Usne khud chalayi?

Did he ride it himself ?

1972

They arrived on a rickshaw — baba, dadi, bua — and I remember running out to meet them the way children run, which is to say without thinking about what running means. I don't remember saying namaste. I remember the rickshaw's rear, and the strange shape sticking out of it that didn't belong to luggage.

Red. Black seat. Rubber wheels, no stand, no carrier, steel handles, a bell, black pedals.

A cycle.

I remember wondering, in the brief, uncomprehending way of a child doing arithmetic he doesn't yet have the numbers for, why they had brought it. It was unloaded. Dadi nudged my aunt. My aunt was already grinning before she rolled it toward me and said, "It's for you."

I think my jaw hit the floor.

Everything before that moment — the arrival, the rickshaw, the three of them standing there after however long since I'd last seen them — degraded into oblivion. There was only the cycle. I don't think I said thank you either. I don't remember saying anything.

Lunch was a haze. Voices around the table were a buzz I couldn't tune into, because somewhere outside the room, propped against something, was the cycle, and every part of me that mattered was already out there with it.

Everyone went for a siesta after. I didn't want to sleep. My father saw it — the longing, unhidden, a child's face has no architecture for hiding anything — and he asked Nagarmal bhaiyya to take me out.

Nagarmal. Khaki shorts, brown PT shoes, a white half-sleeved vest. I remember him more clearly than I remember most adults from that year.

He held the seat and patted it and beckoned me up. It felt strange and it felt enormous, both at once. He explained each part with the patience of a man who has explained it before and will explain it again — handle for direction, pedals for pushing, brakes for stopping — and then my feet were on the pedals and I was spinning them backward, fascinated by the motion for its own sake, not yet understanding that pedals were meant to take me anywhere.

He corrected it. Showed me the right way, the way that actually moves a cycle forward. I felt the weight of the thing under me for the first time. He was still holding the seat. There were no training wheels — nobody in 1972 in that house was thinking about training wheels — there was only Nagarmal's hand, and my feet learning a rhythm they didn't know they had.

Then something changed. The pedals got lighter. My feet were pushing, one down, the other rising to meet it, down and up, circular, rhythmic — and I was moving. Forward. On my own. The symphony of it. I pedalled harder, faster, hypnotised by my own feet, not because I understood I was riding but because the motion itself had taken hold of me.

Nagarmal had let go. I hadn't noticed. Momentum was doing what his hand had been doing a minute before.

Five minutes. That's all it took. I went from a boy who had never touched a cycle to a boy who was riding one — no memory of the exact second the change happened, only the fact of it, already true by the time I noticed.

I was staring at my feet — intently, the way you stare at something you can't quite believe belongs to you — when I heard my name. Something in the tone was wrong. Alarmed. I looked up.

Straight into the handlebar of an oncoming rickshaw.

I don't remember what I felt. I remember chrome — a great deal of chrome, filling the whole of what I could see. I remember the rickshawallah's hand closing around my arm. I remember Nagarmal reaching me, and then walking back toward the house — my cycle in one hand, me held up with the other — with an urgency in his stride I hadn't seen in him before. My mouth felt wet. Full. And underneath all of it, absurdly, my mind was still turning over the feeling of my feet on the pedals.

My father came out. Nagarmal was already apologising before anyone asked him to. My father looked at me and told me to rinse my mouth. My mother's hand flew to her face. And in the middle of all that — I caught only a fragment of it, but I caught it — my father turned to Nagarmal and asked:

"Usne khud chalayi?"

Did he ride it himself.

Not are you hurt. Not how badly. Did he ride it himself.

He looked at me then — half concerned, half something close to a smile, at my bloody, ruined face. My front two teeth were gone.

The dentist removed what was left of them. I got ice cream afterward, which felt, at the time, like a fair trade.

Back home, the adults went inside, spent by the afternoon. My father picked the cycle up off the ground, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, "Let's see you ride."

That was all I needed.

He gave me a gentle push. I was off again. By the time I turned at the gate, I looked back and saw him watching me — smiling — before he turned and walked into the house.

I remember the wind through the gap where my two front teeth had been an hour earlier. I remember storming into it.

Looking up. Not at the pedals.

The inheritance wasn't the cycle. It was the push after the fall.