Kochi Is Hunting for a Green 1957 Bicycle, and the Search Says Something

Somewhere in Kochi there is a green bicycle with a rare double-piped front fork, and a large number of people who have never met each other are looking for it. The search has been running since the evening of July 22, and it has picked up relatives, friends, schoolchildren, a police complaint, CCTV reviews and a five lakh rupee reward from businessman Boby Chemmanur. It is, on paper, a stolen cycle. In practice it has become one of those stories a city decides to take personally.

A lottery win, and a shop on MG Road

The bicycle is a 1957 Raleigh Humber. It was bought new by MR Balakrishnan, who had won a lottery prize from Calcutta that year, from Kavitha Cycle Emporium near Kavitha Theatre on MG Road in Ernakulam. From 1962 he worked in the security department at Premier Tyres in Kalamassery, and he rode that cycle between Mattancherry and Kalamassery, a stretch that anyone who has attempted it in Kochi traffic will recognise as a serious daily commitment.

His son, MB Prakashan, is 80 now and lives in Kalamassery. He kept the cycle for close to seventy years, looking at it in the mornings and wiping it down at night. His father had handed it over with a plain instruction, which was not to ruin it and not to sell it. He did neither.

The evening it went

On Wednesday, July 22, the cycle was parked and locked on VP Marakkar Road near Edappally Toll Junction, sometime in the window between about 6.30 and 7.15 in the evening. The key had been left in the lock. That is the whole mechanism of the loss, and it is the detail that makes the story hurt rather than infuriate, because it is the kind of thing anyone could do on an ordinary evening.

The timing was worse than the loss. July 23 was the twenty-third anniversary of his father's death. The cycle went missing on its eve.

Why a whole city started looking

A complaint went to the Kalamassery police, CCTV footage from the area has been gone through, and the family and their friends started a search that has not stayed in the family. Schoolchildren have been looking. So have people with no connection to any of it. The reward offer widened the net further, though by most accounts the search had already spread on its own before any money was attached to it.

Part of it is that the object is unmistakable. A green 1957 Raleigh Humber with a double-piped front fork is not a bicycle you can quietly ride around Ernakulam. Anyone who knows what to look for would know it on sight, and by now a lot of people do.

What the search says about the city

Kochi is not sentimental in an obvious way. It is a working port city that has absorbed several centuries of arrivals and has never made much fuss about any of them. But it keeps its old things in plain use rather than behind glass, which is a different kind of sentiment. You see it in the shopfronts along Mattancherry, in the ferries that still run because they are the sensible way to cross, in the number of families here who can tell you exactly where a piece of furniture came from and who bought it.

A 1957 cycle that was ridden to work every day for decades sits exactly in that tradition. It was never a collector item. It was transport, and then it was memory, and it stayed useful the entire time. That is probably why the search caught on. Most people in this city own at least one thing like it.

It is also a small reminder of how much the way we move around here has changed. A man once cycled between Mattancherry and Kalamassery as routine. The same journey today runs through a metro line, a water metro and an auto stand, and almost nobody would attempt it on two wheels.

If you see it

Green frame, chrome handlebars, the double-piped front fork that gives it away. If you spot it anywhere in Ernakulam district, the Kalamassery police station is handling the complaint and would be the place to call. As of now it has not turned up.

For more stories about the people of this city, keep an eye on this section. This one is still open, and a fair number of us would like it to close well.