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. Giving a thing a finish-time turns it into a proper mission, and I do my best work on a mission.

The bicycle was Kak Long's old one. Kak Long is my big sister. She is a teenager now and 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. 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 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 training programme. I put spotters along the lane. I marked checkpoints with stones. I had a launch crew. I gave the whole thing a grand name, which did not survive the first crash, the way several of my best names have not.

Kavi was the launcher. Kavi only knows how to move one way, which is fast and all at once, and I thought, who better to get me going than the one person in the kampung who has never once done anything slowly.

"Hold the seat and run," I told him. "Then let go gently."

Kavi does not have a gently. Kavi put both hands on the back of the seat, ran with everything he had, and let go, and the bike shot off down the lane so fast it reached the first checkpoint before I had finished climbing onto it.

"CHECKPOINT ONE," shouted the spotter at checkpoint one, as I went past her sideways, still getting my second leg over.

We parted ways somewhere near the second tree. I will not describe the landing, except to say the lane is harder than the lane looks.

Aiman set up a billing table at the side. He had a rate per wobble, a higher rate for a full fall, and a special rate for a fall into something. He was also selling insurance against the longkang.

"A learner bike," Aiman said, "has only one true destination in its heart. The longkang."

"I am not going in the longkang," I said.

He wrote down the time and the date that I had said it. For later.

Divya kept the data. She stood at the side with her exercise book, writing down every crash, the time of it and the cause of it, very neat, in a column. And every time I raised the seat back up to where I liked it, she quietly lowered it again the moment I looked away. The seat was too high. That was the real problem. She was fixing the real problem without making me say out loud that there was one. I would raise it on principle. She would lower it. We never once discussed it. By the end of the afternoon the seat was exactly where Divya had decided, which was where it should have been all along.

The crashes had a rhythm. Launch. Wobble. Panic. The handlebars going somewhere I had not chosen. A bush, a wall, the soft brakes doing nothing, 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 with more speed. Most of Kavi's problems are also caused by more speed. Kavi loves going fast far too much to ever blame it, even when going fast is exactly what got him into trouble.

And Kak Long kept drifting out.

She did not come out to help. She made that extremely clear.

"I am only out here so you do not die on my bike," she said. "It would be embarrassing for me at school."

She stood at the end of the lane with her phone, not watching. Definitely not watching. Watching the whole 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, jogging beside me at a sensible human speed.

"Pedal," she said. "Just keep pedalling. I have got you. I am right here."

She did it 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. Her phone stayed in her pocket the whole time, which from Kak Long is the loudest thing there is.

"I learned on this bike," she said once, between runs, not really to me. "I used to ride it down to the corner on Fridays, to wave at Ayah's car when he came back over the Causeway." Then she remembered she was a teenager, and did not say anything else.

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 single time, somebody had been holding the back of the seat.

We lined up for one last try in the last of the light.

"Pedal," said Kak Long. "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. And somewhere in the middle of it, without a word, she let go.

She did not say so. If she had said it, I would have looked back, and 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. 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, in the last of the light.

I only worked it out at the kedai, when I 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.

I rode back in the near-dark and got off at the wall where the bike lives. Kak Long was already on the step with her phone out, scrolling, as if she had been there all evening and seen none of it.

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. I leaned on her, and she let me lean, and we sat like that while the lane went dark, two sisters and one old bike against the wall.