Life Cycle

Life Cycle
We belonged to a humble background, and my father was an honest government officer. So the first thing on which I can ride was a bicycle that I got in my class 8. It gave me a sense of joy and freedom, and I used to ride it up and down on my street in the evening. Later I also started going to school on it.
Finding and getting the cycle from 100s of bicycles in the school cycle stand was an activity that is still vivid in my mind. We often forgot the location where we had parked in the morning. At the home time in summer; the heat of the afternoon, empty stomach, and dust due to the movement of students taking out their cycles; everything blends into not so pleasant scene but there was the joy of riding the bicycle that used to keep this discomfort on the back seat.
My journey from bicycle to motorcycle took half a decade, thanks to the lower middle class I belonged. But during that time, I have a couple of friends who were two steps ahead of me and used to drive cars. Yes, cars in school in the 80s were something unusual. Once a friend of mine visited my house in his car, driving by himself, my father was, after seeing this, not only surprised but also looked concerned and kept standing on the door suspiciously looking at him and me. That caused embarrassment for me, particularly when he asked why your father is standing there strangely looking at me.
These were the days when you could see vintage cars. I remember having seen foxy on roads a couple of times. Its shape was of a soup container, and we used to call it "sabundani". It had an engine on the back compartment, which was unusual compared to the other modern cars having an engine at the front.
My father's friend was a businessman who used to trade in tea, an honorable profession during those times. He used to have modern cars that he also changed every few years, which was not common. Once I remember a two-day-long journey in his car to visit another city for our grandfather's funeral. It was a car with enough space at the back where we as children could sleep at night.
These were the early days of life and the last days of the previous century. The underlying desire for the things I miss in my life continued to stay in the heart, and the youth came with its hope and vision, embarrassment, and misfortunes. The early blow was my father's death, the sole breadwinner, but as they say, the difficulties are necessary for progress. Today I cannot believe that I came out of it and, fast forward 15 years, I got my first car at the age of 30.
It was a second-hand Suzuki Swift red in color. With it came the freedom to travel. Many memories are attached with the car from learning to drive to the honeymoon, from intercity travel to accidents, from driving in snowy mountains to driving on the motorway, from stuck in urban flooding with water inside the car soaking my socks inside my shoes to frequent breakdowns.
Cars have a life like a human with happiness, freedom, misery, setbacks, diseases, agony, and finally ageing. But all this lifelong effort, days in days out, ultimately leads to a junkyard or graveyard of cars. As the people of the third world country, there is little concept of retirement for cars here and there are lots of workshops at every corner of the streets although there are not many doctors for humans here. Constant repairs keep life going on.
So this car is still there, not dead and used by my sister-in-law for learning driving. The old car nearing death may not survive with the pain of minor accidents, but it does not break the heart of young drivers. This shed light on the human desire to use everything to the last drop of blood. Greediness and unkind behavior tell that we are by nature cruel, although thinking about it, paradoxically, gives us an opposite feeling of care, love, and compassion