Bidding adieu to the lost romance of the bicycle

The folksy song that the mind has been humming all day dates back to 1892 which was inspired by Daizy Greville, the countess of Warwick. A muse of King Edward VII, she probably went riding the double bicycle with him and it led to songwriter Harry Darce and in the early ’60s legendary singer Nat King Cole sang it all over again: ‘You look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two!’

The reason for this charming song coming back to mind over and over again was an end-ofthe-era news anchor bemoaning the iconic Atlas applying the brakes on operations. And this happened on World Bicycle Day, June 3, for cycling is counted as one of the best exercises and totally pollution-free.

Born and nurtured in Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh with its wide roads, bicycles and cycle rickshaws, I felt a tug at the heart recalling that my first blue bicycle was of this brand that has passed into history. Life, they say, will never be the same again after Covid-19 and little signs of it appear with every passing day.

Of course, my bicycle was not ‘built for two’ and those kinds I had seen only in picture books or much later in a retro of a 1956 film ‘Ek Hi Raasta’ Sunil Dutt and Meena Kumari singing as they pedalled: ‘Sanware salone aaye din bahaar ke!’

My parents moved with the Punjab government from Lahore to Shimla and then Chandigarh. For my mother, raised in orthodox Rawalpindi, would recall with joy that in the new city of independent India, she was overjoyed to see an adolescent neighbourhood girl whistling as she pedalled a bicycle.

My brothers and cousins, girls included, all rode bicycles and I got joy rides aplenty. However, my mother would not let me learn cycling, overprotective of her precious girl child born after four sons. With a nomadic childhood in different cantonments with my brothers, after my father’s death, I never got to learn to cycle. It was walking or bus to college and later the university.

In 1977, a paper much harried during the Emergency, opened an edition in the city and many of us got jobs there. A year later, they offered the staff loans for mopeds and scooters. I enquired if I would be given a loan for a bicycle and the answer was yes.

So with a loan of Rs 500, I went to a cycle store in Sector 22, Chandigarh, and brought a blue low sports model bicycle and pushed it home to Sector 19 as I had yet to learn to ride it. Oh yes! The bicycle cost me Rs 480 and I picked up jalebis from a sweet shop to celebrate the purchase with the leftover Rs 20. At home, my older brother was waiting in the back lawn and had promised that he would teach me cycling. He just asked me to get onto the seat and gave me a push and there I was pedalling. I had never thought it would be that easy, overjoyed that my cycling days had begun.

LIFE, THEY SAY, WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN AFTER COVID-19 AND LITTLE SIGNS OF IT APPEAR WITH EVERY PASSING DAY