Cycling back to boyhood

Rajnish Wattas

THE last time I rode a cycle was in shorts, as a schoolboy. And that's before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, and it was not a style statement for dads to ride fancy bikes costing equivalents of small cars, dressed like astronauts with their jolly kids on Sundays. The old workhorse — a Hercules or an Atlas — was the family conveyance, and fathers dutifully went to work on it wearing their sola ‘topi’ on the head and a clip on their baggy pant bottoms to check them from getting into the chain.

Recently inspired by smart fitness freaks racing flashy cycles with gears and many other gizmos, pedalling like local Tour de France champions on city roads, especially along the Sukhna Lake, I too have jumped on the bandwagon. Never mind my 60 plus years and a shapeless body resembling a sack of potatoes lying unmoved ever since TV was invented.

Jumping on the saddle and getting moving is the easy part; the tough part is wading through the lurking dangers of your own dear, friendly neighbourhood. The burra sahibs’ living in all those majestic villas are too lazy to walk their beloved alsatians, golden retrievers or labradors in the morning for their poo job, and instead outsource it to their bevy of servants. And the cool dude domestics of today don’t believe in a morning constitutional either, and so just unleash the animal instincts of their beloved pets to do their freedom run by ferociously charging into unwary cyclists! And the shaky senior citizen atop a cycle is what whets their appetite for some real meaty ‘shikar’!

If you manage to survive the blood thirsty canines, the marauding SUVs doing their Formula 1 practice run — right on your own friendly street, so lovingly planned by  Corbusier envisaging leisurely walkers genially greeting their fellow neighbours — will get you.

But there are myriad joys that outweigh the perils. You spot a coral tree in the garden of that big brick house at the end of the street sprouting bright red parrot’s beak-shaped flowers. The Aggarwals have painted their house all white now from the previous hideous pink! The friendliest, silent people who give you a warm thumbs up are the diligent safai karamcharis who are painstakingly sweeping the streets from the fallen leaves and litter of last night's excesses of man and nature. The sleepy, small children in their uniforms laden with heavy satchels, bundled into rickshaws on way to school, wave at you enthusiastically rather amused by the sight of a grandpa huffing and puffing on the cycle.

Memories of an era gone by come racing, when one was at school and would race back on cycles to reach home fast or battle the wind to reach in time for the first bell. But there was always time to stop to help out a classmate in distress — especially a pretty girl — if there was a puncture or the chain got derailed, which was not such a coincidence always!

And now I hear that tinkle again!