LEGEND OF THE HAND-PULLED RICKSHAW

To

The “Miniature Rickshaw” Man

There was an old man with his precious rickshaw, a miniature pre-Partition rickshaw, grown soft and smooth around its worn-out edges. The brass rickshaw now looked like worn-out brass, that old sunset-y, copper-y hue also found on huge brass platters and utensils of worshipping Hindu gods, and on the ubiquitous “mandir ki ghanti”. An old miniature of the ancient hand-pulled rickshaw, as old as the wrinkles on that man’s broad forehead, reminiscent of hand-pulled rickshaws from the streets of colonial Kolkata. The rickshaw had made it all the way from Bangladesh. It was the rickshaw of someone’s childhood.

The old man’s wife often derided his fondness for that bogey of childhood memories. “My mother could create a far more versatile rickshaw from matchsticks, as she often did for me and my siblings—there were so many of us, you know,” she used to say. 

Sheer wickedness, deriding someone’s childhood.

The old man kept mum. 

He never allowed any child from his family or outside to even look at it, kept it locked away in some darkness. This was his revenge.

The problem was that his granddaughter grew up. 

Then there were two people in the house during the excruciatingly humid Kolkata summers, vying to get their hands on the old rickshaw. One pressed for time (he continued to work even in dismal old age) and the other with too much time on her hands. There was a deadly duel, a war of words, and a final, unspoken compromise. He lost, victory became hers. She thus became the first ever, and the only child, to have laid hands on the old man’s rickshaw. His bogey of childhood became hers.

She played with it. She imagined the hand-pulled rickshaw with one spoke too sharp (so that you had to be extra cautious while pulling it, and the defect was as ancient as the rickshaw) traversing through the streets of Kolkata like a lone horse. It passed through the filthy, Municipal garbage filled streets of Dum Dum Cantt. and through the posh, “surrounded by high-rise buildings” roads of Rajarhat. It trotted along at night, to the beats of the Dhaak on Durga Pooja, and during the day, weaving its way through Park Circus’ tram-lined roads. It traversed roads imagined and unimagined, making its way through Kolkatas of the mind.

Years later when the old man was long dead and had left behind the bogey of his childhood, the granddaughter automatically assumed that it had been bequeathed on her. As if the bequeathing ceremony had been an unspoken ceremony, just like the unspoken compromise which had made the man “gift” the rickshaw to her.

The granddaughter lives, the old man does not. 

She has still no idea about half the streets of Kolkata, about a true-blue Bengali Durga Puja, or the unknown passages of her future. But she remembers the rickshaw and like him, it reminds her of her childhood. It was an age of innocence which did not last. His had not lasted either.

There was never a simple definition for what the rickshaw signified for either of them. There always was, and still remains, just one explanation—”his bogey of childhood became hers”.

  

Yours truly