IN the early 1970s, I was studying in a Jalandhar college. My home was about 10 km away from the campus, and like most of my classmates, I commuted by bicycle. Not just any bicycle — it was an old, slightly battered lady’s cycle. It had belonged to my sister; after her failed attempts at learning to ride, she had banished it to the storeroom. Years later, when I needed a ride to college, my family’s opinion was unanimous: revive the relic!
Almost every student — and even most teachers — had a bicycle, usually inherited and rusted. A rare few had scooters, mostly the notoriously unreliable Lambretta, which would cough and rattle like a retired brass band. Then there was the Vespa — sleek, stylish and nearly unattainable. If you owned a Vespa, you had arrived.
I, on the other hand, rode my cycle with pride — and often with a classmate precariously balanced on the carrier. None of us thought twice about these little things. Life was simple, and ambitions were modest.
Later, when I joined a nationalised bank, my lifestyle remained unchanged — the same bicycle, the same old trousers. However, one of my colleagues, who had joined the bank years earlier and had an exalted opinion of himself, managed to buy a brand-new Vespa.
He was the first in our colony to achieve this milestone. But instead of merely riding it to work, he turned it into a vehicle for wooing girls. Every morning, freshly oiled and perfumed, he would park it near the local bus stand around 8 am, just in time to catch sight of college girls.
“Going to college?” he would ask gently.
“Yes,” the girl would reply.
“I’m headed that way too,” he would smile, motioning to the back seat of his shining steed.
He became a one-man pick-and-drop service — one girl was dropped off and, on the way back, another was picked up. Some days, he claimed, he made three to four “rounds.” We often teased him, “Do you plan to open a public transport service, or are you doing social work?”
He would just grin. “I get great pleasure,” he once told us, “when I apply the brakes suddenly and the girl sitting behind… well, she leans forward, and…” You get the picture. For him, friction was not just physics — it was fantasy.
And so, our romantic rider continued his adventures, ferrying unsuspecting college girls while narrating his tales to us in the bank canteen. He even claimed to have taken some of them to the cinema. But fate, as always, has its own wicked sense of timing.
One morning, we received shocking news. My colleague had dropped off a girl at her college, and just moments later, collided head-on with a tractor-trailer. The crash was fatal.
To this day, whenever I see a Vespa, I remember his last ride — not just on two wheels, but on the winding road of vanity, desire and irony.
The writer is a retired Principal, Staff Training College, Chandigarh
