A talk with a boy who received bike as a present from his girlfriend on his 20th birthday

အသက္ ၂၀ ျပည့္ေမြးေန႕မွာ ေကာင္မေလးထံမွ စက္ဘီး လက္ေဆာင္ရတဲ့ ေကာင္ေလးနဲ႕ သူေျပာျပတဲ့ စက္ဘီးနဲ႕ပတ္သက္တဲ့အ

ေၾကာင္းေတြ။

အခုစီးေနတဲ့စက္ဘီး ကုိကၽြန္ေတာ့ ၂၀ ျပည့္ေမြးေန႕မွာ ၀ယ္ျဖစ္တာ။ ျပီးေတာ့ ဒီေကာင္ေလးကို သေဘာလည္းက်တယ္။ ကြၽန္ေတာ္နဲ႕လိုက္တယ္လုိ႕ ခံစားရတယ္။ classic လည္းျဖစ္တယ္လို႕ ခံစားရတယ္။ ဒီစက္ဘီးကို ကြၽန္ေတာ့္ ေကာင္မေလး၀ယ္ေပးတယ္လို႕လည္း ေျပာလုိ႕ရတယ္ဗ်။ ကြၽန္ေတာ့္ေကာင္မ ေလးနဲ႕ ကၽြန္ေတာ္နဲ႕ ပထမဆံုးစျပီး ပုိင္ဆိုင္မႈတစ္ခုလိုမ်ိဳးနဲ႕၀ယ္ျဖစ္ခဲ့တယ္။

အဲ့ေန႕ကေတာေတာႏွံ႕တယ္။ စက္ဘီး၀ယ္တဲ့ ေစာ္ဘြားၾကီးကုန္းကေနျပီးေတာ့ အရင္ဆံုး ႐ွစ္မိုင္သြားတယ္။ ႐ွစ္မုိင္ကေန ရန္ကင္းကိုသြားတယ္။ ရန္ကင္းကေန မွ သူေနတဲ့ ဆယ္ေျမာင္း၀န္းထဲသြားျပီးတဲ့အခါ ကြၽန္ေတာ့္အိမ္ရိွတဲ့ ေျမာက္ ဥကၠလာအထိကုိ ေတာက္ေလွ်ာက္ျပန္နင္းတာ။ အဲ့ေန႕က မိုးေတြလည္း ႐ြာခ် ေတာ့ မိုးေရထဲမွာ နင္းရတာေပါ့။ ေတာ္ေတာ္ အမွတ္တရျဖစ္တယ္။ လံုး၀မပင္ ပန္းဘူး။ ပထမဆုံး ေပ်ာ္႐ႊင္မႈ ပိုင္ဆုိင္မႈပဲ။ ကြၽန္ေတာ္ စက္ဘီးစီးတဲ့့သက္တမ္း မွာ အဲ့ေန႕က စီးခ်ိန္အၾကာဆံုးပဲ။

ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႕ ေျမာကၠဥလာမွာ တစ္ေယာက္႐ိွတယ္။ ကိုယ္ကာယ အားကစားသမား။ ေအာင္ႏိုင္ေဆြဆိုလား ေအာင္ေဆြႏုိင္ဆိုလား တစ္ခုခုပဲ။ သူဆိုလုိ႕႐ိွရင္လည္း အဲ့လိုပဲ စက္ဘီးတာကုိ သူေတာ္ေတာ္လုပ္တယ္။ တန္ဖိုး ၾကီးတဲ့စက္ဘီးေတြ၀ယ္ျပီးသြင္းတယ္။ သူ႕စက္ဘီးေတြကမုိက္တယ္ေပါ့တယ္ ေပါ့။ ျပီးေတာ့ သူက စက္ဘီးကို dressing အျပည့္နဲ႕စီးတယ္။ ဘာအတြက္လဲ ေတာ့ အဲ့တုန္းကမသိခဲ့ဘူး။ အဲ့တုန္းက စက္ဘီးစီး ၀တ္စံုကုိ ရီရတဲ့၀တ္စုံ၊ ႐ွက္ဖို႕ေကာင္းတယ္ေပါ့ေနာ္။ ေရကူးတာတို႕ဆိုရင္ အဲ့လို ေဘာင္းဘီ တိုတုိ တုတ္တုတ္ေလးနဲ႕ေပမဲ့ ဘာမွ မျဖစ္ဘူး။ သူ႕ပတ္၀န္းက်င္နဲ႕သူ။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ေဘာင္းဘီ အတိုအျပတ္၊ကိုယ္က်ပ္နဲ႕ လမ္းေပၚမွာ ပတ္ျပီး စက္ဘီးနင္း တဲ့အခါၾကေတာ့ သူ႕ကုိၾကည့္ျပီးေတာ့ရီခ်င္တယ္။ သူကခႏၶာကိုယ္ၾကီလည္း အၾကီးၾကီးဆိုေတာ့ ႐ွက္ဖို႕ေကာင္းတဲ့ ပုံစံတစ္ခုအေနနဲ႕ ျမင္ခဲ့တယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ အခုၾကမွ တကယ္နင္းၾကည့္တဲ့အခါၾကေတာ့ စက္ဘီးစီးတဲ့ ၀တ္စံုနဲ႕ စီးတဲ့့ အခါၾကမွပဲ comfort ျဖစ္မယ္ဆိုတဲ့ feel တစ္ခု ခံစားလာရတယ္ေပါ့ေနာ္။

အဲ့လို အဲ့လုိမ်ိဳးေတာ့႐ွိတယ္။

အရင္တုန္းက ေမာင္းတိန္းဘီးေလးတစ္စီး႐ွိတယ္။ ခုနစ္တန္းေလာက္ မွာ စျပီးရတာ။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႕အိမ္မွာ႐ွိတဲ့ မိန္းမစီးဘီးလးနဲ႕ အဲ့ေမာင္းတိန္းဘီး နဲ႕ကို မီးခြက္ေစ်းမွာလားဘာလားမသိဘူး မွာ အလုိက္ေပးျပီးသြားလဲခဲ့တာ။ အဲ့ ဘီးေလးက ေတာ္ေတာ္ဆင္ထားတာ။ ထိလုိက္လို႕႐ွိရင္ ျမည္တာတို႕ သူခုိးမခိုးခံ ရေအာင ္တပ္ထားေတြအမ်ားၾကီး႐ွိတယ္။ ဒီေမာင္းတိန္းဘီးေလးနဲ႕ ေက်ာင္း တက္ျဖစ္တယ္။ စက္ဘီးနဲ႕ ပုဆုိး၀တ္နဲ႕ဆို အစဥ္မေျပေတာ့ ေအာက္ကေဘာင္း ဘီတုိတုိေလးနဲ႕အျမဲေက်ာင္းသြားျပီး ေက်ာင္းေရာက္မွ ပုဆုိးစြတ္ကတာေပါ့ေနာ္ ။ ေက်ာင္းအျပန္ဆို အဲ့ဘီးေလးကနဲ႕ ဘရိတ္ကိုညွစ္ျပီး ဖုန္သဲထူေတြထဲမွာ စ လစ္႐ိုက္တာ အျမဲလုပ္ျဖစ္တယ္။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ဆယ္တန္းေဘာ္ဒါေဆာင္သြားေန ေတာ့ မစီျဖစ္ေတာ့ဘူး။ ျပစ္ထားတာၾကာေတာ့ စက္ဘီးက စီးလုိ႕မရေတာ့ဘူး ျပန္ျပင္မွစီးလို႕ရမွာေပါ့။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္လည္း ျပန္မျပင္ျဖစ္ေတာ့ဘဲ ေနာက္ေတာ့ ညီေလးရဲ႕ သူငယ္ခ်င္း စက္ဘီးမ၀ယ္ႏိုင္တဲ့ေကာင္ေလးကို ေပးလိုက္တယ္။ သူ႕အေဖက ဆုိက္ကားနင္းေတာ့ စက္ဘီးေတြ ဘာေတြျပင္တတ္တယ္။ အဲ့ဒါနဲ႕ သူကုိ ေပးလုိက္တယ္။

ဆယ္တန္းျပီးထဲ စက္ဘီးမစီးျဖစ္ပါဘူး။ စက္ဘီးစီးဖို႕ကို လည္းေမ့ေန တယ္။ အခုအလုပ္လုပ္ေတာ့မွ စက္ဘီးစီးဖို႕ကို ျပန္စိတ္ကူးရတယ္။ ဘာလုိ႕ လည္းဆုိေတာ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ကေျမာက္ဥကၠလာမွာေနတာ ႐ုံးတက္ရတာက တာေမြမွာ။ ျပီးေတာ့ ဒီကာလာမွာ ကုန္းေက်ာ္တံတားေတြေဆာက္တာေၾကာင့္ လမ္းပိတ္တာေတြကပိုျဖစ္ေတာ့ ႐ုံးသြား႐ံုးျပန္ဆို ဘတ္စကားေပၚမွာကိုပဲ ေတာ္ ေတာ္အခ်ိန္ကုန္သြားတယ္။ လမ္းမွာ တခ်ိဳ႕ႏွစ္မွတ္တိုင္ သုံးမွတ္တိုင္ ေနရာ ေတြေတာင္မွ လုိင္းကားစီးသြားရတာအေတာ္ၾကာတယ္။ လုိင္းကာေပၚမွာၾက ေတာ့လည္း အဆင္မေျပတာေတြကလည္း႐ွိတယ္။ ဘယ္လိုလဲ သူမ်ားနဲ႕ ေျပာ ဆုိဆက္ဆံရတာ အေၾကြကိစၥဘာညာနဲ႕။

အဲ့ဒါနဲ႕ စက္ဘီးကုိ ေ႐ြးလိုက္ေတာ့ ျပီးေတာ့ ကုိဇြဲျပည့္ကလည္း ဒီစက္ ဘီးစီးဖို႕ကုိ အားေပးေတာ့ အဲ့ဒါနဲ႕ လိုက္လုပ္ျဖစ္သြားတာ။ ႐ံုးသြား႐ံုးျပန္ စက္ ဘီးနဲ႕ သြားျဖစ္သြားတယ္။ အရင္ထက္အခ်ိန္ပုိသက္သာတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့အေသ နင္းရတယ္။ ကိုယ့္အခ်ိန္ကုိယ္ပုိင္တယ္လုိ႕ ခံစားရတယ္။ အရင္တုန္းကဆုိ သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြအိမ္လည္ျပီဆို ရွစ္နာရီေလာက္ဆိုျပန္ရျပီ။ စက္ဘီး၀ယ္ျပီးေတာ့ ဆယ္နာရီေလာက္မွျပန္ျဖစ္ေတာ့တယ္။ ကိုယ့္အားကိုကုိးျဖစ္သြားတယ္။ ျပီး ေတာ့ ဘတ္စကားစီးေနရာကေန စက္ဘီးစီးျဖစ္တဲ့အခါ အေတာ္လြတ္လပ္ တယ္လို႕ ခံစားရတယ္။ အဲ့လုိနဲ႕ စီးျဖစ္သြားတယ္ေပါ့။ တကယ္လို႕ တကၠသုိလ္ တက္တုန္းကသာ အဲ့စိတ္ကူးရခဲ့ရင္ ေက်ာင္းကို စက္ဘီးနဲ႕ပဲတက္တယ္။ အဲ့တုန္းက ကကားတုိးစီးခဲ့ရတတာ အရမ္းပင္ပန္းတယ္။

ဒါေပမယ့္ ရန္ကုန္မွာ စက္ဘီးစီးရတာ ခက္ခဲတဲ့အပုိင္းေလးေတြ႐ွိ တယ္။ စက္ဘီးစီးရတာ ကၽြန္ေတာ့္အတြက္ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ physically အရမခက္ ခဲဘူး။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္စီးႏုိင္တယ္ နင္းႏိုင္တယ္။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ တစ္နာရီခြဲေလာက္အထိ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ေအးေအးေဆးေဆးနင္းႏိုင္တယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ safety အတြက္ၾကေတာ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ့္အတြက္ ခက္ခဲတယ္။ safety ပုိင္းမွာ ကိုယ့္ကိုကိုယ္ စိတ္မခ်ဘူး။ အခု ဆို ဒီစက္ဘီးကုိ အိမ္ကို ျပန္မသယ္ဘဲနဲ႕ ႐ံုးမွာထားခဲ့တာေတာင္မွ တစ္ပတ္ေက်ာ္ ႏွစ္ပတ္ေလာက္႐ိွျပီ။ အဓိက အိမ္ကုိ ျပန္နင္းတဲ့လမ္းကုိ မနင္း တာၾကာလုိ႕ ကိုယ့္ကိုကုိယ္ confidence မရွိေတာ့ မနင္းျဖစ္ေတာ့ဘူး။ အဲ့လုိ ခက္ခဲတဲ့အပုိင္းကေတာ့ ကားေတြက မညွာတဲ့အပိုင္းက ေတာ္ေတာ္ခက္ခဲတယ္။

အိမ္ကေန ႐ံုးကို လာတဲ့ခရီးက လွမ္းလြန္းတယ္။ အဲ့အခါၾကေတာ့ နည္းနည္း ေစာေစာထျပီး ကားပဲစီးဖုိ႕ၾကိဳးစားေတာ့မယ္လို႕ေတြးထားတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ႐ံုးကေနျပီးေတာ့ ဆင္ကဲ့သြားလို႕ရတဲ့ေနရာေတြ ဥပမာ- ေျမနီကုန္း တို႕၊ ရန္ကင္းတုိ႕ သြားဖုိ႕အတြက္ ေစ်းေပါတဲ့စက္ဘီးတစ္စီးကို ႐ံုမွာအထုိင္ အျဖစ္၀ယ္ထားမယ္။ နဂို၀ယ္ျပီးသားစက္ဘီးကို အိမ္နဲ႕နီးတဲ့ ေျမာက္ဒဂံုတုိ႕ ေျခာက္ေကြ႕တို႕ အစ႐ိွတဲ့ေနရာေတြသြားမယ္။ ဘာလို႕ဆို စက္ဘီစီးရတာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ၾကိဳက္ေနျပီေလ။

The bike which my girl is riding now was bought on my 20th birthday. I am fond of him (his bike). I feel that it is fit to me. It also makes me feel classic. It can also be said that this bike was bought by my girlfriend. It was bought as a first belonging of me and my girlfriend.

At that day, we went to a lot of places by that bike. We headed to 8mile from Saw-Bwar-Gyi- Gone where we bought the bike. From 8mile, we biked to Yan Khin and then I biked to her home, yard of Ministry of Irrigation. From that, I biked continuously to North Okkalar where my home is. On that day, I had to bike in the rain as the rain fell. It is such a memorable day. I did not feel tired at all. It was our first happiness, our first belonging. On my record of biking, the duration that I biked on that day is the longest period.

There was a person in our North Okkalar township. He was an athlete. I do not remember his name exactly, I think it is Aung Naing Swe or Aung Swe Naing, may be one of them. He was into bikes, he biked very often. He imported expensive bikes. He was proud of his bikes saying that his bikes were cool and light. And he rode the bike with full dressing. I did not know the reason at that time. I thought that to wear this biking suit is funny and shameful. In case of swimming, it is not a problem to wear that sport shorts. It is suitable with its environment. But, when he rode the bike, wearing that short on the road, it was funny to look at him. I saw him as a shameful figure since his body is big. However, these days when I bike, I came to know that it is comfortable to bike with full dressing.

Ages ago, there was a mountain bike in our house. I got it on my 8th Grade. It was altered with women’s bike that we had at “Lantern Bazaar” by paying additional money. It was well- equipped; it made sound if it is touched and also extra-equipped not to get stolen. I used to go to school by that bike. As it was not comfortable to bike with longyi, I used to wear short on the way and changed the dress when I arrived school. On the way to home, I put on the brakes and used to make the slip on the pile of sand and dust. When I went to private boarder on my 11th Grade, I did not bike at all. As it was not used for a long time, the bike could not be ridden, it needed to be repaired. Then, I did not repair and gave it away to a cousin’s friend who could not afford to buy a bike. His father could repair bikes as he rode trishaw. So I gave it to him.

I did not bike since I completed my Grade eleven. I forgot to bike. The thought to bike came to my mind when I started working. It is because I have to go to Tar Mwe as I live in North Okkalar. Also it is because of severe traffic jam due to construction of footbridge, it made me wasted my time on the bus to and from the work. Sometimes, it takes a long time to go to a place which is far only for three or two bus-stops. Furthermore, there are issues on the bus such as to communicate with others, to get the change from the spare drivers.

That is why I chose the bike. And Ko Zwe Pyae also encouraged me to bike. So I turn out to bike. I bike to and from my work. It save the time but I have to put a lot of effort to bike. The

A talk with a boy who received bike as a present from his girlfriend on his 20th

birthday

advantage is I feel that I own my time. Previously, I had to go to home around 8pm when I visited my friends’ places. After buying bike, I go back home around 10pm. I become more independent and self-reliant. In other aspects, I feel free since I change to bike from taking the buses. After that, I bike usually. If I had that thought to bike when I was in university, I might bike since then. It was very tiring to take the buses and squeeze into the crowd. Despite, there is also difficulty to bike in Yangon.

For me, it is not difficult physically, I can ride, I can put effort to ride. I can bike for an hour and a half calmly. However, the safety is an issue for me. I do not feel secure when I am biking. It is such a long distance from my home to the office. These days, it is been a week that I left the bike at the office without biking to home. The main concern is that I lose my confidence to bike as I have not biked to the way home for a long time and that provokes me to stop biking. The difficulty is also because the cars do not give the place to the bikes on the road and do not cooperate with the bikers. That makes me think that I have to get up a bit earlier and try to take the buses to work. Anyhow, I thought to buy a cheap bike and keep it at my office to go to places where are convenient to bike from my office’s location such as Myay-Ni-Gone, Yan Kin. With the bike I have got now, I will go to closed places from my house such as Chauk-Gwe, North Dagon. That is because I love to bike now.


Aung 23rd, February 2016

Translated by Thu Zar