The Atlas Years of Kashmir

An ode to the working-class bicycle that once symbolised mobility and now survives as memory.

- Jamsheed Rasool

licking back his hair with oil, he stood tall and lanky, balanced awkwardly on a rattling Atlas bicycle.

In the early years of the twenty-first century, in a highland cul-de-sac like Kashmir, that bicycle had already begun to invite calibrated whispers as a loser's vehicle.

Sabir, a name that meant the patient one, had an aquiline nose, quick wit, manly voice, and a sharp command of his lessons. These traits should have drawn notice from the stream of girls who flowed out of the biology block each afternoon. The bicycle undid it all.

Perched on that steel frame, he faded from view, and not a single girl turned her head. He spoke with clarity, grasped ideas with speed, and carried himself with effort. Even so, something about his posture and clothes seemed to signal poor ancestry, as if deprivation had found its own language.

Like me, he cycled through the same two outfits every week, washing and wearing them until even hope felt threadbare.

“Are we aliens?” he would ask with bitterness. “Why don't they look at us? Why those boys on flashy motorbikes, loud and careless, smoking openly and mocking teachers? Why them?”

The questions hovered in the air without resolution.

By the winter of 2004, the bicycle had turned into a symbol of defeat, tied to generations who had lived hand to mouth while promises of upward mobility slipped away. To reverse that story would have required a figure from Sisyphus, condemned to push a stone uphill only to watch it roll back down. Sabir sometimes seemed heir to that burden.

The girls continued to pass each day, and the bitterness settled deeper within him. He grew convinced that intellect alone could never soften the poverty that framed his life or alter the way he appeared in their eyes.

“Do they X-ray my family?” he once asked, his voice breaking. “Do they see the poverty before they see me?”