Some time back, as I think most people coming to US are stung, I suffered the sting of becoming health conscious, driven by factors wise and foolish. Everyone around me looked healthy, although most were over ten years older than me and bringing up kids (I am told this particular activity is a major drain on health). That being the latter end of the spectrum tending from wisdom to folly. But, like all things in life, I took it a step ahead and in addition to joining a gym (which I honestly tried to build a regime around till a month or so ago) and bought myself a Kawasaki DX226FS 26-Inch Dual Suspension Mountain Bike. Now cycles and I have a bit of a longish history of conflict.
When I was four years of age, or a little more or less, my dad had a cycle that I would love to ride. Now I was a heavy kid so riding on the front was difficult for the rider. So riding back from somewhere (too young to know or care!) I was flailing my extremities as I normally did to express my childish frustrations. My left leg hit the wheels and got caught in it bringing me and dad down to quite a bit of injury. And my leg, from the dirt on the road and the blood from my veins looked like it could never be fixed again. Fixed it was but started a rather long age of bad luck with cycles.
When I was about 10 or 12 years old, suffering from an early bout of rebellious adolescence, I wanted a cycle and the normal stuff you get in India for a cycle I did not like. At the time it was all we could afford, really but in hindsight wisdom comes cheap. At that age I hated what I had since I wanted the fancy stuff with gears and flashy colors. After some painstaking efforts, by my father, to break the stubbornness out of me, the idea of me ever riding a cycle was shelved along with the equipment. It was a combination of anger at not being able to ride an MTB and the hatred to waste weekend morning trying to learn balancing my awkwardly shaped physique on two wheels.
And I grew older but the greed for the MTB never left me. Closer to 16 I demanded my ride again and was told that such purchase was to be allowed only of I learnt how to use my old equipment. So, the rusted and squeaky equipment was retrieved and oiled for me as I proceeded to learn to ride by driving a short height cycle around in circles on the roof of the ancestral house. I fell, bruised and bled through many evenings before I finally was confident to move to a full sized cycle.
As promised, there came the basic MTB but this became a prized possession for some time – I was pursuing this dream for 8 years and now finally I had what I wanted. So huffing and panting I drove around my cycle everywhere I went. By this time I had started my only retained vice and romance with the cigarette and the huffing and panting never stopped but it was all good as long as I got where I wanted to and stand with the bike resting on my hips, in full style. My influence had been the stylish Aamir Khan from Joh Jeeta Wohi Sikander. Who was I fooling! As life would have it, two days after I learnt how to ride without my hands on the handle, I lost the battle with gravity in one of the famous traffic congestions of Kolkata. Scratches and bumps aside, my cycle lost all semblance of alignment. I walked 8 kilometers with the heavy (remember it was a basic MTB and these were still days of non-alloy builds) cycle and after costing me a significant dent to my reserve pocket money, rode it home. Sadly, it was never the same again – squeaky and often prone to losing balance, brakes and sometimes lost the road altogether. So my first MTB was shelved and very soon I graduated to riding the bike with the IC engine and I thought I would never ride the cycle again.
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