The Rickshaw That Knew the Way

• 4 minute read
• Ages 5-9
• Bedtime Stories

Bashir had pulled a cycle rickshaw on the same three streets for twenty-six years, and in that time he had carried a great many children to school.

Not the same children. That was the thing about it. He had carried one lot until they were too old, and then their younger brothers and sisters, and then, eventually, some of their children.

The route

He did the school run in the morning and the afternoon, and in between he took whoever wanted going wherever they wanted to go.

He knew that route so well that he did not think about it. He knew which way the potholes ran and where the road narrowed and which corner you did not take fast because a shop put its crates out there at eight.

And he knew which houses.

He could have driven it asleep. Some mornings he very nearly did.

The girl who fell asleep

There was a small girl in the afternoon load who fell asleep on the way home almost every day.

She was five and the afternoons were hot and the rickshaw rocked, and she would go under about halfway, sitting up, with her bag on her knees.

Bashir noticed the first time and after that he did two things.

He took the last stretch to her house slower than he needed to, because the potholes on that bit would have woken her.

And when he got there he did not shout up at the house the way he did for the others. He stopped, and got down, and knocked at the door, and waited, so that her mother could come out and lift her off rather than have her woken and made to climb down.

He did that for two years and never once mentioned it.

The last week

When he stopped working, at sixty-eight, the families on those streets found out about a week beforehand.

They did not make a fuss, because somebody who knew him said he would hate it.

What they did instead was that on his last afternoon there was somebody standing at every single gate on the route, which there normally would not have been, and each of them said thank you as he went past and he had to keep going because he was carrying children.

So he heard it about eleven times in a row over four minutes and could not stop for any of it.

He got to the end of the street and sat there for a while.

After

The girl who used to fall asleep is grown up now and lives in another city.

She does not remember the rickshaw very clearly. She remembers being carried in from somewhere in the afternoons, and she remembers it as one of the good feelings of being small, and she has never known who was responsible for any of it.

Which is, on the whole, how these things go.