Riding the wave with a bicycle

Sarvjit Singh

Forty-five years back feels like an eternity now. I was sitting in an excited state with mother at a busy cycle shop in a cul-de-sac of the main bazaar in Patiala. The 20-inch red Atlas bicycle, a favourite, was going to be mine soon. The smell of the new tyres being rolled over the rims, the sound of spokes being tightened, the sight of the chain on the sprocket being oiled, was sending me — all of nine years old then — into a trance. Choosing the saddle was quite a decision. Finally, the time had come to take the crackling bicycle for a test spin. I vividly remember the ether gushing in my small chest as I readied for the first engine-less flight.

The love affair with cycling endured for four decades during which the red bicycle turned into a standard military green, then a silver sports that you mount with a humped back, and finally into a geared mountain bike. The daily 10 to 20 km of cycling during the school and college days gradually gave way to weekend breeze-on- sweat jaunts of 30, 50, 70 and 100 km. Then sadly, with a motorcycle saddle and a car seat to corrupt, the paradise tapered off nearly five years ago.

Nay, love never dies. It only becomes sublime with the passage of time. The plight of cyclists veering to the very edge of Chandigarh’s sector roads to save their lives from faster vehicles and getting puzzled at roundabouts would wring my heart, as if every cyclist, every rickshaw-puller was me.

In Vienna then, on an official trip, I saw well-marked cycling tracks, running as an unbroken ribbon that passed just outside their parliament whose gates were open. I was informed that some parliamentarians came pedalling. The cycling tracks of Chandigarh thus got laid, like a dream, when I served the Union Territory’s departments of finance and engineering as the secretary.

The lockdown came three years later. Bicycle sales zoomed. There were queues outside cycle shops when my wife and I went to buy ours. I can see scientifically now why cycling is good. The trigger of energy acts as a catalyst for an alchemy of youthfulness and happiness. Here and now, experience happens, as currents generated in the nerve centre uplift the inverted tree.

The exercised muscles are able to exorcise the spirits dwelling in the ruins of unawareness, making thereby the elusive balance of awareness a reality. As the metaphor goes, what is on one’s back, comes in one’s front. As cycling recycles my waist, life seems to have come full circle, every morning — for a smarter beginning.