How a simple mechanic punctured my ego

As I stepped out of bed yesterday at dawn, I felt a dull ache in my leg from an accident that happened a long time ago. For a moment, I lay back in the bed, wallowing in self pity at my past misfortune. I had to remind myself my leg had long since recovered and I had been jogging and playing tennis for many years now, and in fact was going to be late for today’s tennis game.

A few minutes later, I was on my scooter and almost at my tennis club when the vehicle suddenly swerved. I pulled over and checked the rear wheel and sure enough, it had a puncture. In India, labour is cheap and jobs are scarce. So one-man tyre puncture service centres are everywhere. Some operate from little hole-in-the-wall shops, others illegally ply their trade on roadside pavements. Fixing a puncture costs just Rs 50–100 (around $1).

However I had a problem as my scooter is an electric bike, and the drive is inside the back wheel. This makes fixing punctures on that wheel a headache as accessing the tube is complicated because of the wires and additional thingies. The mechanic I went to fix a previous puncture, had never before seen an electric bike, and ended up badly denting the motor casing in his attempts to extract the tube.

Expert help was what I needed so I parked the bike safely off the road, and jogged over to my tennis club off for a game. Later at a more decent hour, I called my bike’s dealer, and he promised to send a professional along. A couple of hours later I got a call. It was the mechanic asking for directions to the location where I had parked my punctured bike. I didn’t understand the language he spoke too well, but gave him an idea of the location.

I hurried there myself. Just as I reached, he called again to say he was lost but he couldn’t understand what I said. So I asked a security guard standing nearby to give him directions in his own language. A short while later, the mechanic drove up. He was a frail greying man in his mid-fifties wearing tattered clothes and riding a ramshackle 3-wheel scooter. He gave me a friendly wave as he dismounted from his scooter.

That’s when I noticed his foot, and I had to really remind myself to stop staring as his left leg was a prosthetic one, attached to his hip. Not quite what you’d expect in a person who earns his living by manual labour.

He limped over to my bike, opened his bag, handed me a broad mouthed small tub, and requested me to fill it with water. My bike was parked outside the sprawling campus of a local corporate giant. I approached a gardener who was watering the flower beds and he obligingly topped up the tub with his hose. As I returned to my bike, I noticed an unusual sight.

The mechanic had removed his artificial leg and propped up my bike with it, to prevent it rocking on its stand. My fingers itched to take a photo, but somehow it didn’t feel right.

The man himself was sitting on the ground minus one leg, happily working away at the bike’s rear wheel. Within no time, he had the tube dangling out of the tyre. He then attached a bicycle pump to the tube, nimbly hopped up on one foot, and pumped a bit of air into the tube. He proceeded to dip the tube below the water surface in the tub, and located the puncture by the air bubbles. After expertly patching it, he removed the nail responsible for the puncture, from the tyre.

While he was doing this, I tried to ask him how he had lost his leg. But we couldn’t really understand each other’s language so I gave up. But he did give a broad grin at one point when he understood that I was impressed with his resourceful use of his prosthetic leg to prop up the bike.

As he slipped the tube back into the tyre, I grabbed the pump and pumped up the tyre, and that was it. He quickly re-attached his detachable leg back to his body, and informed me that it would be Rs 200. I handed the money over, with a tip which he politely refused. He instead asked me to take down his number in case I ever wanted his help again.

Watching him ride off, I felt humbled at his self respect, lack of self pity, and fierce independence. This was a man who had a lot less than me, but still was more content with his life despite the lack of wealth and a missing leg.

As I mulled over my eternal discontentment and my never-ending chase to find happiness via material things (I’m looking at you, AirPods), an old saying popped up in my head.

“I cried and cried because I had no shoes, until I met the man with one leg”