to push into a tight space, parks where a bigger machine cannot, is cheap on petrol, and is simple enough that any workshop on any island can look after it.

Go to a 150cc if two adults ride together often, because a small engine carrying two people works hard on the bridge and wears faster. Anything larger is a want rather than a need here and we will happily sell you one while saying so. The things actually worth checking are the seat height against the shortest rider in the family, whether the underseat space takes a helmet, discs front and rear, and whether the parts are on our shelf.

Used is good value here if somebody has inspected it properly, and dangerous value if nobody has. Salt does its damage where buyers do not look: wiring connectors, wheel bearings, brake discs, fork seals and exhaust mountings, none of which show in the paint.

Mileage matters far less than you would expect, because these are short trips at low speed. What ages a machine here is time, weather and whether anybody rinsed it. A well cared for six year old bike beats a neglected three year old one easily. Every used machine on our floor carries a written inspection sheet that includes the bad news, and the price already reflects it.

Yes, on anything on the floor, with a valid licence for that class and about twenty minutes. Mornings are quietest and are when you can actually get a feel for a machine rather than sitting in traffic.

Bring whoever else will ride it. Half the time the second rider is shorter and the machine that suited one of you is wrong for the other, and finding that out before you buy is the entire point.