Cyclic Memories - 4

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Here is yet another Independence Day.

I was 4 when India gained its independence and celebrated it like nobody's business. I recall peeping through the window of our Village Home at the surging crowds in the morning. It looked as if every man in the Village was out on the streets. My Father was away from home, probably in his school, assisting his HM unfurl our nascent Flag without a hitch. The streets were awash with the tricolor and ablast with Vandemataram. Father returned home, his pocket full of 'lemon drops'.

Talking of 1947, here is a cute vignette of the working day of a New York City shipping magnate around then:

"Up in the morning bright and early at his Long Island home. The bath. The shave. The eggs. The cereal. The coffee. The drive to the station. The 8.15. The cigar. The New York Times. The arrival at the Pennsylvania terminus. The morning's work. The lunch. The afternoon's work. The cocktail. The 5.50. The drive from the station. The return home. The kiss for the wife and the tots, the pat for the welcoming dog. The shower. The change into something loose. The well-earned dinner. The quiet evening. Bed."

Unlike London, I haven't been much in NYC, except through PGW, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain (once in a while)....and Saswat.

Saswat has recently moved from NYC and is awfully nostalgic about it. I guess his lifestyle there too is well encapsulated in the above PGW-para.


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 My yesterday's post ended with the sentence:

"And that was my first and last venture with tricycles..."

Not exactly true. There is this baffling encounter I had with another tricycle:

In 1974, I was living in Qrs C1-97 at IIT KGP as a bachelor of 31. And my friend NP and his family were in Qrs C1-116. If you think they were 19 Qrs away from us, you don't know your KGP Campus well although I described its weird numerology many times earlier. The numbering is not spatially ordered but temporally...I mean Qrs C1-116 was the 19th Qrs to be built after C1-97. The Civil Engineer (Construction) must have been a hobby-Relativist since space and time were not all that different for him. 

NP's Qrs were in the same lane as ours but only 7 Qrs away. NP's son, D, was a cute kid of 4 then. And his dad had gifted him an equally cute and sturdy tricycle. And it was D's practice to occasionally visit our Qrs and ring his bell...tring tring tring... to draw my attention away from my woolgathering sessions. 

That was a rather late evening of our Independence Day and the roads were quiet. D arrived, rang his bell and suggested we visit the Hijli Station, he on his tricycle and me on my bicycle. Not exactly...it was NP's bicycle which I was using then.  It was a pre-World War II machine, a supermassive Humber of 24" frame. It was as heavy as I was and more than half as tall. Heavy though it was, once you mount and step on it, it would race like a mustang and fly like an eagle. It has a wiki-entry all its own.

 http://www.southerntierbikeproject.com/BikeArt.html 

I was game to his suggestion thinking that he and his dad were routinely visiting Hijli station and D was adept at it. That is what happens if you are a bachelor.

So, we two started on our respective vehicles, he trying to outrace me and I falling behind to humor him. By the time we were nearing the precincts of what is now the Tata Steel Stadium, D got down and sat on the grass by the side of the road. I asked him what happened and he said he was tired and couldn't ride any further.

That was fine with me and I suggested we take some rest and drive back home. But he said he didn't inform his parents where he was going on his solo expedition and so has to rush home before search parties start off. I was then getting worried since there were no telephones and it was quite dark by then. And the road was as desolate a place as the Dandakaranya it used to be called.

And D said he was too tired to walk either....meaning that I had to take him koley (give him  a shoulder-ride).

KGP campus was notorious then for cycle thieves. I couldn't leave our vehicles there and try and shoulder him all the way back home...both the cycles were expensive. I couldn't leave him there with the Humber and lug his tricycle home first and come back and take him as a pillion on the Humber, since he said he was getting scared. And there looked to be no practicable solution to this multi-mode-resource-constrained-project-scheduling problem.

I then recalled the much easier problem we used to play with in our childhood...the farmer, his tiger, his goat, his paan-leaf bundle, the river he had to cross with them all safely without each eating up the other wherever possible, and  the single boat that could only hold one passenger other than the rower...

I recall vividly our Humber-Tricycle conundrum after nearly  40 years...but I forgot how we solved it ultimately. 

Let it stay as one of those

Locutus Interruptus
 

stories...you can have your pick...

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