Permanent links
Daily links
Journal sitefeed
Movies sitefeed
del.icio.us sitefeed
RSS
1 March 2006
B M Khan and Sons Cycle Works, 8th Main Road, Malleswaram Bangalore 560003
A few hundred metres before 8th main road merges with the upsloping 11th main road to become a single non-entity big street parallel to the railway tracks and humiliatingly having to dive beneath the tracks at the Srirampuram bridge (the lodestone of many unfortunate mishaps), before the lonesome printer/copier/binding shop fashioned out of a ground-floor 15 feet-by-10 feet leased-out room with two large presses, and immediately after the videotheques, the grinding mills and the kiraana shops with electric smoke-lighters that had been kissed by a thousand cigarettes and beedis was the only cycle-repair shop in all of four squared-kilometres that had a roof above it. It had an electric bicycle pump with a dial indicating pressure that grew slowly opaque and eventually invisible as a result of neglect both on the part of the school-boys that outgrew looking at it, and the owners of the shop who gauged tyre pressure like general practitioners felt the pulse by gingerly pressing on unknown veins. Partly to ward off evil eyes, and partly to advertise their specialisation a lonely steel rim shorn of a tube or tyre hung on a nail outside the shop when it opened for business. The unusually high ceiling had one pulley mechanism used to haul up misbehaving bicycles, while in the far interior several abandoned, handicapped and aging bicycles languished. B M Khan and Sons Cycle Works also ran a rental operation that loaned at by-the-hour rates Hero bicycles with thick rubber flapping mud-guards, 'carriers' for light wives, schoolgirls and naughty, snivelling brats and stoppers that swung from below the back tyre. Some even came with a cute mini-replica of the seat attached onto the bar to allow the renter constant supervision of his child as he picked him up from school.Punctures (flats to you Americans) were fixed traditionally by dipping different parts of the tube into a tub of brown water until bubbles frothed, then using a slab of black granite to smoothen the tube and applying sweet-pungent red resinous adhesive and pasting shards of rubber on it -- all handled at Rs. 1.50 in the late eighties, then slowly rose to Rs. 5 soon after the 1991 reforms started to make sense to the Khans though air from the blind pump stayed put at a rhinoceros-faced twenty-five paise coin per tyre.
The shop had as its mainstay the Son, a nameless thirty-something frog-eyed Muslim male with hair worn like Amitabh Bachchan playing an honest cop and a thick well-kept moustache dressed in greasy workclothes and rolled up sleeves and pants. Son almost always had little boys as Apprentices who wore rags that were torn, smudged and grating to begin with -- these were the ones he would order about to fetch his tools. In his best moods, when the wrong tool was fetched he would just abuse and let out a smile and in slightly more vexing situations he would rush menacingly threatening to beat the Apprentice. The patriarch Khan, in the rare occasions that he visited to check on revenues and accounts, would occupy a lonesome seat inches from the overhanging bicycles and shutters which were down, needless to say, on Fridays. I was a regular customer at B M Khan Cycle Works, with first my BSA Champ and then my BSA SLR -- both of which were enemy products to his Hero line of rental wares.
That was more than ten years ago. Last weekend, I fixed a flat (puncture to us Indians) on my bicycle by following elaborate instructions from Jim Langley's amazing bicycle website. A new tube cost $3.50 after a 10% Caltech discount from Incycle on Colorado, the tire levers cost a couple of bucks and a tube repair kit replete with sandpaper, a small tube of adhesive and some strip of rubber cost in all another $3.50. To tighten the seat, all I needed was to work a 5mm Allen wrench on the seat post. Air is free and available any time of the day, ironically or otherwise, with my Schwinn bicycle pump.
