Bicycle Dreaming
Author: Mridula Koshy
Publisher: Speaking Tiger, Rs350
Bicycle Dreaming is a poignant household drama of the sorrow and tragedy effecting and affecting everyday life for the poor in our mega-cities. It’s a welcome and much-needed addition to literary corpus on contemporary Delhi, writes ANUBHAV PRADHAN
It is one thing to enumerate the experiences of poverty, to report and quantify them for the benefit of statisticians and analysts tasked, as gods, to improve the unfortunate lot of others. It is quite another to write of poverty, to be one amongst the poor and write humbly, in their words and thoughts. Mridula Koshy accomplishes as much, and more, in Bicycle Dreaming, her new book on the life of an adolescent girl in an urban village in south Delhi.
Indeed, there is much in Bicycle Dreaming to interest both the lay and the scholarly reader alike. Centering on the life of Noor Saidullah, daughter of a kabadiwallah living in the historic village Chirag Dilli, Bicycle Dreaming is a poignant household drama of the sorrow and tragedy effecting and affecting everyday life for the urban poor in our mega-cities. The plot progresses along two parallel medians: The steady decline in Noor’s father Mohammad Saidullah’s earnings as a kabadiwallah operating in Delhi’s Panscheel Colony and the increasing independence from familial obligations and control claimed by Noor’s elder brother Talib Saidullah’s, employed in a call centre in Gurgaon. The action of the novel is hemmed by these two medians. Noor’s 13th birthday brings not just the awareness of puberty and its attendant bodily changes but also the increasing problems faced by her father at work. As Noor’s life in school changes with her falling in love with her classmate Ajith, Talib leaves home to set his independent house in Chattarpur: This brings responsibilities of the parental household upon her as Ameena, her mother, abandons her husband and daughter to tend to her son in his new home. The narrative conveys well the troubled dialectics of home and outside which inform Noor’s, and her mother Ameena’s, coming-to-terms with the splintering of their family: Noor’s surprise at the world, at her first time in the Delhi Metro, is mirrored by Ameena’s anguish at her own difficult choice, leaving her husband for her son. By the closure of the novel, this dialectics overwhelms the cramped familial spaces of the Saidullahs’ lives, for Noor, almost 14 at this stage, is also “almost already gone” from home: “Her brother’s restlessness in her father’s too-small house would also be her restlessness”, the narrator wonders, and concludes on an unsettled note of uncertainty fused with uneasy hope for the future.
This note of hope is important, for the novel is also a mirror of the joy and hope which the human heart finds in the midst of overpowering grief and inequity. Noor’s friendship with Haseena and her devotion to her father entwine with the pathos of the tale to lend it spots of bright sunshine and glad smiles. Her love for her Ajith, a Dalit boy exceptional in studies but hemmed by his circumstances, is bitter-sweetly giddy as only adolescent love can be. She finds fulfillment in his company and conversation, his dreams and ambitions for his future. It is Ajith, and not her elder brother, who teaches her cycling, giving realisation to her long-cherished dream. The novel closes with the duo holding hands and the ghost of problems to come wailing in the near-distance, but it ends with laughter and this heady hope of a future of being “together again”.
Interestingly, Koshy’s layered portrayal of the Saidullah family and its unravelling under the pressures of globalisation and neo-liberalism is as evocative as, say, the urban ethnographies of Véronique Dupont, Sanjay Srivastava, Emma Tarlo, and D Asher Ghertner. The economies, and ecologies, of waste, recycling, and consumption which shape and reshape the Saidullahs’ lives will gently remind the reader of that mass of humanity which labours to make a living off the refuse of urban life but is treated as nothing more than waste in return. This novel lends voice to the ravishment of land, air, and people being effected by our incapacity, even unwillingness, to address the pressing question of inequitable distribution of resources, top-down welfarist urban planning, and the dismantling of our scant social security apparatus under the pressures of neo-liberal governance and economic organisation. Much has been commented about the cultures of informality, illegality, and injustice which make daily life for much of the urban poor a matter of great drudgery and servitude, but little has been written on the ways in which these cultures maraud through the lives of those on the margins.
Though the narrative suffers from insufficient use of linguistic diversification, from this significant point of view this handsomely produced and accessibly priced book is a welcome and much-needed addition to literary corpus on contemporary Delhi.
The reviewer is a Senior Marketing Editor with Primus Books. Views expressed here are his own