The Wheel

Written by Kumar Tito

An elderly rickshaw puller rushed toward me and said,

“Where are you going? Hop on.”

His energy was strangely contagious. Almost without thinking, I climbed onto the rickshaw.

“To the metro station,” I replied.

As we rode, he said,

“Brother, I’ve been pulling a rickshaw for a solid seventy-five years.”

Instinctively, I ran my hand over the thinning hair on both sides of my head. A man claiming to have pulled a rickshaw for seventy-five years was calling me brother.

I asked him,

“How old were you during Bangladesh’s Liberation War in 1971?”

He lifted one hand to gesture, almost letting it drop onto the pedal. I realized he must have been very young then. Still, I asked,

“Do you remember those days?”

He laughed.

“Who remembers things from when they were that little?”

I was about to work out the math in my head and explain it to him when my eyes fell on another frail old man. Breathing heavily, he was pulling a cycle rickshaw with three passengers on board.

Then it struck me.

By the calendar, he may not have been pulling a rickshaw for seventy-five years. But his entire life had been spent on those pedals. And if he lived long enough, it would be seventy-five, eighty-five, ninety-five — his days passing in exactly the same way.

The rickshaw wheel keeps turning, and with it, a human life is slowly crushed beneath its endless motion.

That is how time surrenders to the wheel. So does civilization.