This story dates back about two decades. I owned a bicycle back then. Monotony didn’t feature in my dictionary back then. I loved riding the bike on the road in front of our house, back and forth, with no agenda to reach anywhere whatsoever. I loved the feel of the wind against my face, the quiet neighbourhood, the street dogs who would sometimes run behind the bike and the endorphins(although at that time I didn’t know about endorphins).

There was only one problem that interfered with this hobby of mine. A friend of mine used to pop by expectedly every day and snatch the bike from me. Well, I had been taught to share, so I managed to stuff my possessiveness of the bike and the aforementioned endorphins within me. That is what good girls did. And so, I didn’t say much during the first few days. After, he started taking my trying-to-be-good nature for granted, I had to do something. My kiddy brain gave me one piece of advice – to hide the keys. I don’t know who I was hiding them from, since he never came into my room to grab the keys. But, I wanted it out of sight, so that I could tell him that I could not find my bike keys. At that time, the guilt of lying was much lesser than the pain of being giving due to a lack of choice. My friend came, I told him that I had lost the bicycle keys(with much tsking to validate the point). Guess Bollywood resides in each one of us in the way we dramatise things. He went off, probably to find other people’s honesty that he could mess around with.

I relaxed that day, doing things that kids do. The next evening, I decided to sneak out my bicycle to go somewhere new, somewhere I would not bump run into this friend. To my utmost horror, I could not remember where I had hidden the keys. It was one of those duh moments, which I can never forget, as if the memory cells in my mind which had the information on where these keys were, had been sucked in by the Bermuda Triangle or something. I searched everywhere possible for the next few days. It was the dumbest thing to happen to me(and anyone I knew). I was the laughing stock for my family for the next few days. Ultimately, the lock had to be broken, when the keys were declared missing permanently by me. The next day onwards, I had to share my bicycle with him again, this time with a feeling of guilt and stupidity tugging at my heart.

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