I Kissed A Girl In My Class by Abhilash Gaur Page A

of other
schoolboys and the van’s cleaner got down in the rain to push it.
They had to push a long way before it started, and by then they
were all soaked. Manu had cursed so much under his breath that he
had let off all his steam. He was laughing now. Happy despite the
loss. His birthday was just two days away, and he was thinking of
his new sports bicycle.
    ***

24. New
Cycle
    The day before
Manu’s birthday, Papa came home early and took him to the cycle
shop. It was a big and old shop in Sector 20 called Darshan
Brothers. There was a dry-cleaner next door to it on one side and a
confectioner on the other. The confectioner had his softy machine
in the corridor and the space always smelt of a mix of ice cream
and rubber and tyre resin. It was a sweet, industrial smell the
like of which Manu never encountered anywhere afterwards. It wasn’t
an appetising smell really, but it was pleasant.
    Manu had known the
shop for a long time. When he had just learned to cycle, he used to
come there with Papa for spares: a new saddle or a bell or a lock.
It was also a good place to get the cycle serviced when the
mechanic outside their campus disappeared for weeks on visits to
his village. Later, when Manu could cycle confidently and started
going to school on it, he sometimes came to the shop in the evening
to window shop for cycles. The owners were brothers, as you would
have guessed from the shop’s name. They were ageing, and completely
unlike each other. One was fat and round-faced and bald, and he
always wore kurta-pajamas. He had a grating voice and talked too
much, but not to children. The other brother had his hair in place,
was quiet, and wore shirts and trousers.
    The shop was
always swarming with mechanics because it met many orders for
cycles in a day, and then as now, cycles did not come assembled
from factories. To ogle at the assembled cycles you had to find an
excuse to get past the threshold, and then nobody bothered you.
Manu’s red Hero Jet and his father’s bigger and black Hero Jet had
come from that shop. But this time Manu didn’t want a Hero. The
choice lay between Hero, Atlas, BSA and Avon, but for the kind of
cycle he wanted—a street racer with bent over handlebars and thin
tyres—BSA was the best. There was the BSA Mach 1 that had been
around for many years, and the new BSA Mach 10 with derailleur
gears. Although he would have liked the fancier new bike, after
much coaxing and cajoling Manu had been able to bring his father
round to approving the Mach 1.
    So that evening,
father and son walked down to Darshan Brothers to buy a new cycle.
Manu was super excited. He already had a chrome HMT watch with a
jet black dial, and with the cycle he would have everything that a
boy his age could fairly hope for.
    The garrulous one
of the Darshan brothers was at the counter that day. He greeted
Manu’s father pleasantly and on learning that the day’s business
lay in the boy’s hands, turned on his oily charm upon him. Manu was
very clear in his mind about the cycle he wanted: a ‘gunmetal grey’
BSA Mach 1. Sharad had a brown Mach 1 and while that also looked
nice, Manu had been a fan of all things grey since he was a little
boy.
    It was a long wait
for the cycle and they spent a couple of hours in the corridor
sitting on low stools the workmen had made for themselves out of
wood and frames welded from old cycle parts. First came the cycle’s
main frame, lowered out of a hatch in the loft. It was wrapped in
brown corrugated paper and Manu wondered how the mechanics knew it
was gunmetal grey and not another colour. But they tore off a
corner of the wrapping and it was the right colour. Then came the
handle and the saddle, and the mudguards in little cardboard boxes.
Manu was surprised that the little mudguards were chrome rather
than the cycle’s colour, but the shopkeeper assured him the company
had changed the design recently.
    The wheels, tubes,
tyres and miscellaneous pieces like axles and balls and