Total recall

What’s your favorite thing about yourself?

I’m an elephant- in the crazy kind of things, I seem to remember from when I was a kid. Is it exceptional, I have no idea, because I honestly cannot remember my email passwords and usually spend a lot of time resetting these at regular intervals. I know that my memory lets me recall some absurd incidents from my past. Fortunately, I also remember the funnier aspects of these incidents, but unfortunately, I have not been able to use these memories to help me master my classes.

I learned to ride a bicycle when I was 9 years old. Mum ran behind me for a few steps and then left me to ride. The first time I realized that I was riding on my own, I panicked and fell off the bicycle. The second time, I managed to get my foot off the pedals and still managed to scrape myself, but the bruise was more to my ego than anything else. The third time, I remembered to stay on and continue to ride and I could hear Mum screaming her encouragement from behind me. Once I learned to get on and off the cycle, Mum used to ensure that I could rent the cycle for a few hours every day to practice. Around this time we had moved to a new locality and there were a lot of renovations and constructions happening around my home. So, dunes on the road were not a novelty, it was the norm. Usually, I used to ride around the dunes and never had a reason to stop near them. If ever there was a vehicle on the road, then I used to pull up to the side and wait for it to pass before I started riding again. This was very easy to accomplish because we lived on the side streets and traffic was usually restricted to residents’ vehicles who were also very accommodating. Typically, when I rented the bicycle then I ensured that I was riding the entire time right until the last possible minute.

Once, I learned to ride, my holidays were filled with ways I could convince Mum to let me rent a bicycle. And on those rare occasions, she let me rent the bicycle overnight I always felt like I had hit the jackpot. On one such day, when I was riding around the locality by myself, I had to avoid a vehicle that came in front of me and I held the break. Fortunately, the brakes worked and the bike stopped. Unfortunately, it was around a dune on the road and the wheels skidded. I lost control of the bike and fell off. I was thrown some distance away and when I got up and dusted myself, I realized that I had scraped both my knees clean off. In pain, but controlling my tears, I lifted the bicycle and pushed it back home. I was more worried about the bicycle than the injury. I did not know if the bicycle would work again. When I reached home, Mum came out to check, looking at my knees, she took the bicycle from me and placed it against the wall. The thing about renting bicycles is that the only things I required in them were the pedals connected to the wheels and the seat, I was always riding the cycle from the moment I rented it right until I had to return it. I never parked it so I never looked to check if it had a stand. So this time when I pushed the cycle back home, Mum just leaned it against the wall. She took me in and cleaned the wound. That evening I had a fever and couldn’t return the bicycle on time. The bicycle stayed overnight. I was upset that the bicycle stayed overnight and I was in no position to ride it.

Every night I slept in the living room. Mum had placed two storage boxes next to each other and placed a few blankets on top of it to make it my makeshift bed. A mosquito net used to be tied to four strategically placed nails across the room. These boxes were slightly higher than the height of a regular cot and I used to roll off the cot and fall. The crazy thing was that the mosquito net was pushed so far under the blankets that in those instances when I rolled off, I was sleeping on the side of the boxes, and usually when Dad got up for a drink of water, he would lift me and place me back on the bed again. Seeing the extent of my injury Mum decided to let me sleep with my siblings in the other bedroom. That evening I was in a lot of pain so Mum made me have some dinner and gave me my medicine. I had to sleep between my siblings and Mum even turned the TV towards the room so I could watch TV while lying in bed as I waited for everyone to finish their dinner and come to bed. Mum usually told me stories every night and that night as I was sleeping with the siblings they offered to tell me a story.

I was in a lot of pain, but more than that was the trauma of the story the siblings decided to tell me. It started the way Mum’s stories started, “Once upon a time, in a land far far away lived a king and a queen. They had ..” And it paused there because the siblings wanted to name the king and the queen. They argued back and forth nonstop for as long as it took for me to fall asleep. I don’t remember the pain as much as the trauma of listening to the start of a story that did not have a body or an end. The following morning I woke up sore, my knees hurt a lot but I had no fever. Mum helped me get ready and insisted that I ride the bike for a couple of hours and then return it. At first, I was hesitant and insisted that she accompany me. All it took was a couple of rounds around the block and I was comfortable again. Eventually, the knees healed, but I never stopped riding the bicycles again.