We were happy to walk, but having had a good time we wanted to be nice to the rickshaw pullers for whom it could be a last bit of custom before ending the day if we chose to take a rickshaw ride home. I never could decide which was nicer, the walk or doing a good turn to the rickshaw pullers.
When I got married and spent the odd night at my in-laws in Jadavpur in the suburbs, I had no two opinions about the cycle rickshaws there. They were an unalloyed evil. You couldn't walk the short distance to the main road without almost being hit by swerving rickshaws.
It was less tense to hire one of them, but it seemed ridiculous to take a rickshaw for such a short distance, and those cycle rickshaw-walas didn't arouse sympathy like the rickshaw pullers did when we were young.
You couldn't walk because there were too many cycle rickshaws and too few people wanted to walk even short distances. On the other hand, today in central Kolkata, rickshaws have been banished from most streets.
I don't miss them as such and realise they should have gone long ago, but I do miss the sound of those bells which had been so well tuned despite the next to nothing that the rickshaw pullers must have paid for them.
Walking in Kolkata has steadily become more and more difficult, with only a brief interlude around a decade ago when hawkers were banished from the major south Kolkata thoroughfares.
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After decades I was again able to walk all the way from Bhowanipur to Gariahat taking in the buildings and shops which made a tram ride down that road such fun when I was a youngster.
The great thing about this walk was that if you felt tired at any point, you could get onto a tram or bus for the rest of the journey. The hawkers are back and you can barely walk down the pavements.
The nicest walks that you can take in almost any Indian city are, of course, in New Delhi. I have done the stretch from Nizamuddin to Lodi Gardens even in the height of summer because I know at the end of the road, there are the gardens where the temperature drops immediately and the green is balm to the soul.
I have also, on the spur of the moment one early evening, walked from the French embassy in Chanakya Puri to Rafi Marg and then replenished the water the system had lost through beer downed at the Press Club.
Almost any stretch in New Delhi is a walker's paradise but it is difficult to hop onto public transport if you should feel tired before time.
Bangalore is not hostile to walking as such, but you have to do it at any one of its many lovely parks, not on its roads. Like all unplanned cities, there is hardly any pavement space to walk in most of Bangalore, but what makes things worse is the drains by the roadside.
Sure they are covered, but mostly by unevenly laid granite slabs which tend to break and collapse in places. Lately an attempt has been made to replace them with standard-sized concrete slabs. These have made for a more even surface but some of them have also fairly quickly collapsed, taking you back to square one.
Walking was taken in the stride by most of middle class India until the Maruti 800 came and cities began to burst at the seams. The final blow was delivered by the new prosperity of the last decade.
Today you walk only if you are retired or diabetic or a freak who likes to walk, or a combination of these. But as aspirational India has sought to arrive by car, the rest of the world has moved on.
Increasingly, all over the world, people are walking more and more, not because they are too poor to take a bus but because it is good for them and planet earth.
Most Indian cities have large nullahs running through them, carrying drain water as well as sewerage. Next to these have grown slums and repositories of filth.
If you grade cities by such filthy nullahs, Bangalore comes quite high on the list, the pride of place going to Chennai which stinks if rain does not wash away you know what. An unnecessary difference of opinion persists on whether it is better to cover up the nullahs or take the sewerage out of them.
The most practical solution seems to be man-sized concrete sewers which can be physically cleaned if needed, with the top covered by good earth and grass and made into space for walking, jogging and cycling, lined by shrubs and hedges.
And out of deference to a few eccentrics, you can have rickshaw pullers' bells hung from slightly ornate lamp posts, tinkling in the wind and reminiscent of bygone times.