Forever Young

Mom cycling

My mother, she’s 89 years old and still rides a bicycle.

Mom cycling

When I was a little kid, used to love being outside. I would go out of my house at 5 pm after doing my homework and would not return before it turns dark. But that all is just a way to explain how childhood was for all us millennials. Isn’t it? Unlike how it is now, where children don’t want to get out of the house and are pretty happy playing video games at home and also making friends on social media.

 

It was simpler times then. I remember very clearly, how my mom used to help me learn to ride a bicycle then. I remember how she would assure me that I would not fall and will walk with me until she leaves me to be on my own. I used to yell when I would see her doing that, but that has made me what I am today. A free, liberated, goodwill woman.

Recently while I was searching for my old album on my recent visit to Mysore, my hometown, I came across a diary which was so dusty that it could have given an asthmatic attack to anyone. As I wiped the dust off, I found a beautiful red-colored diary with the title “I Wish” in Kannada written on it.

I opened it with quite a reservation and a page turned with a beautiful picture of a bicycle and it said: “I wish I could ride the bike as my daughter does, but I am happy teaching her something that I don’t even know, my daughter. My dreams, I live through her”……..I have translated it here, it was originally written in the most beautiful handwriting in my mother tongue Kannada.

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I stay in Melbourne for the last 15 years and decided to take a sabbatical and write this book that I had been trying to finish for a very long. Now my kids have gone to college and I really can use it sometimes. So I packed my bags and came down to where it all started, my hometown. Since I was here for quite a long time, I decided to teach mom, how to ride a bike. I would like to mention here that she’s 69 years old at this time.

As quickly I could go to the local market to get this pink shiny bike for mom and bought it home. Of course, there was a lot of debate about age, and women, and what will people say, and bony pains, and age and women and the cycle went on. But i won.

It took her just a month and she started doing it all by herself.

Recently, I am back again, this time to write another book, and I can barely meet my mom because she is so busy with her cycle gang that they do it in the morning, then in the evening, and in between, she has started taking classes, etc etc etc.

I am proud of you Amma,

You are my rock. A rock on a bicycle.

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