Arjun Poudel
(I dedicate this memoir to the memories of my mother who finished reading her leather-bound copy of Bhanubhaktiya Ramayana dozens of times and also read out and explained it to the elders of our neighborhood)
Shantabikram Shah was definitely the shiest and most taciturn of bicyclists in the Kavidanda of my childhood. I never saw him exchange a hello – let alone any pleasantries – with passersby or bystanders. Rarely did his hands rise in a namaste to anybody, while almost all other bike-riders greeted – and still greet – each other by raising a hand as they held their bikes steady with the other. Nor did he ever seem to make any eye contact with those he passed by, although he rarely appeared to be biking in a hurry. The only occasion I saw him rushing was years later on a day preceding a Shivaratri in a neighboring village when he was bypassing a rope put across his way by a bunch of kids to raise funds for a bonfire party. Although he had paid those kids as handsomely as he would always give our deusi and bhailo teams in Deepawali, he was being pressed for more. I then saw him turn his handle to his right and quickly make his way around the tree to which one end of the rope had been tied. It might as well have been the only time Shantabikram ever ran in his adult life.
I remember no less vividly the other day when I was playing marbles with three of my childhood friends – namely Eknarayan Bhushal, Bhuwani Rijaal, and Manohar Malla – in front of Bhuwani’s house. The tar-paved roads of today’s Kavidanda had not even been graveled at that time. Although they were ten to fifteen feet in width, bikers used a narrow, well-worn trail in the middle and the rest of the road looked like a well-grazed part of a meadow. We also used that very trail to roll, toss and shoot our marbles. While in the middle of the game that day, we saw Shantabikram in the distance slowly pedaling his bike toward us. He lived – and probably still does – on the same street about three hundred meters to the south of where we were playing. Being a Thakuri with ‘Shah’ as his last name, most people in the neighborhood called Shantabikram ‘babu saheb,’ while others called him ‘raja saheb.’
“Babu saheb is approaching, I’ll go and hide for a couple of minutes,” Manohar said and began to take strides towards the backyard of Bhuwani’s house. As the elders viewed marble-playing as scarcely better than loafing around, Manohar didn’t want to be seen engaged in such a pastime by a highly respected Thakuri of the neighborhood.
“Who leaves a game in the middle like that?” Eknarayan reacted. He then threw a look at me and added “that too in fear of someone who plays card games with me for days on end?”
When Eknarayan had remained absent from our games of the previous two or three weekends, some of us were wondering where he could have vanished. There was a rumor – outlandish to my young mind – that he had been playing twenty-nine with Shantabikram and his wife. The remark he just made to me did not just confirm the seemingly outlandish rumor; it also made him seem no more a playmate of mine but a member of an earlier generation.
By this time, Shantabikram had arrived as close as fifty meters from us. The remaining three of us withdrew to the edge of the road to let him pass. While thus retreating from the middle of the road, Eknarayan looked directly into the eyes of Shantabikram and said with a smile but without raising his hands “Namaste raja!” The latter slightly tilted his head away at an angle of about thirty degrees from Eknarayan’s straightforward look. He then blushed and parted his lips into a barely audible “Namaste!”
These two and many later encounters with Shantabikram have long convinced me of how wrong my mother was in the view she held about him all her life. In her view, bike-riders passing by our country house fell into three distinct categories: i. Thaloo or elite ii. Thoolo, i.e. someone with pretensions of being an elite and iii. Sujjan, i.e. normal, ordinary and decent people. It must be noted here that vehicles like buses, cars and motorcycles being rarities in those days, bicycles were pretty much the only vehicle to pass through that house, with the exception of an occasional bullock cart often seen in the harvesting season.
Throughout her life, my mom put Shantabikram in the first category apparently because he never said ‘hello’ to her or raised hands in greetings to her on being face to face. I don’t know if he had responded only with a gentle smile to some of her greetings during the early stages of their acquaintance, as was the case in the incident above with Eknarayan, and thus failed in her eyes to respond to her greetings in kind. During his daily rides to work in the town of Rampur, if he didn’t cast a glance toward our house, he can hardly be faulted for that because he didn’t cast his glance to anybody else’s house. The focus of his eyes invariably rested on the road a few meters ahead of the front wheel. His impeccably neat and clean appearance might also have played a role in hardening my mom’s initial view that he belonged to the same category as, for example, Rambhakta Pyakurel and Punyaprataap Rana did.
Pyakurel and Rana had similar bearings as they rode their bikes almost daily along the road that went past our house. While Shantabikram and nearly everyone else sat erect on the seat and only lightly held the handles with their elbows sticking out, Pyakurel and Rana both leaned forward with their arms stretching stiffly down to the handle. It looked as if they were resting the full weights of their upper bodies on the handles using their straight arms as trusses. What is more, their faces looked no less stiff and rigid than their bodies, thus rendering each into an irreparable thaloo for my mom.
The most important factor that determined a neighborhood thaloo for her was not a personal one, like her own apparent falling out with Shantabikram. Nor did it have anything to do with the distinctive bodily posture that people like Punyaprataap and Rambhakta maintained as they rode their bikes. What distinguished a thaloo (the first category) from a decent and normal rider (the third category) for her was whether and how one interacted with other bike-riders. In fact, bike-riders related themselves with each other in a whole variety of ways. We’ll return to this topic in a moment; first a quick look at the types of bikes and the various uses they were put to.
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There were mainly three Indian brands that were popular in Chitwan during the Panchayat era – Hero, Avon, and Atlas. Nearly twice as expensive as these was a Chinese brand named Phoenix, whose original set of tyres seemed never to wear out. All these bikes had a triangular main frame – the uppermost rod being horizontal and the lower two forming a v-shape. When the lady’s bikes began to arrive after the sun had set in the Panchayat regime, they came with an open frame, i. e. one lacking the horizontal upper rod. Soon afterwards came mountain bikes, geared bikes and many other fancy types. Simultaneously, the use of motorbikes also sky-rocketed.
Going back to the bikers’ heyday under the Panchayat Raj, we find very few married women using bicycles except as the passenger of a male family member. Most families could afford a single bike, which was put to a variety of uses from commuting to work or school to carrying rice-sacks to the mill for husking. Women’s use of bicycles became universal when the dairy industry had expanded its presence to the whole of Chitwan. Before lady’s bikes became widespread, bike-riding in Chitwan was characterised by a number of gender-based norms. Here I present two of them.
First of all, men generally mounted the bike – as they still do – by first stepping on the left pedal and then swinging the right leg to the other side. Most women, however, folded their right leg and raised the knee high enough for the whole leg to pass to the bike’s right hand side. They reversed this process as they dismounted the bike. One reason for them to do so was that there usually was a milk can or some other load on the back seat. Then, as passengers, women sat themselves with both legs turning to the left, while male passengers usually sat astride.
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In the USA, where I currently live, bike-riders mostly use expressions like “excuse me” and “on your right” to inform the pedestrians or other bikers they overtake. Only a few riders ring the bell here. The opposite was the case in Kavidanda and in Chitwan generally. Riders rang the bell not just to ask pedestrians and other riders for way, but also as a greeting and sometimes to just draw the attention of someone at a distance. Some youngsters even employed bells for pranks and other mischievous purposes. Here is an incident that occurred in 2040 or 2041 B.S. (1983 or 1984 C. E.) when I was walking home from school with my middle-school classmate Subhash Chandra Poudel.
Subhash was wearing a new orange-coloured pair of loafer shoes that day. I think school uniforms hadn’t been introduced yet, at least not in Vishwa Prakash High School, where we were sixth or seventh graders. Subhash was in half pants, probably white. After taking the first right turn off the Rampur-Bharatpur road, we had walked about 500 meters and arrived at the point where the road narrowed to less than a half of its normal width. Paddy had freshly been planted on either side of the road and the paddy-plots had been filled with knee-deep water.
All of a sudden, we heard a bike’s bell ring so close to our ears we two had no doubt about getting hit. Seeing no better way to safety, Subhash immediately jumped into the muddy water. I stood aside, looked back, and saw that the mischief-maker was one of the school’s senior boys, whom everybody called bichari ko Narayan. He was called “bichariko” probably because his father or grandfather was a bichari, i. e. one who could hold the wrist of people feeling unwell, examine the pulse and offer medical consultations. The bichariko Narayan was not riding any bike at the time, it was only a bicycle’s bell in his hand that had wrought the mischief.
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Considering the other ways bikers interacted with each other, a very common sight during my childhood was that of two or three people heeding in the same direction engaged in telling stories, cutting jokes or just chatting with each other while riding side by side. As the roads were largely empty in those days, one could indulge in such pastimes without much risk. Leisurely biking thus partakes in the same ethos as those of fireside storytelling and gossiping. The moment one starts riding motorbikes, however, such ethos remain left behind and there begins a life of hustle.
Two such leisurely riders – a middle-aged man and a spinster – rode past our house every weekday for several years. Like Shantabikram, both of them worked in the campus of the Institute of Agriculture in Rampur, which has been made into a university today. My mother, who never rode bicycles herself, put both of them in the third category discussed earlier, that of decent and normal riders. The man was a distant nephew of hers, the second son of her cousin whom everybody in Western Chitwan called Nepal-e (with the vowel sound /e/ attached to ‘Nepal’). This cousin of hers was given that appellation or pet name by the villagers of Aaruchaur in Syangja, where he and my mom both grew up – the reason being that he had the rare distinction of having walked from Aaruchaur all the way to and back from the Nepal Khalto, as the Kathmandu Valley was called in those days.
My uncle Nepal-e lived right next to the Jungle of Tikauli that lies in the south east of Bharatpur. News of his cattle being preyed upon by tigers reached us once in every two or thee years. His second son, Moti, would lunch as early as 7:00 am and then hurriedly mount his Phoenix to embark on a nearly 15-km arduous ride to Rampur. About five or six kilometers down the way, he would stop outside the spinster’s house and wait until she emerged with her own Phoenix – a lady’s one – flashing her teeth in a smile that scarcely anyone else had the luck to be greeted with. The spinster’s family is still known as Pakhoori Bote, having migrated from another village in the district of Syangja named after a famous tree of Pakhoori (Ficus glaberrima). The ride thereafter would no doubt be less arduous as they chatted their way to their work.
We conclude with a quick and short look at the second category of riders, as per my mom’s classification. This category of riders were basically decent and ordinary folks. Only now and then they seemed to my mom to have elitist pretensions. As my mom grew older and weaker, she spent more and more time sitting on a chair outside on the verranda or the front yard. If anyone, who otherwise normally greeted her, failed to do so for a second or third time in a row while passing our house, she would infer that he had elevated himself into a thaloo, sometimes only to realize the very next day that the reality was something else. However, a lot of bikers in Kavidanda upgraded themselves into motorbikers during those years of her gradual debilitation. Many of these, who as bike-riders were once friendly and interactive with her, had no time for her as they rushed past our house on motorbikes. All they could do by way of greeting was to give her a beep, which she never recognized as a form of greeting.
(Thanks to Shobha didi for helping me with the botanical name of Pakhoori and to Achut my brother Shivaji for having read a draft.)