A Bikeless Hero

‘A hero without his bike is like a chachaji without his trousers,’ I said, and all my buddies burst out laughing. My clinic was filled with my friends more than with patients. My nana had long since given up on me. ‘I have spent so much money on your medical studies over so many years and all I have got in return is your rowdy friends coming here and raising hell.’

The bike raced along with my three rascal friends behind me, each carrying a switchblade. We screamed like madmen as we sped along. Someone said from the back, ‘These doctors don’t give a fuck during dissections but are we villains just because we like ripping people’s guts out?’

I didn’t reply. I wasn’t usually the first to do anything. But if someone got into my face without reason, how could I not tell them to back off?

Our bike zipped past Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s statue as we shouted, ‘Har Har Mahadev!’ After Phule Vegetable Market, we cruised straight down Karve Road, crossed Ambedkar Chowk, and arrived at Gajanan Maharaj’s Math. ‘Fuck,’ I muttered. ‘We’ve ended up at Gajanan Maharaj’s feet after raising hell all through streets named after the great saviours of our society.’

Umya laughed. ‘We’re just the children of globalisation. Post … post-modern … that’s what this is!’ ‘Let’s go to Jamshedji Tata’s statue,’ Donde chimed in. ‘We’ll prostrate ourselves before him and say, “We have only two Gods: You and Gajanan Maharaj. Only babas and capitalists are going to survive this Kalyug. All our fates are uncertain, boss…”’

Nana raised us – my brother, my younger sister, and I – with a very sanskari upbringing. My brother got swept up in all those conservative traditions, but I was able to escape Nana’s clutches, discovered the world outside the four walls of our house. Nana, though, was only concerned with relatives, their weddings, his games of cards, and his office friends. He once became the treasurer in the bank elections — he probably embezzled some cash too. He definitely knew that world like the back of his hand, but that was all he knew. I knew the real world, about things he didn’t even know existed. Our baba’s world was mostly like a Yash Raj movie — suffused with high emotion and melodrama. The TV was playing some movie. Hero and heroine have set off on a journey … together. Destiny itself has made travelling together an unavoidable circumstance. They share a room. But nothing happens between them. They get annoyed by each other’s habits and fight over the smallest things: How he makes a mess while brushing his teeth, how she leaves strands of hair on the comb. But then I began to wonder, when the hero and heroine are off on this journey, where does the heroine change her underwear? And does she suddenly stop getting her period while all this is happening? And what if this fellow wants to masturbate, where does he go?

My nana is amongst those kinds of people who never wonder about such things and are content enjoying their candy floss without question.

My sister, Sonali, was named after my aaji, Sonabai. At home, we all called her Sona, except for my aajoba, who called her Sonabai, claiming his wife had been reborn as his granddaughter. She’s my sister — dear to me, but still my sister. I’ve had all my friends tie rakhi by her, not because she’s ‘that kind of girl’ — she’s grown up with Nana’s sanskar after all — but because I would always be worried otherwise. I know what the real world is like, and I’m aware of all that could go wrong. I’m always paranoid about her safety. If she’s late, my mind spirals —what if some roadside thug has threatened to throw acid in her face? That’s when I hop on my bike and start my rescue mission…

Flirting with girls or teasing them is not something I can do. Back in 11th grade, there was a girl named Padmini who sat on the bench in front of me. I told Umya that she kept staring at me and was flirting with me. He said I was mistaken — she was staring at him. So, in the spirit of friendship, I ‘sacrificed’ my love, wrote her a letter in my neatest handwriting, and handed it to Umya to give to her. For two years — 11th and 12th grade — we followed her around on my bike, with that letter in hand.

On the last day of college, after finishing our exam, we bolted out of the hall and rushed to Padmini’s exam centre, which was quite some distance away. We spotted her on her Scooty. She stopped, looked right at me, and asked, ‘Did you skip your exam today?’

I shook my head. ‘We finished early and came straight here.’

‘Didn’t you have the biology exam today?’ she asked.

I nodded.

‘How did you finish so soon? And bio of all subjects? Isn’t Shahu College your centre? It’s so far away! I chose electronics because I didn’t want to go to that faraway centre.’

She even knew my subjects. How strange.

‘Should I head home now, or do you want to keep following me?’ She was only speaking to me. ‘You should focus on your studies. These days, women only fall in love after knowing about a man’s career.’

‘Really?’ I asked.

‘I don’t, but others do,’ she said.

Umya’s face fell.

‘You bastard! It was you she was staring at all along, and I thought she liked me.’

Then he took that letter and set it on fire with his lighter. I burst into laughter.

‘You asshole, I sacrificed my love for you, and now that you know she liked me, this is how you behave?’

Umya didn’t respond. He had become quite emotional. Filmy influence, you know. How else do people know they have to become emotional at such moments? It doesn’t happen automatically. Particularly for such stupid reasons.

Obviously now we no longer run around women like we did then. It was fine when I was in college but now almost a decade later, even letters have become old-fashioned. Umya is getting marriage proposals, Dondya is already married, and my elder brother has a baby so I am an uncle now.

‘We’re old now,’ I said to Umya. ‘How much more time are we going to waste? When are we going to get some ambition?’

‘This is who we are,’ he said. ‘Even if we settle down, we’ll stay the same. Look at Dondya. He’s married but still spends his nights with us.’

‘His poor wife,’ I quipped. ‘She might have to have an affair to satisfy her needs.’

Just as I finished speaking, Dondya appeared right in front of me. I remained as I was, but Umya quaked in his boots, his face looking like he’d seen a ghost. Dondya latched onto my collar. I didn’t want it to turn into a scene, so I quickly said sorry without really meaning it. It worked and he backed off.

‘Don’t you care about anything?’ Umya asked me later.

I shrugged. ‘Dondya says worse things about other women all the time. He should be able to take it when it’s about him.’

‘What if he said that about your sister?’ Umya asked.

I paused, realizing that I wouldn’t be okay with it. She was innocent, morally upright, and most importantly, she was my sister.

Sonabai got her results — it was her third year of engineering. She’d struck a deal with Nana that if she topped her class, he’d buy her a laptop. Meanwhile, I’d bought my own laptop with the barely-there earnings from my medical practice, saving for six whole months without spending on anything else. Nana hadn’t offered me anything for passing my exams even without studying. ‘You managed to do so much while goofing off. Imagine what you could’ve achieved if you’d studied just a little,’ he said, knocking the wind out of my sails.

Sonabai, on the other hand, got a brand-new laptop — the perks of being the youngest, and a girl, in the family. My brother’s just a year and a half older than me, born when Nana and Mom were in their prime. My sister came eight years later, when Nana had probably softened up. Most definitely.

Padmini was back in our lives. Her family offered her hand in marriage to Umya. ‘You rascal,’ I said, patting him on the shoulder. ‘Looks like everything’s going according to your plan. She’s finally yours.’

I remembered how she had said that women fell in love based on a man’s salary. Umya had switched from science to commerce and eventually became a contractor. Dondya and I used to clean up his messes. He’s made quite a name for himself in the city now. Even though he’s known for causing trouble, he’ll probably get a ticket for the upcoming elections, and all his sins will be wiped clean.

‘We’ve become big boys without having to get married. Why is she not yet married?’ Umya wondered aloud. ‘A beautiful girl like her? It’s very suspicious. She must have a boyfriend on the side or something. That’s the only reason why she still doesn’t have a husband. And do you think she’s still pure? She’s definitely been around.’

‘So have you,’ I said.

Our Umya had affairs all over the place. Rooms would be booked in hotels located in desolate places outside town. Then he and the girl would arrive separately. I’d even driven a couple of them there on my bike.

‘How can you marry someone like that?’ Umya countered.

‘Fine, then. Let me go meet her instead. I don’t mind an experienced girl.’

‘She’s not the same caste as you.’

That was the day it hit me — I needed to settle down and start a family. Friends and shenanigans were all fun, but it became clear that even those who call themselves ‘post-modern’ were part of the same rat race as everyone else. I asked Nana for money and had a new board made for my dispensary. Gradually, my contact with Umya and Dondya faded. I started to feel betrayed. In the end, even friends follow the caste system, clinging to society’s archaic traditions. Like a fool, I had trusted them.

What was I supposed to do with this betrayal? End it all? How could I find the same thrill I once got from threatening people with knives, throwing punches and kicks? It’s a mess now. If I choose the straight and narrow, it’s all over. Finished. I’m as good as dead.

Umya’s marriage was finally arranged, to a nineteen-year-old college student, eleven years younger than him. ‘Well-behaved and well-cultured,’ he said. He’s buying a car now, adding to his collection of two bikes and two four-wheelers. He’s even thinking about buying a bus — he’s running a travel business on the side. ‘We’re post-modern, brother,’ he said. ‘We want mayhem, and we want cars.’

‘Practice sitting on horseback with that car — you’ll need it at your wedding,’ I joked. ‘A hero without a bike is no different from a groom without a horse.’

He fell over laughing.

Dondya’s wife was pregnant. When he told us, I felt like he had a hidden agenda, as if to prove something. He might as well have said, ‘I’m spending nights with my wife like a real man. A child’s growing inside her, he’ll carry on our family name, fulfill my dreams, and even if he doesn’t, I’ve proven my masculinity. What about you, baba? It’s time you create something of your own.’

I felt like asking him if he had confirmed whether the baby was indeed his, but I bit my tongue and swallowed those bitter words. ‘Congrats,’ I said, instead. ‘You are finally going to be a dad, you rascal!’

He narrowed his eyes and looked at me. I couldn’t tell what I had said wrong.

Nana found a new hobby: Playing solitaire on Sonabai’s laptop all day. He didn’t need friends anymore, just him and his cards. ‘The internet also has gambling,’ I joked. ‘Why don’t you bet a nice sum of money and join those games. You’re used to cash passing through your hands from being a cashier anyway.’

That’s when Sona took me aside. ‘Don’t encourage him, Dada,’ she said. ‘He might check my Facebook.’

I became worried. What could she be hiding? I quickly searched for her profile. I am normally not too interested in all this. I have an Orkut and Facebook accounts but rarely check them. Sonabai’s profile mostly had her photos with her girlfriends. I checked her wall to see what people had written there and once again it was mostly her girlfriends writing about friendship. Compared to other profiles, Sonabai’s was quite tame and innocent. I suddenly saw Padmini in her friend’s list and immediately sent her a friend’s request.

As I stopped spending time getting into fights with my friends, I found myself with a lot of free time. I began to do what I normally never did — surf the web. All these years I had had no affairs with girls, not even a single fling. Once I had kissed a girl on a bet, and she fell for me but I was not interested. Now I felt something was missing. I messaged Padmini, ‘Remember me? I used to follow you around on a bike.’

She didn’t reply. I didn’t send another message; I don’t chase too hard. So, I chose a different route and began chatting with complete strangers on the internet.

At first, no girls would talk to me, but then I realized no one came online for conversation — they came to get rid of their sexual frustration. To satisfy their lust by hiding behind fake profiles and false identities. The internet was an outlet for the violent urges buried deep within. If I tried to talk about something casual, like a movie I’d seen or a book I’d recently read, they’d log off instantly. I was stumped on what to do. One day, I decided to change my identity. I made a fake profile and pretended to be a girl to see how men chatted with others. They wasted no time, and asking for Age-Sex-Location (ASL), dove straight to dirty talk. What do you look like? What are you wearing? Are you touching yourself right now? I’ll tie up your hands, grab your hair, and so on. I slowly began to enjoy pretending to be a girl and talking to boys. Maybe it was a girl pretending to be a boy replying to me. Who could say?

One day, I was completely engrossed in chatting with a boy from Germany. We became so intimate that he became desperate to see me. I told him I didn’t have a webcam and tried to prevent the conversation from going any further, but he asked for my email address. He said that if he had met me, he would make me his ‘begum.’ I was quite surprised by all this because I didn’t think a German boy would talk like this. His English was passable. ‘I will make you my queen,’ he wrote. I translated it for myself as ‘begum.’

I asked if he was really German. He instantly became defensive. ‘I live here, but I’m from Palestine. I’m a Muslim. Are you going to stop talking to me now?’

‘No,’ I typed. ‘Why would I?’

‘Because that’s what I am used to here. In Germany we live in exile. Back home we live as prisoners.’

He got depressed after this subject came up. We talked about refugees, Palestinians, and Turks. Then, out of nowhere, he said, ‘You’re a hot girl. Why are you even bothering yourself with this stuff?’ And then he logged off.

Who was this man I was having virtual sex with? Just as I started to know the real person, he vanished. There were no humans online — just animals, waiting to tear you apart. Log on and behave as you please with someone else. Let yourself go wild because you don’t know who you’re fucking since everyone is anonymous. What kind of sex was this anyway? Completely fake and imaginary. The internet is a place to excrete the crap in your brain, a giant global sewer to dump it all.

Meanwhile, my clinic had picked up business. With nothing else to do, I could focus on things that actually mattered. Life in our town wasn’t so bad. We had peace and most of the comforts of a big city. Load shedding was the only drawback. For someone like me, having a home and a steady job was enough. It wasn’t the grueling labour of village life, nor the relentless hustle of the metro. Even with all the time used up, there was still some left over.

I even began paying more attention to our home. We needed to build another storey on our house by placing a slab on the terrace. I brought this up with Nana, suggesting that we could rent the rooms to a coaching class. He was overjoyed, emotional even.

‘You’re finally working to bring prosperity to the house,’ he said. ‘Should we start looking for a daughter-in-law now, or will you?’

We’d argued plenty over this before, about marriage, caste, everything. I even told Nana once, ‘What if I don’t like women?’ He didn’t quite get it. ‘Nana, what if I’m interested in boys instead?’

‘That could be,’ he replied. ‘So, should we find you a son-in-law instead? Should he be from the same caste, or does it not matter? You’re already in the minority so it becomes difficult to meet the caste requirement.’

Nana didn’t bring it up for years after that, but he had my brother ask me whether I really liked boys.

I had a bike, but I wasn’t an action hero because I didn’t have a ladylove to sit behind me as I sped through the streets. Still, I was the hero of my own life. I had all the traits — daredevil spirit, a knack for causing mayhem, and even smoked despite being a doctor. Most importantly, I was handsome. I looked younger than most of my age, but I realized those action hero qualities were fading as I was getting older and settling down.

It was closing time at the clinic. Every day, after locking up, I would head to a cyber cafe that belonged to Dondya’s brother and chat with strangers. Sometimes, it got so late that he would hand me the key to close up. I had gone back to chatting as a man now that I had studied how other men chatted with women.

 One night, just as I was about to lock up the clinic, a girl appeared. She looked to be my age but carried a youthful energy, like someone from 11th grade. She had put on a little weight, and her hair was shorter than I remembered. She had gone to Pune after 12th grade, and we had lost touch. Seeing her made me realize how much time had passed. ‘Padmini,’ I said when our eyes met. I assumed she wouldn’t remember me, but she did — name and surname. She must have really liked me back in college.

‘I heard you became a doctor. My brother told me to come here if I wasn’t feeling well, so I did. Otherwise, I don’t see doctors for things like a cold,’ she said.

I didn’t think much of it when I examined her, but later, it hit me that I had touched her for the first time after all these years. It stirred something in me I hadn’t felt in a long time. Was it because I had finally needed physical contact? Or maybe all that chatting with strangers was driving me insane?

We started meeting regularly. She taught physics at a nearby college. The girl I was once nervous to talk to was now sitting across from me, sipping chai. I would meet her at her college canteen, and we would talk about everything. I had begun to like her, but I was afraid of saying anything because she was just as direct and straightforward as she used to be. She might ask me directly what my sex life was like. And if I told her about my online chats and dirty talk, who could say what she would think of me? We would walk to my dispensary, lost in conversation. She would visit me there, and then we would walk to her college. I never asked why she hadn’t married, and she never asked me that either.

I ran into Umya one day.

‘You got her in the end,’ he said. I was confused and started to get angry. ‘I know the truth,’ he added. ‘The whole college is talking about it — you and Padmini.’

It was strange. I spoke about all kinds of vulgar things with unknown women online, but now people were more interested in my friendship with Padmini, which was pure. We weren’t hiding; we met openly. This was how it went in small towns. Gossip spread like wildfire. It was mostly concerned with women’s reputations and characters, and it stayed in people’s memories for a very long time.

I had almost stopped riding my bike. One day, Sonabai asked, ‘Will you teach me how to ride?’

I agreed, and was surprised because she had always seemed too delicate for such a thing. I wouldn’t have thought, even in my wildest imagination, that she would be interested in learning how to ride a bike. As I taught her, we talked a lot. I had never realized that my sister had her own life. She was always just my younger sister, but now she was talking about her friends, college, and movies I didn’t care for, although I tried to see her perspective. One day, she suddenly braked, and the bike stalled. She panicked and let go of the handlebars, and we crashed. We both got up, laughing at how we’d fallen to the ground. I picked up the bike and sat in the front. She got on behind me. We rode ahead. Sonabai stopped laughing and said, ‘I want to talk to you about a boy.’

I slammed on the brakes and told her to get off the bike.

‘What boy?’ I asked.

‘A boy in my college. I like him.’

Without thinking, I slapped her. I didn’t know why I did it. I took her home, found out who the boy was, called Umya, and gathered a couple of local thugs. We went to the boy’s hostel and roughed him up. Afterward, I felt exhilarated — it had been a while since I’d done something like that. But then it hit me: I had become my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather. My rebellion was over. My convictions and fire were gone.

Now, I had fully merged with the patriarchal tradition of guarding the ‘honour’ of the home. And that honour, of course, meant protecting the women. I would do as I pleased, letting loose in chat rooms, but when it came to my sister, the traditional man in me would awaken, turning me into a tyrant. I had become just like the men I once despised. The realization made me restless. I went to my room, locked the door, plugged in my laptop, and began chatting, trying to avoid giving myself the time to feel guilty.

That day, I met an interesting girl. We couldn’t stop talking, even after the usual dirty talk. She was an Indian living in the UK, with a love for Bollywood, though she had also seen films that strayed from the typical formula. She knew all about India’s partition — her grandfather had moved to London just before it happened and never returned. She talked about her ex-boyfriend, an Irishman, and how her friends teased her about how ‘perfect’ they were together since neither of them were truly English. That had really irritated her.

‘My father was born here,’ she said. Her mother was Indian, but with her great-grandfather having moved to London, she was technically British. Yet, she wasn’t considered truly British. ‘Bollywood makes only romantic films,’ she wrote. ‘All you need is a hero and a heroine. And they need to be in love. Where does all this communalism and casteism come from in Indian society?’

I couldn’t think of an answer.

‘Those films aren’t reality,’ I finally told her.

She laughed. ‘In India, don’t young men ride around on their bikes, revving the engine stylishly? When I visited Punjab, everyone kept hitting on me while riding around on their bikes.’

I laughed too.

‘A hero without a bike is like a PC without the internet,’ I wrote.

She began laughing too.

The phone rang as we spoke. A strange man calling to threaten me. ‘If you so much as look at my sister again, you’ll see what I can do,’ he said.

I was baffled. How could someone threaten me? I had given someone else an identical threat just a short while ago. Something has really gone wrong, I thought. I could never have imagined that today was going to turn out to be that dramatic. The doorbell rang just then, and I opened it to find Padmini.

‘Will you marry me?’ she asked, her tone steady. ‘The whole town is gossiping about us. There’s nothing between us, but considering our age, there’s no harm in getting married. I find you different from the others, but my brother is against our relationship because of caste. If you agree, I’ll deal with him. If not, let me stay here for the night. I’ll leave for Pune tomorrow at dawn to stay with a friend and never come back. I am running because my brother is chasing me. I am not a kid anymore. I am a professor at a university. Will my life continue being dictated by my brother even now? Enough is enough.’

Sonabai appeared before my eyes. I thought about how I had slapped her and beaten up her male friend. How could I say anything to Padmini when I was just like her brother? I didn’t even know what to say. I was completely dumbfounded. It felt like I had suddenly walked into a cinema screen and found myself in the climax of a movie. I had neither a gun nor a knife. I had a leading lady but didn’t know my role — was I a hero or a villain? I just stood there like an idiot.

She asked me again for an answer. Then she said that coming here had been a mistake. ‘You aren’t inviting me inside, and I don’t think you will be able to fight with my brother. Back in college, you’d finish your paper at top speed and follow me around on your bike after every exam.’

I told her the truth, that even if I might have been riding the bike it wasn’t me who liked her. It was my friend, and I was just keeping him company.

‘And when you stared at me?’ she asked.

‘That was because I used to like you,’ I admitted. ‘But he started liking you too, so I stopped.’

Padmini wasn’t convinced. ‘Then why have you been waiting for me in the canteen every day? My brother is after my life because of it, and you are saying you did it all for your friend?’

Once again, I was stumped.

A car pulled up just then and stopped outside our door. I stood in the doorway. Padmini was in front of me and my family members were all around us. Padmini’s brother was inside his car. I wondered what would happen if a sword suddenly appeared in my hands. I would be able to fight all of them then, I thought.

But then Padmini walked towards her brother and told him she was going to Pune and that she didn’t care what he thought about it. She told him there was nothing between us and if he troubled me for any reason, she had plenty of ways to deal with it. She began walking into the distance. My chat window was still open. The London girl’s messages kept buzzing away there. Here I was staring at Padmini walking away. I suddenly remembered my bike and ran outside to it, kickstarted it and rode up to Padmini.

‘Sit!’ I commanded.

She hesitated for a moment, then got on. Everyone watched from afar. Her brother realized what I had done, and he revved up his car. He chased after us and we ran from him. As the bike raced along, I said to Padmini, ‘A hero without a bike is like a movie without a climax.’

I could hear Padmini laughing. I am, indeed, a filmy hero, I thought to myself, and I’ve got the bike to prove it.