It is not often that you get a chance to explore your city on a bicycle at 2’o clock in the night, especially when you are living with your family and assuming that you don’t lie to them regarding your whereabouts.

But yesterday, 3 of my friends along with me decided to do the unthinkable. The biggest impediment though was how to arrange for 4 bicycles at that point of time, considering that we all had given up the habit of possessing the same since our IIT days.

It is said when the going gets tough, the tough gets going and so did Birju who made every possible effort that he could to arrange for the bicycles, which seemed to have been the most luxurious of vehicles that all four of us would have loved to have that very moment. And at last he succeeded.

And there we were riding our bicycles on the famous streets of Lucknow which appeared much wider and broader than what they look like during the daytime because of the traffic that tend to demean the very character of the broad roads during daytime.

With no plans as such in our minds, we just rode our bicycles to every nook and corner of the city, some known to us and some totally unknown and unexplored, taking short breaks at times to fulfill our appetite with a kulhad of tea accompanied by a well baked band-makkhan and at times to pose for a photograph on the weirdest of locations. 

As if this was not enough and as if we wanted to relive the college days once more, we decided to bring some happiness to the faces of a couple of our batch mates who had by then already hit the bed and were sound asleep in their respective houses.

We rode all the way from Hazratganj to Gomtinagar, which is around 8-9 km in distance in order to bring some excitement into the life of a person who had been too busy for the past couple of days by any stretch of imagination. 

One thing that we all can do and take great pride in doing is to take at least some amount of liberty when it comes to playing pranks with our batch mates and friends or when it comes to willingly or unwillingly include someone close to us in our ad hoc plans.

And the good thing is that our friends or batch mates never ever seem to play spoil sport, instead are more than happy to join the brigade, if not in reality but definitely on paper 😉 as if replicating the policy implementation measures taken by our government at times.

After having a wonderfully prepared tea with a couple of biscuits at a 24-hour tea stall, we all decided to play dumb charades with Naidu offering himself voluntarily to become the soft target for all of us when it came to giving Bollywood movies to a guy who, considering that he belongs to Hyderabad and expecting him to flounder on every occasion, did a wonderful job of making each one of us burst into laughter.

The time flew by and we could hear the birds chirping amidst the cold and foggy morning. It was already 7 a.m. and we all decided that it was time to head back to our respective nests , where we knew that we were in for a bombardment of questions from our respective family members.

As Saty drove on his scooter with me sitting on the backseat, the vivid scenes from the night that had just gone by, flashed in front of my eyes and I could see Birju dancing to the tunes of Rang De Basanti, I could see Naidu going nuts with his explanation for the movies and I could see Saty chipping in with his witty and hilarious remarks.

It is said that nothing lasts forever, but one thing that stays with you are the moments and the memories that you tend to cherish even when it’s long gone by and this night will find its place right up there amongst the wonderful nights that I have had the fortune of experiencing in my entire lifetime ;).

Source for Image: http://blametheblogger.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/a-fun-night-in/