I was born in a two-room house behind the tehsil office in Gorakhpur, on a night my mother swore the electricity failed twice, so the midwife worked by lantern light. There is no certificate of it, only her telling, and she told it the same way for fifty years. My father repaired cycles. He could true a wheel by sound alone, spinning it with one finger and listening for the spoke that sang wrong.

A neem tree stood in the courtyard, and in summer the whole family carried their cots out and slept beneath it, counting the same stars every night. My first memory is a sound and a smell arriving together: the hand pump creaking at dawn as my mother filled the brass pots, and the kerosene stove catching with its small blue cough. Even now, when I pass a stove like that, I am four years old for a moment.

My mother cooked, always, and on Sundays she made litti chokha over dung-cake fire so that the whole lane knew what the Vermas were eating. But if you ask what I loved most, it was her aloo ka parantha with white butter from the dairy near the station, the butter going into the cracks before I could catch it. We did not have much. I never once felt hungry, which I have since learned is a different thing, and I only understood the difference when I had children of my own.

We had no toys, so at eleven I built a bicycle. The frame came from one wreck behind the shop and the wheels from two others, which is why it always pulled a little to the left, as though it wanted the river. It took me four months. When it was finished my father said nothing at all. He crouched, squeezed the brakes twice, straightened, and said one word: go. I rode eleven kilometres to the Rapti and came home after dark and was beaten for it. I have never owned anything since that felt so much like mine.

Holi, without question, because it was the one day in the year my father shut the shop. He came home with his hands still smelling of oil and let us cover his face in colour, laughing in a way he did not laugh on the other three hundred and sixty-four days. One year I reached into the wrong tin and smeared my brother's cheek with axle grease instead of gulal. My mother scrubbed him for an hour by the pump while he howled. He is seventy now and tells it at every wedding, and it gets worse each time.

My father taught me that a man's cycle is his livelihood, and that a rickshaw puller with a broken wheel has a family who will not eat that night. So you fix it first and take the money afterwards. Often the afterwards never came. He would shrug and say the account was being kept somewhere else. I thought that was a poor man's excuse for being cheated. Forty years on, having been cheated and having been kind in roughly equal measure, I think he was simply right, and I think he knew it would take me forty years.

There is a spanner in my drawer, a number fifteen, with the steel worn to a shine where my father's thumb rested on it for thirty years. When he died I took nothing else from the shop. I take it out sometimes and fit my thumb into the hollow his thumb made, and for a moment the two of us are holding the same tool.

My first job was not a job at all. I was fourteen when my father put his hand into a moving chain and could not work for three months, so I opened the shop myself at six every morning and sat there. For a week nobody came. Who hands his livelihood to a boy. Then Sharma ji's rickshaw threw its chain outside our door at seven in the morning and there was nowhere else open in that hour. I fixed it in twenty minutes with my heart going like a bird. The next morning there were three cycles waiting, and one of them had come from the next mohalla.

That same year, and not on the day I first earned. It was the evening I told my mother there was enough for the month, and watched her decide to believe me. She did not check. She simply put the tin back on the shelf and asked what I wanted to eat. I was fourteen. Once someone has believed you like that you cannot go back to being a child, however much you might later want to.

In 1983 they opened Station Road for a drain and left it open for nine months, and a cycle shop on a road nobody can reach is a room full of tools. We ate rice and salt on more days than I care to count, and I am not ashamed to say so. Kamla sold the gold bangles her mother had given her and never told me; I learned it from the jeweller years afterwards, when I had gone in about something else entirely and he said, casually, that he still had them. In 1991, the year the shop finally did well, I went and bought them back. She wore them to Neha's convocation and said nothing about it. Neither did I. We are not a family that says such things out loud.

In those nine months it was the rickshaw pullers who carried us, and they did it without once letting me see it as charity. They began coming the long way round, through the mandi, twenty minutes out of their own earning day, so that their cycles were repaired at my shop and not at the one on the open road. Not one man ever said that he was helping me. They complained about the price, as always. That was how I knew.

It was arranged, as everything was in 1974. I saw Kamla once before the wedding, for five minutes, in her uncle's front room in Deoria, with eleven relatives watching us not look at each other. She kept her eyes on the floor. Then she looked up, once, quickly, and I remember thinking with complete clarity: this one will manage me. She has, for fifty-one years, and I have never once wished otherwise.

She counts money twice. Always twice, even ten rupees: the first time in silence, the second time with her lips moving, as though the notes might have changed their mind in between. For fifty years I have watched her do it, and for the first twenty of them it irritated me beyond words. Now, if she ever counted only once, I would put my hand on her forehead and send for the doctor.

I was seventeen in 1969, and Sharma ji owned the only radio on the lane. That night it said that men had walked on the moon, and the whole gali came and stood outside his shop in the dark to hear it repeated. I had run out still holding a wheel, and I remember the weight of it in my hand while I looked up. The moon was exactly the moon. Same size, same marks, no different from any night of my life, and somebody was standing on it. I did not sleep at all. After that my one dream was smaller and much harder: to see the sea. I saw it in 1994, at Puri, with Kamla beside me. I cried, and told her it was the wind.

When Neha was born I was at the shop and a boy came running down Station Road shouting my name. I pulled the shutter down without locking it, which I had never done in my life, and ran the whole way. When they put her in my arms, so small that my one hand covered her back entirely, a single thought arrived and stayed: I will have to become a better man now. Fixing cycles will not be enough. That night I did not sleep. I kept leaning over to check that she was still breathing, and she was, every time.

In 1996 Neha was nineteen and a proposal came that everyone agreed was excellent: a good family, honourable people, willing to do everything properly. Kamla's brother sat in my house and said what everybody says, that at nineteen a girl should be settled. But Neha had stood first in the district in mathematics, and I had watched her do it at the same table where I did the shop's accounts. I said no. Saying no to strangers is nothing. It is saying no to your own family, in your own front room, that costs you, and it cost me two years of a certain kind of silence on that street. I sold my father's second shop, the small one near the mandi, to pay the fees at Lucknow. She is an engineer now. She builds bridges. Not drawings of bridges: bridges. The one at Bansi that everybody drives over without thinking, she made that. I have stood underneath it twice.

People expect me to say money, or the certificate the district gave me in 1996 for best small trader, which is in a frame my wife dusts and I do not look at. The real one was quieter. On the day I shut the shop for the last time the rickshaw pullers of Station Road came together, forty of them, men whose wheels I had straightened for thirty years, and put a shawl around my shoulders. Nobody made a speech. Somebody at the back said the price was too high, and everybody laughed, and that was the whole ceremony. The shawl is folded in my cupboard, and I have told Kamla it goes with me when I go.

That in thirty-two years not one man ever came back to say: Ramesh, your repair failed. Perhaps some of them were being kind. But I have known rickshaw pullers all my life, and about their cycles they are not kind.

Two things, and the second one cost me more. Fix it first and take the money afterwards. I learned that from my father, who learned it from the road. And when every single person in the room agrees about what should happen to a girl's life, go and ask the girl. The room is very rarely wrong about small matters and very often wrong about that one. Aarav, Myra, listen to your Dada once. When a thing is broken, somebody's whole life is standing still beside it. Fix the thing. The account is kept somewhere else.

As a man who fixed things. Not a great man: things simply came to him broken and left him working. And, underneath, one more line — that his daughter builds bridges. If those two lines are there, it is enough, and both of them are true.