It was supposed to be for the pleasure of the kids, right? But the loving yet strict taskmaster in me made my elder son do odd jobs. He was a proud owner of a cycle. Getting vegetables, getting some provisions immediately required—these tasks fell on him. And above all, we asked him to take our second son on the cycle to the school, which was half a kilometer away. Thinking of it now, I shudder. What kind of guts was that? Didn’t I think about the safety of the kids? The roads were bumpy, with lots of potholes. And it so happened once he fell down with my younger son behind him, whose face got infected. It was around a week or fortnight of agony till the infection was totally gone. I was to be blamed. That opened our eyes, and this practice of making the kids do our chores stopped. We need a jolt to get out of our slumber.

On return to Chennai, I disposed of both the bicycle and tricycle, since I thought both my sons had outgrown them.

To my credit or otherwise, depending on one’s point of view, I taught both the kids at a very young age to ride a moped. That was the only two-wheeler I could acquire at that time. I desperately needed a vehicle for my office use.

Coming back to Chennai, the school was not far away, maybe about one to one and a half kilometers away. No direct bus service. So I had to get a new, bigger bicycle for my elder son. I could not afford to buy one for each of them. So my elder son was saddled—no pun intended—with the task of

 taking his younger brother to school. This went on smoothly for some time.

Then the problem started. The kids had their own sense of timings, preferences, outlooks, and personal requirements. Differences were bound to be there.

Continued in 275. Re Cycle Car - Part 3