Do you know what a ladicycle is? It is pretty much like a bicyle as we know now. There was a time when women like my Ma couldn’t ride a bicycle that were not ‘ladice’. Yet, she rode up and down the campus of the Film Institute of India in Poona.

A ‘ladice’ cycle is defined by contrast to a gent’s cycle. The gent’s cycle has a horizontal bar between the seat of the rider and the handle.

A ladice (ladies’) cyle had a diagonal bar between the junction of the handle and the bottom of the seat. Why?

Because, if a girl/woman would ride a gent’s (men’s) bicycle, she would have to sit astride. So, bicyle makers fashioned a diagonal stroke across. Girls could ride a bicycle if their left foot was pedalling left and if their right foot was on the right pedal if they were not seated while in a saree. If they were seated, their bums would show.

All bicyle makers of the time – Atlas, Hercules, Raleigh – made it. It was advertised as an ode to women’s liberation, my Ma, my professor father having had to leave early for the morning lectures, asking me to hold the backseat while she furiously pedalled, legs across through the horizontal and diagonal rod, to attend a bit of the lecture. It was on one of those furious rides that we brushed against thorns on the fence of a rich man’s bungalow. The barbed wire tore my skin. By the time she finished her class my shorts were red with blood. They took us to the dispensary where they cleaned and stitched the wound. The marks are still there. I am sixty years of age, my parents long gone, but the stitch marks are still there on my back.

I recall this this evening because of a lunch over which Mandira Mitra, a graduate of FTII herself, mentioned Bani Dutta, nee Bani Roy, one of the first women to graduate from the Film Institute of India (later, the Film and Television Institute of India – FTII, as we know it now). Bani Dutta, nee Roy, was my Ma.