Reborn In 17th century India with Black Technology - Chapter 826

Chapter 826: Bicycle (1/2)
Gulmarg, Kashyapamar State, Akhand Bharatiya Empire

“Agni Sarupa !”

“Hiyaaaaa!!!”

“Jalla Avarna !”

“Oooohaaaaaaa!!!”

A group of children wearing unique Tantric costumes were chanting various mantras from Kavya’s *Harish Puttar* novel.

Suhail Karan, a middle-aged man who was around 6 feet tall, looked at the children playing with an amiable smile on his face; they reminded him of his own daughter when she was young. Sadly, she had already grown up and was no longer a little baby anymore. Thinking about it both warmed his heart and made him feel bittersweet, but in the end, he was still left very energised. It was as if the vitality of the children playing fed back to him, giving him the energy he needed. Even the tiredness he had started to feel due to holding several heavy cloth bags suddenly reduced by a lot, and he was able to continue moving forward without a frown on his face.

If it were possible, he would have liked to watch the kids play some more, but after he realised that the kids had stopped making noise, noticing his arrival, he let out a deep breath and shook his head in disappointment. In a few moments, he reached the outskirts of Gulmarg to a large courtyard house nestled at the edge of a dense jungle. At the compound of the house, Suhail saw a young teenage girl looking around worriedly. But as soon as her eyes met his, the worry on her face completely melted, and a pear-blossom-like smile appeared on her lovely oval face.

“Father, why did you take so long to come back home today?” his daughter, Sheela, gestured with her hands in sign language.

Suhail looked at his daughter with a hint of doting in his eyes. He first went into the house with his daughter following right behind him like a tail. With a grunt, he unloaded all the bags he was carrying in his personal garage. Finally freeing up his hands, he answered his daughter with a little excitement in his eyes, “The workload in the factory today was not too heavy, so I was allowed by the manager to manufacture the parts for your two-wheel carriage. Also, I bought some other things in the city along the way, so it took a while longer to return.”

Understanding the reason, Sheela was relieved, but then again, thinking about the two-wheeled carriage her father was working on for the last four to five months, she became very excited.

“Father, can the two-wheeled carriage finally be built??”

Suhail Karan hesitated, but he still nodded. ”It should be possible. All the parts have been built and only the assembly is left.”

Sheela was very excited, she pulled his hand and jumped with joy. “Alright, let’s build it now.” Unlike girls of her age who were into commerce or arts, she had followed in her father’s footsteps and was an out-and-out mechanical enthusiast. She knew what the significance of the two-wheeled carriage was, so she could not wait to finally assemble the carriage and test it out for herself.

Suhail could see the excitement in his daughter’s eyes. He was also itching to get his hands dirty, but it was already daybreak and the sunlight was about to run out, so he quickly motioned for his daughter to have her dinner and sleep.

“I have applied for leave for the next two days. Given that it is Sunday after that, I will be home for the next three days. Now you sleep, we can start building the carriage early in the morning.”

Sheela was a little reluctant, but in the end, she couldn’t withstand her insistent father. She did what she was told. She had her dinner and finally went to sleep after turning around continuously in bed for 30 minutes.

—

5:00 AM

“Father, father, wake up, wake up, let’s build, let’s build!”

Suhail Karan was woken up by an aggressive shaking all over his body, as if he had been thrown into a carriage going at high speed down a rocky hill. Looking at his daughter’s face, which looked like a beggar who had just woken up, he immediately got angry. His hand, like a hidden dragon, burst out of the blanket and immediately twisted his daughter’s ear, causing her to shriek in pain.

He forcefully ordered her to take a bath while he went directly to the kitchen and prepared the tiffin for the day. Sheela came out of the bathroom with a pouting expression on her face, looking very angry, but Suhail did not give in to her tantrums. Instead, he strictly ordered her to finish the food before they could start the build. Sheela was only 14 years old, after all, and she was in a rebellious phase.

“I will not eat,” she just growled with a stubborn expression, but Suhail, who had brought up a daughter by himself after his wife had passed away, was not the one to relent.

“If you do not eat, the two-wheeled carriage will not be built, and it will be stopped indefinitely,” he just stated without any emotion on his face.

“Ahhh!”

“Stomp!”

Sheela squealed angrily and stomped her feet like an angry little bull with two cute ponytails, but in the end, she still lost to her father. She obediently ate the tiffin and even completed some of the chores in the house before she was allowed to wear her oversized apron and enter the garage.

As soon as she entered the garage, she saw her father carefully holding a pumice stone, sanding down the frame of the two-wheeled carriage. Looking at the blackened, wrinkled hands of her father, who was working on the wrought iron frame, Sheela obediently came forward and sat next to her father, hoping that he would let her do something.

Fortunately, she was not disappointed. The very next moment, Suhail handed over the pumice, which is a natural rock that can be used like sandpaper, to his daughter.

“Sand down the frame until a fine layer of oxidised rust is removed,” he vacated his seat so that his daughter could take his place. The frame was clamped down with a wooden support so that it could not move; hence, Sheela did not need to hold on to anything and could sand the frame without any reservation. Sheela excitedly took over the pumice and started rubbing it on the iron frame, making a high-pitched scraping sound.

Looking at how his daughter handled the pumice, Suhail was very proud. He might not be able to speak, but he was very skilled in mechanical work. This skill of his was noticed by the factory manager at a factory where he worked a few years ago. The factory manager promoted his rank and eventually helped him get into a vocational machinery course at the college level held for adults.

Given that he had a disability of not being able to speak, he was immediately exempted from all the fees, and he was even allowed to use the materials of school for free of charge during experimentation. This led him to develop his machining and metal-handling skills even more. Right now, he works as a chief craftsman for a metal processing company that produces parts for the military.

Now, looking at how his daughter seemed to have inherited all his talent for machinery while not having his disability, he was overjoyed. In fact, his daughter was the main reason why he chose to design and build the two-wheeled carriage. His daughter had just completed high school and had passed with relatively good marks. She was now qualified to enter a good college in the big city, Srinagar, but the city was nearly 20 kilometres away, and he was not very willing to let his daughter stay in the hostel. So, thinking about the gyroscopic effect, which was practically demonstrated to him when he was in school, he decided to build a two-wheeled carriage for his daughter to travel from the remote village of Gulmarg to the big city, Srinagar.

For most people with similar thoughts to Suhail, if they want to build something, it is not too easy to get it done, since industrial centers are spread too thin across the empire, making it very expensive for grassroots innovators to get their product out unless they are in a big city or in close proximity to a big city that has access to industrial companies. Fortunately for Suhail, the place he worked was actually an inland industrial zone of the Bharatiya Empire focused on processing copper, lead, zinc, cobalt, and tungsten from the Himalayan belt. So, a lot of metal processing factories, as well as manufacturing companies, existed in close proximity.

For the last 4.5 months, he had been tinkering with the two-wheeled carriage. Two hundred fifteen wooden models and seven prototypes later, it was finally time to build the first prototype with all the parts produced as he theoretically intended.

Suhail Karan picked up another pumice rock and started sanding out the smaller parts of the two-wheeled carriage. This was a very tedious process that was boring and time-consuming, but neither Suhail Karan nor Sheela complained. Both father and daughter relished polishing the frame and the parts for the whole day.

Fortunately, there was something exciting for Sheela to do by the end of the day, as she was allowed to paint all the parts that had been sanded down.

Sheela, with excitement, started painting different colours on the parts. She painted the frame black, the mudguards grey, the handlebars blue, the pedals brown, the small chains black, and finally, she even added a wooden identification board, like those present on carriages used to identify them, and painted the board pink.

Looking at the hodgepodge of colours that did not match one another, Suhail stayed silent and shook his head in amusement. He knew that his daughter had a terrible ability to work with colours. Even during her schooling, colouring the drawing on her slate was the worst activity she performed, but looking at her happy smile as she got various colours of paint all over her apron, Suhail did not have the heart to say no to her. ‘Forget it, she’ll be the one driving the carriage in the first place. If she doesn’t like it in the future, it can always be repainted,’ he thought to himself.

To Be Continued…