How I Rediscovered Cycling and My City

I learned how to ride a bicycle at the age of 7-8 only after my younger sister had mastered it. Much like overcoming many other physical fears – lighting a match, driving a car – motivated by the incredulity of her beating me. But like with most physical play, I abandoned cycling with my childhood while my sister kept riding.

I was usually happier indoors, reading. There were also no adult role models for physical movement being healthy, even desirable. And there were the many said and unsaid things from the women in 80s and 90s India suggesting frailty of the female body.

At the age of 24, coaxed by someone, I started running and enjoyed it immensely. Since then, I have discovered yoga, swimming, and this March, at the age of 42, I bought myself a light, aluminum-frame, drop-bar city bicycle.

Outdoor running was becoming harder in Delhi with pollution claiming its skies more months every year. I reasoned I could instead ride a bicycle with a face-mask on, and also use it for short distances in city traffic.

The plan was to pick the bicycle up at Decathlon and ride back home, but after knocking down a column of displayed goods as I fumbled for the breaks, we took its wheels off and put ourselves and it in an Uber. Once home, we were clueless about how to set the geared chain with the rear wheel. My husband had never learned how to ride a bicycle, and knew even less about them than me. In the age of artificial intelligence, the average human cannot fix a bicycle chain. Although YouTube did get us there, almost.

Around 2015, I read an ode to cycling. Valeria Luiselli’s book Sidewalks is the culmination of her discoveries, within and without, cycling her cities. The narrator points out that walking is too slow to get to know a city, and a car too closed and fast to interact with it: “Skimming along on two wheels, the rider finds just the right pace for observing the city and being at once its accomplice and its witness.”

“The bicycle is halfway between the shoe and the car, and its hybrid nature sets its rider on the margins of all possible surveillance.” On Indian roads, a bicycle can cross at a crosswalk like a pedestrian, squeeze in between and overtake cars; but is also not a registered vehicle and thus escapes traffic challans.

Recently, at somebody’s eulogy, someone nostalgically talked about how Delhi, half a life ago, was lovely to cycle around. I turned to my husband sitting next to me and whispered, “It still is”.

You do need to carefully time your season and hour to enjoy that experience today, though. Monsoon mornings, especially Sundays, are magical in Lutyens’ Delhi, with its smooth, beautifully tree-lined streets, with few traffic lights and circles instead. The rain-washed streets can splash you with mud though, leaving you resembling the child in the ‘daag achche hain’ (dirt stains are good) advertisement.

The only morning I rode Janpath all the way to CP was a Monday, and the traffic on the outer-circle was persistent even at 7:15am; but upon crossing into the inner-circle, I found the lethargy I was seeking: a few straggler autorickshaws and pedestrians, a lone runner, and fat rats burrowing into the flowerbeds at the street’s edge.

I glanced at the Museum of Illusions, which I had visited a month ago with my nephew (by changing lines on the Delhi metro), and at old-favorite restaurants and stores, realising how the cumbersome CP traffic prevented us visiting more and how without any external energy source I was here in 40 minutes.

Cycling around Delhi you can stop to pick-up fallen flowers, or ogle while riding slow, at the bare-bodied, sweat-shiny runners, admiring their perseverance against the muggy air that makes breathing while running against it almost Herculean. You can dismount to stare at the red-naped ibises in front of the Pakistani high commission or at a Neelgai at the edge of the JNU forest without your vehicle taking up much road space.

Delhi might lack the density of outdoor fitness freaks and bicyclists that the US west coast has, and nor can it boast a sea-face like Mumbai, but it has the rare combination of the majesty and order of British pomp, the charm of aeons of history and the humility of its ruins, streets edged and cooled by beautiful, giant trees, numerous bird species, adorable stray dogs, and much-prayed-for rain.

The British imported, experimented with (in Sunder Nursery) and planted numerous, especially gorgeous flowering trees in Delhi, brought from Africa and Latin America, many of which we unwittingly believe to be Indian. One day while cycling on Lodhi road, I stopped, struck by the red flowers at my feet. I later learned that they were from the sausage tree (Kigelia Africana; native to tropical Africa), named after its phallic fruit, and nicknamed “Balam kheera” (!) in India. This April I also noticed the only Maharaja trees (native to Mexico; Pseudobombax ellipticum or “shaving-brush tree”) in Delhi, in Sunder Nursery, because their shocking-pink, brush-like flowers, like plumes atop royal headdresses, were in bloom.

Delhi streets are also bordered with native trees: the jamun, mango, peepul, semal, ashoka, neem, and the humongous banyan, spewing its aerial roots as if forced out by an internal tempest but also manifesting abundance and a benediction. All these – the foreign and the local – lend the city its viridescent glow on cloudy monsoon mornings while some give its grey streets the extravagance of rich colorful fruit (jamun in June-July) and juicy flowers (semal in February-March), oozing pulp and nectar underfoot.

I failed to get my nephew to appreciate the import of all this arboreal beauty, brought to Delhi by the British; his American sensibility simplified non-native trees as ‘invasive’, there was no third way to be.

It was surprising how easily I began cycling in Delhi traffic. Cars did not bother me. But buses suddenly honked and swerved to the left edge of the road where I assumed I was far away from them – buses don’t drive in the slow left lane (as they are supposed to) but that’s where their stops are – and motorbikes pressed me to emulate them and fill every inch of space between larger vehicles.

Eventually, frustrated by traffic, I started getting out early in the morning. It was only then that I underwent the teething rituals I had expected earlier in my cycling career.

One beautiful morning, on a flyover barely outside home, I heard a rhythmic sound and felt something bumpy. Getting off the flyover onto a quiet service road, I stopped a young passerby for help, offering him my cycle to feel what I had felt. Even he took a full five minutes and a first denial to see the flat tyre. After which a sidewalk gawker and a loitering pedestrian admired my cycle and portable pump with gauge, while I fruitlessly pumped air into the tyre, denying its puncture.

Later, after asking my car-washer (whose vehicle is his cycle) where the cycle tyre repair shops were, I carried the flat tyre on a cycle-rickshaw to the “Biharis-run shops behind Lal dispensary” (in his words) in Lajpat Nagar. While I waited for my tyre to get its band-aid, other customers stopped, some to pump their wheels themselves, and I witnessed someone’s cycle being de-tyred, conscious of how much harder it was compared to my Triban RC100DB.

Another morning, I was cycling fast, returning from Raisina Hill after a café stop at Khan Market. A dent in the paved Lodhi road led the slim front wheel off it and onto the narrow dirt track on its side. I focused on keeping the cycle going straight, and after successfully scaling a mound of dry leaves, reasoned that the only thing to be done was to lift my front wheel back onto the pavement.

Here came the inevitable fall. I remember thinking, “Shit, I’m falling on my face.” My next conscious memory is that of another helmeted person asking whether I was okay. He picked up and held my cycle upright while I thought aloud that I was okay but had possibly broken some teeth. A pedestrian also stopped, curious how I had fallen. I tried to explain as I discovered the blood staining my face-mask. My upper lip was cut, but mostly the mask had saved the skin on my face, and I had scraped off the skin around my right elbow.

Both men waited as I discovered the extent of my injuries, and only after I reassured them that my bones and teeth were intact, they left me. Another man on his scooter, with his son dressed for school, took a U-turn to ask if I needed help. As a woman, these are also the men you encounter on the streets of Delhi.

I had come of age as a city bicyclist that morning. After the I-fell-but-I-seem-ok phone-call home, I rode home slowly, my right elbow cringing with the effort of pressing the brake.

Later, narrating to my father-in-law my gratitude on not being run over after I fell, he in turn told me about a cyclist friend. We chuckled at the irony that a car had hit her right in front of AIIMS such that she had been rushed to the hospital and saved.

The fall necessitated a cycle technician’s visit home to restore shape and tighten my bicycle. It was then that I learned to pump air in tyres correctly and how tight the tyres needed to be, but also that changing gears when coasting (or freewheeling) is futile. There were other late-learned lessons: painful elbows and Google taught me to hold handlebars with elbows unlocked, another cyclist suggested carrying a spare tube. And I am still learning the lexicon of bicycling.

My cycle lets me wander and explore my city unlike before. The first Sunday morning that I cycled to Nehru Park, I was stunned by the outpouring of runners, across gender and age, many clad in fluorescent colors, many men bare-chested, some barefoot. I thought there was a marathon but failed to see any uniform. They spill onto the streets beyond the park, and especially onto Shantipath, which is paradise for bicycling and where you will see some of us, mostly alone each, stretching our spines over our bikes, sometimes looking across at each other and sharing wide smiles that communicate only a sliver of the joy and thrill of this almost-flying with the wind in our faces.

The wide, green-cushioned cycling lane encircling Nehru Park also surprised me. Till then the only other cycle lane I had seen in Delhi was where Lodhi road diverges away from Lala Lajpat Rai road, but that had felt unsurprising, very “Delhi”, precisely because it kept breaking before disappearing without warning.

I hadn’t expected Delhi to be so active; to me it had been the city of food, royalty, and indulgence. But Delhi is also the city of immigrants and the weekend running scene in Chanakyapuri suggests the role expatriates have in it.

The indulgence of Delhi serves the Chanakyapuri runners: two of the few early morning cafes in Delhi are in Malcha Marg market. Visit around 7:30am and sweaty people in their lycra, sporting Fitbits, will be filling up tables, demanding fresh-pressed juices, kale-avocado smoothies and chia-granola bowls. A stray dog or two will be asleep at the entrance. The windows will look out onto the glorious greenery of Delhi.

This fit crowd, as one would suspect, is mostly wealthy. But cycling includes and connects with the not-so-wealthy, whose primary locomotive is the staid, colorless, gearless, no-frills bicycle with bent back handlebars; those cyclists who have not an ounce of superfluous fat on their bodies, who ride without helmets, patiently, sometimes for miles, unperturbed by the weather and lacking the luxury to bother about the quality of the city’s air.

These are predominantly men and they get strangely competitive when I pass them. The inequality of purchasing power comes at odds with the opposing inequality of gender, and I can see in their eyes the need to undo their defeat, tinged with envy and sexism. Remembering how I myself learned to cycle, I am conscious of the dopamine hit I get as I race past them.

Uniformed guards outside stores, though, admire my cycle with more pleasure than envy, and relate their own daily cycling commutes.

Bicycling is a hobby for those of us who own cars and do not depend on our cycles to transport us – as an old friend put it, “Ameer logon ke chonchle” (Rich people’s pretentious fancies). But if more of us chose to ride than drive, network externalities would make cycling increasingly more pleasurable, and those schoolchildren who watch us, with shining eyes, would have role models. I like to dream that 40 years from now, Delhi streets will be cycling havens, and that might dent obesity and diabetes, the frustrating traffic and some of the smog from its skies.

(Sneha Bakshi is Assistant Professor, Economics, at Ashoka University. Cycling is her new-found hobby. Views expressed are personal)