There were all
sorts of questions, the usual ones about countries and currencies
and capitals without which no school quiz is complete, and more
difficult ones with abbreviations and mathematical puzzles. There
were also unexpected questions about cuisines and culture. The
Sunrayers did better and better till they tied with the leading
team from St John’s. They were super thrilled because they had
really felt like underdogs at the start of the day. But going into
the tie-breaker they felt they would win again. Unlike the quiz at
school, this inter-school round had negative points for a wrong
answer in the tie. Sunrays and St John’s got two questions each,
and as the last question came round they were level still.
The last question
was: which is the smelliest animal in the world?
Manu did not know
it, and he kept his hand down. The St John’s team seemed to be at a
loss too. Neha said she had no clue, Sana guessed the right answer
could be ‘pig’. Manu thought pig was too easy an answer, but maybe
it had been kept for the last to throw them into doubt. He
hesitated, and the St John’s boys hesitated. But neither team could
go through to the next round without a lead of 10 points.
Sana nudged Manu
again. “I am sure it is pig,” she said. Manu looked at Neha and she
shrugged. Slowly, he raised his hand. “Pig” he said into the
mic.
“Wrong answer,”
said the quizmaster. “It’s skunk”.
Sunrays had lost
points and handed victory to St John’s.
The three
Sunrayers walked down the stage to their waiting teammates with
their heads hung in shame. Manu was angry, because he had answered
most of the questions and brought the team within an inch of
victory, but he did not say anything to Sana. It was all over.
When they had all
sat down inside their school van, its old engine refused to fire.
It sputtered and died, again and again. Manu, a couple of other
schoolboys and the van’s cleaner got down in the rain to push it.
They had to push a long way before it started, and by then they
were all soaked. Manu had cursed so much under his breath that he
had let off all his steam. He was laughing now. Happy despite the
loss. His birthday was just two days away, and he was thinking of
his new sports bicycle.
***
The day before
Manu’s birthday, Papa came home early and took him to the cycle
shop. It was a big and old shop in Sector 20 called Darshan
Brothers. There was a dry-cleaner next door to it on one side and a
confectioner on the other. The confectioner had his softy machine
in the corridor and the space always smelt of a mix of ice cream
and rubber and tyre resin. It was a sweet, industrial smell the
like of which Manu never encountered anywhere afterwards. It wasn’t
an appetising smell really, but it was pleasant.
Manu had known the
shop for a long time. When he had just learned to cycle, he used to
come there with Papa for spares: a new saddle or a bell or a lock.
It was also a good place to get the cycle serviced when the
mechanic outside their campus disappeared for weeks on visits to
his village. Later, when Manu could cycle confidently and started
going to school on it, he sometimes came to the shop in the evening
to window shop for cycles. The owners were brothers, as you would
have guessed from the shop’s name. They were ageing, and completely
unlike each other. One was fat and round-faced and bald, and he
always wore kurta-pajamas. He had a grating voice and talked too
much, but not to children. The other brother had his hair in place,
was quiet, and wore shirts and trousers.
The shop was
always swarming with mechanics because it met many orders for
cycles in a day, and then as now, cycles did not come assembled
from factories. To ogle at the assembled cycles you had to find an
excuse to get past the threshold, and then nobody bothered you.
Manu’s red Hero Jet and his father’s bigger and black Hero Jet had
come from that shop. But this time Manu didn’t want a Hero. The
choice lay between Hero, Atlas, BSA and Avon, but for the kind of
cycle he wanted—a street racer with bent over handlebars and thin
tyres—BSA was the best. There was the BSA Mach 1 that had been
around for many years, and the new BSA Mach 10 with derailleur
gears. Although he would have liked the fancier new bike, after
much coaxing and cajoling Manu had been able to bring his father
round to approving the Mach 1.
So that evening,
father and son walked down to Darshan Brothers to buy a new cycle.
Manu was super excited. He already had a chrome HMT watch with a
jet black dial, and with the cycle he would have everything that a
boy his age could fairly hope for.
The garrulous one
of the Darshan brothers was at the counter that day. He greeted
Manu’s father pleasantly and on learning that the day’s business
lay in the boy’s hands, turned on his oily charm upon him. Manu was
very clear in his mind about the cycle he wanted: a ‘gunmetal grey’
BSA Mach 1. Sharad had a brown Mach 1 and while that also looked
nice, Manu had been a fan of all things grey since he was a little
boy.
It was a long wait
for the cycle and they spent a couple of hours in the corridor
sitting on low stools the workmen had made for themselves out of
wood and frames welded from old cycle parts. First came the cycle’s
main frame, lowered out of a hatch in the loft. It was wrapped in
brown corrugated paper and Manu wondered how the mechanics knew it
was gunmetal grey and not another colour. But they tore off a
corner of the wrapping and it was the right colour. Then came the
handle and the saddle, and the mudguards in little cardboard boxes.
Manu was surprised that the little mudguards were chrome rather
than the cycle’s colour, but the shopkeeper assured him the company
had changed the design recently.
The wheels, tubes,
tyres and miscellaneous pieces like axles and balls and the carrier
and bell didn’t descend from the loft but were merely picked out of
pigeonholes that lined the shop’s walls like a postal sorting
office. Once the mechanic put on Manu’s job had everything he
needed, tools included, he sat down on his haunches and started
work, which involved a lot of greasing and inserting balls into
places that Manu never knew existed.
Assembling a cycle
must be a tedious job for the workmen who make several of them in a
day, but for Manu it was pure fascination. The gleaming new rims
turned into wheels before his eyes as dozens of spokes went into
both wheels and passed through the cycle’s thin axles. Every spoke
had to be tightened with a little round key that twirled swiftly in
the mechanic’s trained fingers. Then both wheels had to be checked
for balance and shaky movement. More balls, more grease. The handle
went into the frame, and so did the front fork. Oh, there were so
many of these little pieces to be fitted to complete the jigsaw
puzzle that’s a bicycle. Brakes and brake shoes, saddle rod and
saddle, pedal hub and pedal shafts, and then the pedals themselves.
It’s unfair that cycle mechanics don’t get any respect when they
are really quite talented craftsmen.
When everything
was ready, the bell had been rung, the brakes tested for grip,
every remaining bit of plastic and paper wrapping torn, and the
grease stains polished off, the tyres were inflated hard with a
hose attached to a compressor. It was the only compressor at a
cycle shop in those days between sectors 29 and 22, and air pumped
into tyres with it was regarded as something special, although many
a tyre and tube had been destroyed with over-inflation at novice
hands.
Manu took a test
ride around the shopping block. It would take some practise to get
used to the new seating position and the bigger frame, and the
cycle would feel lighter after a few days of running in. All that
Manu understood, so he grinned from ear to ear, and even executed a
skid in the corridor, getting a frown from Papa.
Papa paid exactly
Rs 1,000 for the cycle, and it was a goodly sum those days. He
wanted a sturdy lock on the cycle but Manu protested it would spoil
the look of a sports bike, so they settled on a cable lock that
could be secured around the rear wheel.
Back home, the
cycle got the kind of reception that cars get these days. Ma came
downstairs to see it and hear about all its outstanding
characteristics. Manu wanted to carry it upstairs at night, “since
it is new” but Ma and Papa shot down the idea. He was hours away
from turning 12, and the cycle added to his excitement. That night,
Manu slept fitfully and was up first in the morning. It was raining
(it always did on his birthday) so he could not take it out for a
spin, but he cleaned it with a damp cloth nonetheless.
***
The Mach-1’s
small mudguards were no defence against the muck kicked up by its
wheels on a wet road, and that was the main reason why Manu’s
parents had been set against buying him a racing cycle. Now, as
Manu rode to school without a raincoat, the rear wheel sprayed a
straight line of brown mud on his white shirt and the front wheel
did the same to the inside leg of his blue trousers. That didn’t
matter because all the boys who rode racing bikes came to school
with similar stains.
When Manu reached
school his friends teased him about the red vermilion mark on his
forehead (Ma insisted on doing puja in the morning on his
birthdays) but gathered enviously around his new bicycle. Everybody
wanted to ride it, and Manu let them do so with firm caveats. “No
speeding, no skidding. Don’t take it into the ground and don’t
stray from the straight road because I don’t want you to go out of
sight”. They did his bidding but still Manu felt uneasy all the
time the cycle was in their hands. Anyway, the cycle came back
undamaged, and after parking it the boys went straight to their
class.
Manu did not like
the vermilion mark but he kept it on as it was a talking point.
People guessed it was his birthday, and asked, which made him feel
important. Only when everyone—Neha included—had wished him did he
wash away the mark.
He wanted to show
his new cycle to Neha thinking that she would be impressed, and
after school he deliberately hung around the slot where her cycle
was parked. But Neha did not notice, so busy was she in talking to
her friend and neighbour Shweta. He didn’t want to butt into their
conversation, and so started riding away with a casual “bye”. “Bye,
Manu,” they echoed and continued talking. He was sorely
disappointed but rode home thinking about the special meal that
awaited him.
Time slowed down
once he was home. His friends would not come until 5pm, and while
he was excited about celebrating his birthday with them, he longed
go out and cycle even more. Samar was the first to arrive. His gift
was a biggish box inside which something rolled. Several things.
It’s a game, decided Manu, but he didn’t open it because he had
been taught that one should not show any enthusiasm for gifts—it
reflects greed. So Manu showed complete indifference to all the
gifts he got that evening, although in his mind he was assaying the
weight and the bulk and the sound of each package.
Till the time the
cake was cut, everyone had their eyes upon it. It wasn’t a fancy
cake, not even a Black Forest (you would be surprised how
undemanding kids were in 1989), just a plain-vanilla oven-browned
cake that Ma had baked, but she had used home-made white butter
(that she had got up early to make) in it and she had beaten the
batter till her hands ached. So, it came out nice and fluffy and
smelling very wholesome.
The cake should
have had 13 candles (one for luck), but Papa frowned on silly
symbols and would have liked Manu to not blow out any candles at
all. However, Ma insisted on planting one in the centre for form’s
sake. The birthday song was sung the way it is always, starting out
with a very loud “happy birthday to you, Manu” and then dropping
into a murmur as none of the boys remembered what lines came next
and lip-synced hoping that the others would keep up the song to the
end. They didn’t, and the singing ended as soon as it had started
with loud but embarrassed laughter.
After the cake
came vegetable pakoras (freshly fried), and bread pakoras and
samosas from the shop at the corner outside the campus. See, this
was before Pizza Hut or Dominos or McDee’s or Subway came to India,
forget Chandigarh. ‘Liberalization’ hadn’t happened. You got
ThumsUp and Campa Cola but no Coke or Pepsi (children of
middle-income families happily guzzled Rasna and Rooh Afza). Wimpy,
which was the first multinational fast food chain in Chandigarh,
also came after a few years. There was only the home-grown Hot
Millions, but Manu and his family had never tried it, and people
like them formed a vast majority in Chandigarh. Birthday parties
had simple menus but everyone enjoyed digging into the same things
again and again. Those who wanted to make a party more elaborate
included Maggi and chhole kulche, but cake was the only foreign
influence you could see.
After everyone had
eaten to their heart’s content, they went out to test Manu’s cycle.
Again and again they went around his housing block, and some did
try long skids at full speed on the road hidden from his view.
Altogether, everyone was very pleased with the party, Manu most of
all, and they all went home well after the hour they had promised
at home. Manu tore open every gift and was delighted to find three
of his favourite Alistair McLeans among them. The board games were
not bad either but he kept them aside to pass on as gifts at
others’ birthdays.
***
Nobody’s
special on the day after their birthday, and Manu went to school
without a vermilion mark and with the usual aloo paratha in his
tiffin box. But it still felt like a special day because of the new
cycle. Now he could ride really fast, and Sharad was no match for
him. Although he cared a lot for it and stopped others from braking
hard at speed, once in a while he couldn’t resist the temptation to
make long, black skid marks on the road with his cycle.