Healing on a Cycle Ride
By Shreya C.
You’re slicing the air as you walk, move, breathe. You’re rolling a rock up a hill. You’re flying too close to the sun. You’re hurtling towards finality as each second passes, but the devil is in the details.
The colour of the sky, the song of the robin, the scent of a freshly made dosa slathered with ghee. The sensation of pushing through the pain barrier as you attempt to do a measly 15 kilometre cycle ride. The smile from a stranger encouraging you. He’s the one earning his livelihood while travelling on his old, gearless bicycle with a load on its back, but you’re the one who needs encouragement. Unfair.
You stop to look at a bird on an electric wire which stretches from one end of the field to the other. You’re wearing your glasses but you still can’t be sure. Is it a red-rumped swallow or a barn swallow? You wish you had got your camera, or better still the binoculars. But this is supposed to be just a cycle ride, just a cardio exercise. You have resolved to stop mixing up things, being pulled in a million different directions, not focusing on any one, spread out too thin.
The inside of your brain feels like a root ball infected with aphids. It’s tightly packed together, no room for the roots to breathe, while the aphids eat away at your ideas, leaving all the stories in your head without endings. You have finally pulled the root ball out, cleaned it under fresh running water, removed the aphids, and repotted it in a sunny yellow pot. This time you will take care, this time you will not fail. You will not tell yourself you will fail.
When you have decided it’s a red-rumped swallow, you move on, cycling through the mud roads cutting into the paddy fields. It’s 6 a.m., not a soul on the roads, just the spiky tops of coconut trees and the lush expansiveness of banana leaves. You see a plastic cup in the water to your left, a bottle half filled with some liquid, bits of what looks like a raincoat. When the tightly packed root ball had its way, such sights would upset you greatly. Now you know you have no control over other people, only yourself.
You hear a squeal, it persists, it’s disturbing, it’s a creature in pain. In a muddy pit of dried and fresh grass, you discover a brown puppy with black ears, a gash in its neck. It sees you and attempts to run, but it’s too weak from the pain. It lies there looking at you with deep brown eyes. You are lost in them. Till he squeals again.
There is an emergency vet five minutes away, but it takes thirty minutes to convince Snowy—a name at odds with the puppy’s appearance, but you had decided long ago your first dog would be Snowy—that you mean no harm. When he is calm, he fits perfectly in the dented black basket at the front of the cycle. There’s nothing terribly wrong with him, the vet patches him up and hands him to you. You have to get him back tomorrow for more injections.
You try to slide out of this new role of caregiver, but the vet shrugs and gestures around him. There is nowhere to keep him here, he will surely die. He needs a warm space to sleep and heal. The decision has made itself.
At home, you remove the lid of the latest takeaway container and fill it with water. What about food? You have no idea. Snowy is asleep, his leg twitching on occasion. You’ll figure it out, you are convinced. The root ball in your brain, now free, alive, breathing, your friend, agrees. You aren’t French, or an investigative reporter with a drunken Captain for a friend, but you have a feeling Snowy and you will make a great team.
THE END
Author Bio: Shreya C. is a book editor (most recently with Penguin, now she freelances) and former journalist (sportswriter). During the pandemic, she moved from Delhi to Goa, India, where she now resides. Subjects that interest her are mental health, birdwatching, photography, and writing.