Bicycles for Birthdays

This Friday is Murshidah’s birthday, and so is mine. What is the probability for father and daughter to be born on the same date, albeit 40 years apart? I guessed it’s because I have repeatedly forgotten my birthday (year after year when I was much younger), and perhaps the best way for me to remember my birthday was by a gift of a baby girl from Allah. I blamed it on my profession (an absent-minded computer programmer). It’s not just my birthday I forgot, there were some years I forgot my wife’s too. Deep trouble, hey!

She wanted a bicycle for her birthday, just like what Musfirah got for hers. I contemplated over its significance and meaning. While doing so, I have decided to get one too for Mus’ab. This is my grand plan to get him out of his bedroom and stay away from his playstation, TV and computer. Perhaps a bicycle will get him outdoor to enjoy the real instead of roaming the virtual.

My contemplation brought me to the days when I first got my bicycle. I could not remember where my late father bought and how he paid for it. But I have vivid memories of the lanes and drains over which I cycled to get to Jalan Eunos School. My bicycle was my true companion since I started cycling to school from my house in Jalan Pasir. I was in Primary 3 then. If you think that’s too young an age to cycle to school, it’s even a wonder how Noraini, my younger sister cycled to school from Primary 2, initially led and accompanied by my father (on his own bicycle) and soon we went solo, the two of us on our own bicycles.

I continued cycling when I went to secondary school. By then I had my second bicycle. Yet again, this blue “Ali Baba” bicycle was vivid in my mind. It was a rare item then and I felt a sense of individuality since I was the only student in the school who had a mean machine of a make and model envied by others.

But the bicycle was not for showing off. It was my only means of transportation to school and to deliver the glass jars of krepek ubi sambal homemade (by my mother) and packed into plastic packets (glued over a candle light by her children), to the mamak shops for them to sell it among other items in their stores. Once two jars filled with krepek fell off my bicycle and broke on the road. My heart sank as the broken pieces of glass buried the packets of krepek rendered it unsafe to eat and unsaleable. My mother lost two jars worth of revenue and I was numb from guilt for many days.

I now understood the significance and meaning of my bicycle. It was more than a toy. In fact it made me a delivery boy for my family’s very small time business – kind of an empowerment programme we initiated as a family to supplement my father’s income as a dispatch rider. While my father was on his motorbike dispatching newspapers, I cycled to deliver jars of krepek. Almost learning the ropes at a young age, I was taught skills to prepare myself for the future – the basic competency necessary to earn a living, just in case I didn't get very far in life.

We are about to leave for Giant at Tampines to buy the bicycles.

I have yet to find the meaning for their birthday gift.
Hopefully, my children will discover it themselves, some day.