Comment

In Pune where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, the poor boys went everywhere by bicycle: to school, college, the social tea shop, friends’ houses, on errands and to picnics in gangs to one or other of Shivaji’s forts. There was no competition in bicycling, no distinguishing pride in the make or price of our bikes. Each bicycle was to us as Silver was to the Lone Ranger — ‘Hi Yo’ and away!

Aspi Khambatta’s bike was a faded red frame without mudguards or brakes. He pedalled it at breakneck speed and stopped by scraping his shoe against the front wheel.

Our households each had several bicycles, some rusty relics which could be oiled and patched and brought back into service.

I once detached an old dynamo from one of these thinking it would save me the effort of carrying a torch. The lamp, even an oil one in those days, was legally essential after dark and this lighting law was the chief source of bribe-income for the local constabulary.

I oiled the dynamo, attached it to my bike and wired it up. It didn’t work. I went to the Ahura Cycle Mart, our local bike-vet and appealed to fat Mr Irani to fix it. He held the dynamo, spun its moving gear and examined it this way and that.

“This dynamo needs lead,” he said.

“What do I do?” I asked

“Get a large sheet of lead, wrap the dynamo in it. Go to Bund Garden Bridge and throw it into the river,” he said, handing the device back to me.

In Cambridge, UK, bicycles were de rigueur. The University culture bred bicycle theft and taking one that you found unlocked was not considered a heinous crime against property but regarded as a misdemeanour to be tutted at and tolerated. I never stole any bikes but herewith testify, for the first time in print, that I and Darryl D’monte my undergraduate contemporary and now distinguished eco-journalist, one drunken evening in celebration of the end of exams, requisitioned a few rusty bikes and threw them from a tall hump-backed bridge behind Trinity into the Cam for the devilment of hearing the splash. We ran away.

Since that time the status of the bicycle has been elevated. It is now the symbol of the new ecological Puritanism with a great deal of sanctimonious pomposity attached to it. It has become the badge of the ecologically superior. And with this bicyclist’s conviction of being the holiest riders on the planet comes an arrogance matched only by the Mumbai bus driver or the head-scarfed truck-driver on smack on the Indo-Gangetic highways.

Cyclists in the UK seem to have a duty to shout crass abuse at motorists and kick and dent cars to assert to the ether their caring attitude to the planet. One such posterior-opening-of-the-alimentary-canal, dressed in a ragged waistcoat and torn jeans hit out as I witnessed, with a metal instrument at car that overtook him on a London street, cracking the car’s rear window. The woman driver was too terrified to stop. Next, our hero climbed the pavement with his bike where I happened to be walking with a friend. I told him to get off the pavement in the same terms that he was using on the woman driver. He got off his bike, confronted me and spat in my face. I attempted to grab him by the collar but was restrained by my friend and passers-by. He went his way and we went ours.

Last week I saw the same fellow on the TV news being rather viciously arrested by two policemen while he was aggressively demonstrating against some policy announcement of the Labour government. The cops dragged him to their meat wagon and though I was in this case politically on his side, I confess to a flutter of satisfaction in my wicked and vengeful heart. I may even have muttered ‘God is great’.