the bicycle

I was going to learn to ride a bicycle, all the way to the kedai and back, on my own, before the sun went down. I gave myself until dark. A thing is more real if it has a clock on it, and a thing with a deadline is a mission, and I do my best work as a mission.

The bicycle was Kak Long's old one. Kak Long is my big sister, and she is a teenager now, and she is far too grown up for a kid's bike, so it had been leaning against the side wall going rusty, with a flat sad streamer on one handlebar from years ago. It was too big for me. The seat was up too high, and the brakes had gone soft, so that squeezing them was less like stopping and more like making a polite request. A bad bike and a hard clock. Perfect. That is exactly how you know a thing is worth doing.

I did not just get on it and fall off, which is how a normal person learns. I set up a proper training programme, because a thing this size needs structure. I put spotters along the lane at intervals. I marked checkpoints with stones. I had a launch crew. I gave the whole thing a grand name that I shall not repeat, because the name did not survive past the first crash, which is a fate that has met several of my best names.

Kavi was the launcher. Kavi only has one speed and the speed is full, and I thought, who better to get me moving than the one person in the kampung who has never once done anything slowly? This was a mistake, and I knew it was a mistake at the exact moment it became too late to stop being a mistake. Kavi did not push me off gently. Kavi launched me. He put both hands on the back of the seat and ran with everything he had and then let go, and the bike shot off down the lane so fast that it reached the first checkpoint before I had finished climbing onto it. I was, technically, still getting my second leg over when the bicycle hit top speed. We parted ways somewhere near the second tree. I will not describe the landing, except to say the lane was harder than the lane looked.

Aiman set up a billing table at the side, because Aiman cannot watch a thing happen without working out how to charge for it. He had a rate per wobble, and a higher rate for a full fall, and a special rate for a fall into something. He was also offering insurance against the longkang. The longkang is the drain at the end of the lane. A learner bike, Aiman said, has only one true destination in its heart, and that destination is the longkang. I told him I would not be going in the longkang. He wrote down the time and date that I had said it, for the record, for later.

Divya kept the data. Divya is my best friend, and she is right about things, and she stood at the side with her exercise book writing down every single crash, the time of it and the cause of it, very neat, in a column. She was also, every single time I raised the seat back up to where I liked it, quietly lowering it again the moment I was not looking, because the seat was too high and that was the actual problem, and she was fixing the actual problem without making me admit out loud that there was one. I would notice the seat had got lower. I would raise it back up, on principle. She would lower it again. We never once discussed this. By the end of the afternoon the seat was exactly where Divya had decided it should be, which was, of course, where it should have been from the start.

The crashes had a rhythm to them. Launch. Wobble. Panic. The handlebars deciding to go somewhere I had not chosen. A bush, a wall, the soft brakes making their polite useless request, and then the ground. Aiman counted each one. Divya wrote each one down. Kavi offered to launch me harder, because in Kavi's experience most problems are solved by more speed, and most of Kavi's problems are caused by more speed, and he has never once connected the two.

And Kak Long kept drifting out.

She did not come out to help. She made that extremely clear. She came out, she said, because she was bored, and because somebody had to make sure I did not die on her old bike, which would be embarrassing for her at school. She stood at the end of the lane with her phone, not watching. Definitely not watching. Watching the entire time over the top of it.

Then somehow she was holding the seat. I do not know how it happened. One run, Kavi was launching me into the trees. The next run, Kak Long had the back of the seat. She held it steady and jogged alongside me at a sensible human speed, telling me to pedal, just keep pedalling, she had me, she was right there. She did this run after run, up and down the hot lane, holding her own old bike steady under her little sister. Every time anyone looked at her, she said she was not really helping. She was just walking that way anyway. And her phone stayed in her pocket the whole time, which from Kak Long is the loudest thing there is.

The light went orange. The sun was going down behind the roofs. My clock was nearly out, and I still had not done one length on my own, because every length had a hand on the back of it, keeping me up.

We lined up for one last try in the last of the light. Kak Long took the seat. Pedal, she said. I have got you. Go.

And I went, down the lane, her running beside me with her hand on the seat, faster, then steady, the kedai getting closer at the end of the lane, and somewhere in the middle of it, without telling me, without a single word, she let go.

She let go and she did not say so. If she had said it, I would have looked back. If I had looked back, I would have fallen. So she let go and ran a few steps behind me with her hands empty and her mouth shut, letting me think she was still holding on. I went far enough that it was too late to start being scared. And I was riding. Actually riding. All the way to the kedai, alone, on Kak Long's old bike, in the last of the light.

I only worked out she had let go when I reached the kedai and turned around, wobbling, and saw her. Way back up the lane. Standing completely still, hands at her sides, nowhere near me. She had not touched the bike for the whole second half. She had taken her hand off the seat the second I stopped needing it. She had not told me. She wanted it to be mine.

I rode back in the near-dark, braking with my feet because the brakes only ever made requests, and I got off at the wall where the bike lived. Kak Long was already sitting on the step with her phone out, scrolling, as though she had been there all evening and had seen none of it and helped with none of it and had certainly not spent two hours running up and down a hot lane holding a seat.

I did not make a thing of it. You learn, with Kak Long, not to make a thing of it. I leaned the bike against the wall and sat down next to her in the dark.

The seat of the bike was still warm where her hand had been. Her shoulder was right against mine. She kept scrolling at nothing on her phone. I leaned on her in the dark, and she let me lean, and we sat like that while the lane went dark, two sisters and one old bike against the wall.