my bikes....

As i took my 4.5 year old daughter for small ride on her pink bike on a saturday morning , it seemed i was repeating a ritual that my dad did for me some 30 years ago. He had gifted me my first bike some 30 years ago. It was a red colored smaller bike with rims of creme color. Like my daughters one now , which is of course more flashier , it also had two smaller wheels on the sides of rear wheel to prevent me from falling. It had taken me some time to pick it up and learn moving the handle in the right direction , which of course my daughter picked up much faster given the generational shift. While this is chronologically only 3 decades ago , but then in India , seems like eons ago , given the amount of change our generation has seen in last 3 decades. Yet , few things won't change- idle chatter of mine to my dad , is the same which i get from my daughter. As i don't remember all the things i had said to my dad, so won't she later in life. But then , this wont come back to me ever again ....she wont be 4.5 years old again....and i wanted to savour every moment of this , even though , it is so boring to hear her same stories over and over again. It is some divine logic , which makes you feel like holding sand , which you know is slipping and you like it both slipping away and holding it at the same time....i fell in love with my parents once i became a father ...

Moving on to my bikes story ...that was first bike....second one was even better. It was a 6 years old Saine Raliegh cycle which my father had bought in 1971 , when he joined his first job. My mom says that i used to sit in the front rod of the cycle on a small child seat. It was definitely a luxury.And my parents used to walk for kilometers make me have a ride across the small town called Sindri. That cycle gave way to new Vijay Delux scooter parrot green in color , which was added to our family in 1977 , when my younger brother came in. This scooter was my best fantasy come alive with me standing in front of dad holding on to the handle. The air blasting past my ears while dad used to drive was so much of a whizz....i turned 10 , when i tried to first hand on my dad's bicycle. Believe , it was an experience to feel so high perched on the top of the moving metal. I was not tall , so it took me a while before i could climb up the perch easily...which i did eventually and much to my delight , circled around the colony that we lived over so many rounds that in the evening , my mother had to put my legs in salted hot waters to relax my thighs. Then for so many years that was stable companion of sorts , i did most of my home errands on that for my mother. i carried vegetables , took wheat for grinding to the local grinder shops , all on my dad's bicycle. That old man stayed with me for another 20 years , when finally in house , my wife tried to be kind with some local washerman , and gave that to him which he never returned.

Then as i moved to Tata Steel as a GT in 95 , i still remember that first week of August sometime , when all my friends had already bought their Yamaha RX 100 , the bike that stirred our generation, i was destined to purchase a cheaper 4 stroke version of Kawasaki 4S bajaj. But this was a compromise that i had to live with. Yamaha was Yamaha...it could start at the 4 gear directly . Only Yamaha could , others of that generation of bikes could not. It was not era of Pulsars and Hayabushas in India. Yamaha was the best. That synchronous sound of the engine that went past the hostel rooms were so exotic. And yet , each day , i pretended that my 4S was equally good , which i did it was not. Yet , it was faithful , like the wife and Yamaha was the sexy neighbour that i could never my hands on. So much so on Yamaha...even today after 15 years , as i look at old ones whizzing on the road ,not comparable to newer flashy ones , i still cannot get over the high that i gave me then , like an old wine , it gets sweetened with age.

Today , i believe , may be as i would turn 40 , may be , i can purchase the king of the roads the
Royal Enfield Bullet ...may be a show piece , to showcase , my remaining manliness. Indeed , you start needing that 40 onwards perhaps ....