Cycle-zaade!

 

I learnt cycling in 12th grade.

Recognising the tyranny of board exams, our family didn't want to leave it to chance (or when I think of it, fully to me) for me to pass my physics. They found a tuition teacher that my cousin and I would go to in wintery mornings of January 2000, 5:30am! That's the only slot the teacher had it seems. I don't remember my teacher's name but I do remember he would start our class with a bowl full of pomegranates, eating all by himself while we were stuck solving his "questions for today".

One of the mornings, my cousin decided he will not carry me pillion anymore to the tuition. To be fair, he had done that for the past whole week and it's really no fun to carry another teenager on the back of your bicycle in a super chilly morning. While I was irritated with him then, I can't be more grateful to him now. 

I had the option of walking up to my tuition class. It was made clear by my folks that no one else would drop me. Or I could learn to cycle. Well, I had never figured out why would anyone put their life in danger by trying to focus on the road, pedal hysterically, keep saving one self from the monsters such as motorbikes, cars and trucks on road and tire oneself out before even reaching the place!

But then, my family decided that it was time I learn how to cycle. The only other cycle at my home was my cousin sister's ladybird. Not sure if it was her generosity or my uncle asking her to let me use, she did let me use it to learn. Irrespective, she was big-hearted, I think. The way I am possessive about my cycle even now, I would have hated the idea that someone else is using it to learn (what if they break it down?)!

Those wintery mornings, not sure how much I learnt physics (well, I managed to pass, so that's something) but I indeed learnt to ride a cycle. And I think that's one of the best things I did for myself. In the last twenty years or so, cycling is one of the activities that has come to my aid in many different ways.

 

My cycle became my friend when I needed to cry and sing at the same time during heartaches. I would ride up to long distances, let the tears flow and be wiped up immediately with the wind. On my happy days, I would again ride up to long distances and sing all the happy songs, smile at everything that would pass by. When I had to clear my head, want to feel alive or just be by myself but also be in motion, I jump on my cycle and pedal. 

My cycle has been my teacher too. I have mostly loved geography and sociology. It really intrigues me how social and ecological spaces interact with each other. The way I got to learn about the places I have lived in would not have been possible without my cycle. In Ballia, I would just wake up early mornings and pick up any road or gully, many times leading into nearby villages, loitering around. That gave me perspectives on how spaces were structured in the city. Why did my family, the upper-but-not-so-upper-caste Baniyas, lived where we lived and why did Dalit communities live where they did. The hyper-masculinity of the city public spaces and the shared workspace of the rural fields were so apparent. 

When I moved to Allahabad, I insisted on taking my cycle with me. My family asked, why do you need it there, you will have the college bus? I couldn't clearly say why. But I insisted and gave them multiple safe plans of how I will take it on the train. They were worried I might injure myself by cycling in a big city. But they gave in. To my credit, not once did I get into a cycling accident in Allahabad (if you don't consider the time when a dog went all indecisive in front of my cycle on a highway-ish road). My cycle created access to knowing the city in the ways I know it. be it going to busy Mutthiganj street for my Hawaiian guitar tuitions, going to another part of the city to hang out with my friends at their homes, or cycling around the Sangam, where Ganga and Yamuna rivers meet, with the songs in my head. 

When I was moving to Kanpur, my father asked me to give my cycle to my cousin brother, whose sister's cycle I used. What you take, is what you gotta give, you see! "He needs it to go the tuitions. You are not going to need it in Kanpur. Your tuition class is walkable from your room." We didn't really get to argue with fathers in north India those days (ok, that's an easy generalisation, so skip that). So I went to maa and cried. She advocated for me but the decision was made. 

So it was settled. I was going to hate my father that year. Well not just for the cycle, and mostly because I didn't know things better and was lost in my own world, but that was that. I only learnt later from maa that our family's financial situation was tight, and we couldn't afford things just for mazze ke liye (for fun). Anything that didn't serve its "core purpose" was to be reconsidered. And cycle's core purpose was to take us from one place to another, at least that's how my father tried to rationalise. The idea that one may use a cycle to, let's say, clear one's head, was too fancy, too luxurious. I made a decision (frankly it was less of a decision and more a reaction). The next cycle I will have will be from the money I earn. I lived three full years without a cycle. In the very first year of my job, the second thing I bought from my salary for myself was a cycle. The first was a mobile phone, me being the last person in my masters class to have a phone. 

 

Since then, even if I may not have most of the other things that many folks around me kept buying - a house, car, etc etc - you know the drill of "being settled", don't you!? - I always have had a cycle. From mountain bikes that I would ride in a Mumbai city (who cares, eh?) to the ones with gears on them, I have found myself learning about cycles, and falling in love with them again and again. From Orkut to Facebook to Instagram, my cycles have found a way to tell my stories. 

When my cycle was stolen from the stand of my Teachers Colony home, I decided a safer place for the next one - my drawing room! The next one was particularly light, for one, of course, it's fun to ride a light bicycle, but more because I had to climb up and down 4 floors with it every time I ride it in our building with no lift. My flatmate and friend, Abhishek was generous to let that be.

From riding my own, to looking out for everything-cycle all around me, became the thing. You know how it is when you are in love, right? So be it comic stripes, such as Calvin & Hobbes ( and they are my favourite, by the way), coffee mugs, to cafe-wall-arts, I see cycles all around me. 

Today, looking at these young people, pedalling away their cycles, I am reminded of many such little moments of life. While I rarely enjoyed cycling with other folks - that's mostly because I fear I may actually bump into them, just looking at their joyous faces made me think what a lovely, little invention this thing is! 

And I can never put in words - and this I say after having written this blog! - what does cycling mean to me. As I am writing this, I am reminded my current cycle, which you see in the picture below, has been with me since 2014. Now that's more than I have stayed in any relationship or a job! That says something about my love, no? :)

A non-ode ode to poetry

Today, one of my old students in a casual conversation around poetry over breakfast, said, “I learned poetry from you.” While I think he was being generous in saying that (I didn’t really teach poetry to him, and I will tell you why I feel so soon), the conversation opened up my own reflections on how poems have brought life to my ways of being. 

While I don't remember some of the earliest poems I was introduced to, I do remember that Maa and I had a poetic relationship. She would sing some lovely poems to me as a kid when and if she would get a chance. This particular poem about an old man was my favorite and I would ask her to recite it for me again and again. 

When I went to the English Boarding school, my first year in grade 6 was a mess. Not that the rest of the six years were glorious, but then they were better indeed. And why? I found poetry. Just like that, in one of the school events, our house captain, Nigam Bhaisaheb, asked our class to volunteer for a poetry recitation. Remember, I was still in the messy-first-year spell. Hell, I was not going to volunteer myself for an event that required me to go in front of over 800 students and say something for 4-5 minutes! But then, he asked us to read a piece of the poem for that year’s competition, Makhan Lal Chaturvedi’s Prem. I still remember that feeling of wanting to run away from that room. But then in an army school, you don't run away from your seniors unless you are ordered to. So I stayed. After all of us were done reading the piece aloud, he chose me and my friend Saurabh to do this. I so badly wanted to say no. But then, in an army school, you don't really say no to your seniors unless you are ordered to. But here, Nigam Bhaisaheb, instead of an order, gave a really motivational speech, which I of course don't remember. But I remember the feeling. For it had made me feel seen. Made me feel that someone believes that I can do something and can do it well. So I did. 

That was my first time, in front of an audience, reciting hai kaun sa wah tatv jo saare bhuvan me vyapt hai… and that was my formal introduction to poetry. (Sidenote: I won that competition with a historical score, which was more than Nigam bhaisaheb’s own score several years ago when he was in my grade. And his was the highest! So basically I had created a new record. Not that I am a scorekeeper now, but it mattered to me then.) I am sure he doesn't even know what impact his speech and his identification of me for that poetry recitation had on my life. And thus began my love story with poems. 

I started reading a lot of poems. I realised there was something that was coming to me. It felt like a poem to me. My words would have their own rhythm that I could feel. But then when I read what my syllabus was, it would not really fit the format. And then, Geeta mam, my Hindi teacher, taught us the chhandmukt Kavita (Free verse / Vers libre). Boy, I can’t even tell you how happy I was! 

My first poem was a chhand-mukt kavita. I called it, Wo jala sulga chand, That burnt moon (Pretty dark for a seventh-grader, isn't it? But then, why not?) As I continued my academic journey, I read many poems as part of my syllabus, and I am so grateful for all my language teachers - Geeta mam, Anju mam, Tripathi sir, Michael sir, and Vikram sir ( Vikram sir actually taught us all the tenses in poems he had created out of sentence examples - I can never forget his - I am going to Bombay…. You are going to Bombay… damn! The way we laughed then, but he continued to sing and sing, class after class!)

I think we don’t learn poetry. A poem is with us, all of us. It needs that fertile space to sprout through us. And so I say, my student - him or any other - didn't really learn poetry from me. They had it in them. I may have possibly contributed my bit to the fertility of their environment for poetry to sprout out, the way Maa, Nigam bhaisaheb, Geeta mam, and all my other teachers did. And so did all the poets whose poems I had the opportunity to read, celebrate, engage and reflect with - with or without chhands!

My red book of poems became that place where I could go and let my poems flow. Ok, to be more correct, my rough notebooks/loose papers were the places where the poems actually flew first, and then when they shaped up in the ways I found closest to what I wanted to say, that's when they would to the red book. 

Later, in my graduation days, I found a poet friend, Tulika ( I mostly called her Tuli or Donald, but that’s another story). Tuli and I would write our poems, me in Hindi and She in English, and would read them to each other. We were our only audience and the only critics. We would give each other feedback, and celebrate what we could bring out from within us. We continued this practice even after we graduated from college for a long time until life took its own course. And then we returned to it, once in a while when the poem needed its audience. 

When I became a teacher and needed to create a space for my students to be able to bring their stories out, poetry found its way to my classroom. While it was indeed lovely to bring the joy of poems to my students, it only then occurred to me how most of the poems that I had access to in my childhood were from certain dominant groups. For example, I read so much from Hindu upper-caste poets but rarely the poetry that came from Dalit writers. I rarely read romantic love poems that spoke about diverse ways of loving. My students came from such diverse life experiences that the poems I read would no longer serve them. Rafeef Ziadah’s We Teach Life, Sir, Pash’s Sabse Khatarnak, Steven Boyle’s I Hit Send, and Allen Ginsberg’s, Footnote to Howl, and Salma - the poet’s biography became part of the initial curriculum. In later years, my older students’ poems, such as Shahid's Land, Jeesu's Education and Raksha's poem for her grandparents came into the curriculum for my new students. 

In the last eight years with so many students from Akanksha, American School of Bombay, and Apni Shala, my life has been enriched with what all these amazing young people have written about. They have written about land, gender, violence, and love and loss. They have written about their joys, their sorrows, their anger, and celebrations. They have written about why they hate me or love their mom. They have written, recited, and cried and laughed in their sharings. And all of this has happened because they chose to see (in some cases coaxed, and yet in others forced into ;) ) their poems within them, and bring them out. In the rawness of umpteen number of torn pages thrown in the dustbin, and still getting back to it. And when done, sharing it, a part of their beings, with people out there. 

And no, I don't think they learned poetry from me. We indeed worked together on many of their poems. But they found the poems they wanted to be written - rather those that needed to be written out of them - and brought them to our workshops for us to be able to work together. and that's how we all became poets.

So, hey! Let your poems flow. Start with what you have. A word, a phrase, an image. Whatever. Begin, and come back to it when it comes back to you. But begin. 

#WorldPoetryDay #Poetry #Poems