The Name Scratched Under the Frame

The neem tree outside the college gate kept the cycle shop in shade until noon, and after that the shade moved to the wall and the wall stayed warm till dark. Ramesh had run the place since before the college was called what it is called now, and he could tell from the sound of a cycle coming down the road which part of it had gone wrong.

Anuj came to him in his first week with three hundred rupees and a long list of things he had decided not to spend money on. The college was eight kilometres from town and the bus came four times a day.

"There is one," Ramesh said, and pulled out a Hero from behind the shutter, repainted a green that someone had mixed in a hurry. New seat, new bell, the frame wiped with oil until it shone the way old things shine when a person has decided they should be sold.

"Second hand?"

"Third. Maybe fourth. It will run."

It ran. For two months it ran, to the department and back to the hostel and to the tea stall outside the gate where the man sold cigarettes one at a time. Then the chain came off on the road to the bypass in the rain, and Anuj sat on the kerb with the cycle upside down and one greasy hand, and while he was fitting the chain back over the cog he saw, under the crank, where the paint had worn thin, a name cut into the metal. Not punched with a machine. Scratched, letter by letter, the way people write their names on things they are afraid of losing.

Meera. Under it, smaller, what was left of a date, half of it gone under the paint.

He did not think about it for a week. Then he thought about it all the time. Someone had put their name under a cycle frame, in the one place only an owner would ever look, and then the cycle had been sold anyway.

He asked Ramesh, who was pumping a tyre and did not look up. "Cycles come and go," Ramesh said. "People sell, people leave. I don't keep the names."

But there was a register in the shop, an old one with a cloth cover, in which Ramesh wrote down every cycle that came to him: the number on the frame, the price he paid, what he paid it for. Anuj saw it once when Ramesh went to the back to look for a spoke spanner. He did not open it. Later, telling the story, he was careful to say that he did not open it that day.

In his second year, when he knew enough people to understand how a college works, and that students leave for reasons which never reach the noticeboard, he asked a senior from the batch above whether there had ever been a Meera in the department.

The senior thought about it. "Meera who left in the third semester? There was a girl. Good in the labs." He waved a hand vaguely at the direction of the town. "She didn't come back after the winter break."

Anuj rode home that evening along the canal road with the feeling of carrying something that did not belong to him and had not been handed over.

He went to the shop the next morning before the first lecture and asked Ramesh directly, because he had decided on the way that being indirect about it would be a kind of cowardice.

Ramesh listened. Then he put down the spanner, opened the register himself, and turned the pages back, and back, and stopped.

A frame number. A date from three years before. A name. And, in the margin where there was no column at all, in the same neat hand as everything else: short by three hundred, to be returned.

Anuj read the line twice.

"She came in the winter with the cycle and said she needed the money for the train," Ramesh said. "I gave her what was in the box. It was three hundred less than the cycle was worth and I told her that was the price. Then I wrote it in the margin so I would not forget." He closed the register. "I have not forgotten."

"She isn't coming back," Anuj said. "Someone said she is at a coaching centre, two towns over."

Ramesh looked at the cycle leaning against the wall, the green paint, the new seat, the name he had painted over twice and never quite covered.

"Then the money is with you," he said. "You are riding it. Take it to her."

It took three weeks to find the address, and a Sunday, and a bus that went through two towns and stopped at a market where the road narrowed to the width of a cart. The coaching centre was above a stationery shop. Meera was twenty-four and taught physics to students of sixteen, and she looked down at the cycle in the street for a long time before she looked at him.

He told it badly. The chain, the name under the crank, the register, the margin. He had rehearsed it and it came out in the wrong order. Then he held out the envelope.

She did not take it at once. When she did, she held it the way people hold something they have already decided to give away.

"I sold it because I needed the fare," she said. "I told myself it was a bad cycle. The brakes were terrible."

"The brakes are still terrible," Anuj said.

She laughed once, and then was quiet. "He wrote it down," she said. "All this time."

He went back the next Sunday with the cycle, because at the end she had asked whether he still had it and whether she could see it. She came down and stood in the road and put a hand on the seat, then crouched and looked under the crank, and the name was there, half worn, under the green paint. She said nothing about the name. She asked whether the chain still came off in the rains. It did. She said that had always been the chain and never the cycle.

Then she asked whether he knew anyone at the college who needed a cycle cheap, because a girl in her class came from a village four kilometres out and walked both ways.

That is how the cycle got its fourth owner. The name under the crank is still there. Nobody has painted over it again.