The Cyclist

When I was ten years old there were rumors that in a basketball field located in Khorasan Sq, in Tehran, a Pakistani cyclist has got onto a bicycle and wants to cycle for 10 constant days for helping the flood victims of Pakistan. In that period that nothing happened this incident was important news. Especially for us kids, whom all wished to have a bicycle. The kids in the neighborhood gathered and we all went to see the cyclist. The ticket was 5 rials and some of us borrowed money from others to enter the coliseum. It was the first and second day of the incident and naturally a few people had come to watch. Individual cycling marathon was not that spectacular, in instance. A tall and thin man, with a black topcoat and a tired face spinning in an endless circle around himself and another man constantly spoke about his charity work for helping his countrymen in a microphone. But between the viewers they were saying that the flood in Pakistan has nothing to do with his business. He had been seen before cycling for the excuse of earthquake in another location, and later I thought that he was an “Armed Cheguara”. 
 
The best part of the program was when he wanted to go to the toilet. He horned twice and the man holding the microphone said two or three sentences about modesty and pudency and at the end he asked us to close our eyes and he solved his problem by using an ewer. And the neighborhood kids took revenge for the 5-rial that they had paid for the ticket by laughing and mocking him. 
 
There was a rumor that at night, when everyone goes home, the cyclist sleeps. This is why the most daring kids of the neighborhood, those who could escape home at midnight, got united to go to see the cyclist in the midnight of the third night. 
 
The door of the coliseum was a bit open and the ticket-seller had gone. We got behind the glasses of the covered basketball field. The man holding the microphone was taking a nap and the cyclist was cycling all alone as if he is doing it for god’s eyes. 
 
I even remember that Farah (queen of Iran) paid a visit to his marathon and gave him a present. After it was proven that the ceremony was true more viewers were attracted to the place. On the fifth day a small Bazaar was formed around the cyclist, who melted in himself every second. You could have bought all the stuff you needed for the house from around the cyclist and be entertained by watching him. 
 
The cyclist resisted until the seventh day and melted more and more every second and the Bazaar around him grew larger and larger each second. On the seventh day, which is a meaningful number, he fell down. We got there when they had already taken him and there were rumors that he had already died before falling down. But the Bazaar was still there and you could still buy anything you needed from there.
 
My neighborhood kids, whom until yesterday did not mind to flat the tire of his bicycle out of mischief, now sustained all their coins to the box for helping the flood victims of Pakistan out of pity. There was one person that borrowed money from all of us for helping them and said that he would pay back as installments until next week. 
 
Later I heard that the same man has repeated this story in other cities. I can even say that sometimes the cyclist is not a special person in some places; it is a class, a society, and a nation. 
 
I really liked to make the story as I wrote it first. I mean when the cyclist apparently succeeded and stopped cycling he could not walk on a straight line anymore. He went towards the mass crowd in the opposite street in circles from this Bazaar and in a place, a little further, when he had finished his work, he died. But what could I do with all those circumstantial advises? Pessimism once again? Be careful that the cyclist should not die! Don’t you want to make The cyclist? Then it is better that you assume that you have never seen him in the Khorasan Sq of Tehran. Why don’t you think more globally? Why are you so obligated towards the time and place?! Anyways wasn’t the man a Pakistani? Okay, what do you think about a ten-day trip to Pakistan?…