Back to bicycles: melancholia, pleasures, and surprises

After your first day of cycling, one dream is inevitable. A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow.
—H.G. Wells, The Wheels of Chance

It doesn’t need reiterating, but I got myself a new bicycle on the first of May.
More than a month has passed and the enthusiasm for biking remains, though Kolkata city is hardly the place where you can think of pleasant biking.

Around eight years back, I rode to the university on a rusty black Hercules MTB, muttering to myself about definitive todays and tomorrows as I dissected the city’s heart (dumb voice-over from JU community radio 90.6 FM: Tomorrow the bicycle races. Through the suburbs on summer evenings: but today the struggle. ...)

It got stolen after a year.
Along with my definitives, all dialectical and historical todays and tomorrows, the millenarian dreams that only youth can conjure in its mind.

No regrets. Somewhere, at some new moon, someone else, of the same lost age of innocence and the defiance to unknown complicities, someone definitely younger, is pedaling fast towards those dreams, which I might now call confused, but can never disown their experiences for they taught me much. I have emerged sadder and wiser. Young mind, wherever you are, wish you my realizations without the sadness, solitude and pain it brings when you know your dreams have been played and tampered with.

But the returning to the university seems a difficult task, for the paths, too, have literally changed beyond recognition.

Biking is an attitude, I remember reading somewhere. But in Kolkata, dear, you’ve got serious attitudinal problems when you decide to cycle your way through depending on an eight year old memory.

I lost my way thrice into the mesh of lanes and bylanes that once characterized south Kolkata. Here you took a right turn, and there was a big pond to your left. There you swerved to avoid a bamboo grove, and little fenced spots of green, a garden or two where you could see and smell, at least forcibly imagine the presence of almost all the trees you thought you had lost to a distant childhood in the mofussil.

Nothing remains of them.

The concrete and brick have devoured all, given the unprecedented progress of unplanned urbanization that has swept through the city in recent years. When the heat settled in the melting asphalt and in the shadows of the endless stretch of box-like apartment houses on colony lands, I asked my way through the pointed obscenities that bristled below the late afternoon sky.

I learnt another thing. Apart from some wayward kids, it’s only the poor adult folk who use bicycles in Kolkata. The noxious fumes-spewing motorcycles, the autorickshaws and the nouveau rich red little cars, are status symbols and in an old colonial city, symbols are matters of life and death. These symbol riders take it for granted that traffic rules are to be flouted and anyone on a bicycle is to be ignored, rudely brushed aside, shouted at like a dog, or mangled like a worm. The common logic working in their minds is: “Hey, that was a sod without money or status. Or why would he be pedaling if he could have afforded petrol money?” True, sierras, I got neither money nor status. But even if I had, I would have preferred the bicycle.

“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets,” said Christopher Morley. I am none, but I do deserve a better commendation, for I’ve survived some of their works, say Rushdie’s for instance. And no wonder Kolkata city spews a lot of rubbish in the name of literature coz majority of its pot-bellied poets and authors ride cars and autos. Taa-raa-rum-pum-pum-pum!

But inside the campus, things are different. Envious eyes caress your new black bike, friends and canteen boys share your joys, and an unknown undergrad approaches you and shyly asks for a ride. When you see him speeding away, and you happily shout at him, and pretend to give a chase, you realise that life still has, a humane, almost classical moderation in the kind of melancholia, pleasures, and surprises it offers.