Ian Dia Bicycle

Evelyn Lilith Burns’s Arjuna Indiabike is the silver bicycle that announces her arrival as a force at Methwold’s Estate and later becomes the instrument of two decisive turns in Saleem Sinai’s childhood. Its significance exceeds its function as transport: Evie uses it to establish her authority, Saleem takes it up to pursue her, and the moving bicycle brings about both his discovery of the midnight children and his collision with the political life of Bombay.

Design and Arrival

Evie’s bicycle is described as one of the last great old-timers, in mint condition, with drop handlebars wrapped in masking tape, five gears, a seat made of reccine cheetah-skin, and a silver frame. That frame, likened in the narration to the Lone Ranger’s horse, makes the machine immediately conspicuous among the children’s surroundings. The bicycle is so closely identified with Evie that the narrator says she cannot be pictured without it.

The bicycle makes its entrance on New Year’s Day, 1957. While the children are playing French cricket in the circus-ring between the palaces of Methwold’s Estate, Evie rides up the hill and interrupts the quiet game. The contrast is immediate: the children’s settled pastime gives way to the spectacle of a newcomer who takes the ring, and the attention of its inhabitants, for herself.

Evie’s Performances and Authority

Evie rides faster and faster around the circus-ring, then performs a sequence of stunts: balancing with one foot on the seat and one leg extended, turning circles around the children, and standing on her head on the seat. The bicycle appears to make gravity and speed answer to her. The ring, previously just a place where the children play, becomes a performance space shaped by her movement; the narrator presents it as a canvas traced by the wheels.

The machine also accompanies Evie’s display of sharpshooting. With a Daisy air-pistol at her hip, she fires at stones and at coins the children toss in the air, then shoots the heads off kings on a pack of rummy cards. The bicycle and pistol together establish a new order in the children’s circle: after dismounting, Evie declares herself the new big chief, and nobody objects. Saleem recognizes that he has fallen in love with her at that moment. In his later account, the bicycle is thus inseparable from both her command of the group and the beginning of his attachment.

Saleem Learns to Ride

Saleem’s desire to win Evie’s attention leads him to decide that he must share her interests and learn to ride a bicycle, although wheels had not interested him before her arrival and he had never been given one. When Evie starts teaching the children, he joins the queue without a bicycle of his own. She lets him use her silver Arjuna Indiabike and walks beside it, holding the handlebars while he tries to balance. Saleem recalls the lesson as a rare moment of happiness, even before he can ride independently.

Evie eventually gives him a shove and lets go. Saleem cannot manage the brakes or steer away from Sonny Ibrahim, who is riding a blue bicycle. The two bicycles meet, and Saleem and Sonny fall from them. The incident turns the bicycle from an object of courtship and instruction into the immediate cause of an encounter that changes Saleem’s understanding of himself.

Collision and Political Consequences

During the collision, Saleem’s temples fit into the hollows in Sonny’s head, which the narration connects to their different births and to the forceps used in Sonny’s delivery. After the crash, Saleem hears the other children born during the midnight hour as distinct voices calling out. The narrator describes the accident as completing what the earlier washing-chest calamity had begun: the midnight children’s voices, previously muffled in the background, come to the foreground. The silver bicycle’s unintended course therefore helps precipitate Saleem’s telepathic awakening and his discovery of the larger community to which he belongs.

The bicycle later carries Saleem into a different kind of collision. As he rides around the circus-ring, he begins probing Evie’s thoughts; she notices the intrusion and pushes him away. He hurtles downhill on a runaway bicycle, past Bank Box Laundry and the apartment blocks Noor Ville and Laxmi Vilas, and into a march. There, political demonstrators challenge him about his language and ask whether he will join the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti. He refuses, and, dazed, recites a Gujarati rhyme he knows. The episode connects Evie’s bicycle to the linguistic and political conflict over Bombay: the machine that first made her mistress of the circus-ring carries Saleem from its private childhood world into the public march.