Why did Ravi miss the bus?

The bus to the exam centre was supposed to leave at seven. Ravi reached the stop at five to seven, just in time to see it turning the corner at the far end of the road. The conductor, it turned out, had decided that morning to leave early.

For a minute he simply stood there, doing the arithmetic of disaster. The centre was eleven kilometres away. The exam began at nine. His father had taken the scooter to the market before dawn.

It was Mrs Kulkarni, who ran the tailoring shop beside the stop, who solved it. She did not ask a single question. She walked to the back of her shop, wheeled out a heavy black bicycle with a basket on the front, and held it out to him. "It was my husband's," she said. "Nobody has ridden it for two years, so do not expect it to be fast."

It was not fast. The chain complained on every slope, and the seat had been set for a much taller man. But it moved, and Ravi reached the gate at twenty to nine, damp with sweat and grinning like a fool.

That evening he brought the bicycle back, cleaned, with its chain oiled and its seat lowered. Mrs Kulkarni looked at it for a long moment. Then she said that she might start riding it herself.