We saw it – but we didn’t believe it. We drove up close, got down and stared at him. It was real. We still didn’t believe it. Ratan Biswas had five bamboos, each 40-45 feet in length, balanced on and tied to his bicycle. And he was pushing his load along the road to the market in Agartala, Tripura’s capital, 17 kilometres from his village. If the extended ends of the bamboos so much as touched a single stone, bump or any other object, cycle, owner and bamboos would come down. Rather painfully. Bamboos have a trait that makes them look much lighter than they really are. The five bamboos looked like four since two were so closely tied together, they seemed to merge into one. Together, these five weighed around 200 kilograms. Biswas knew this. He was happy to talk to us and let us photograph his crazy cargo. Not so keen to let us try moving it ourselves. He knew the odds.

How the heck do you balance that weight, we ask – and those incredibly long bamboos – on a bicycle that is barely five feet in length? He smiles and shows us the wooden planks, themselves of bamboo. He’s got two vertical ones towards the front of the bike. These are tied at the bottom to one of the angled bars of the bike and come up on either side of the horizontal bar, where they’re again tied together. He’s also got another plank, also of bamboo, tied horizontally on the bike’s carrier.