A rainy day

Some geography text books talk about the whole thing starting with the sun burning and heating up a pathetic little planet a few gazillion stone throws away and making low pressure areas in some miserable parts of it that cause winds near the equator to get disoriented and head towards these places and empty up over there. No matter how many hellfires burn the sun, it cannot keep the earth like one big Sahara. If it had any shame, it would have gone nova and then become nothing and everything at once. The resulting nothingness and everythingness would suck worse than earth, because nothing in the known universe can suck like black holes, and the whole thing would end in a respectable manner. Instead, it persists in coaxing them little vapours of the good old water upwards and creating woolly and senseless things called clouds.

Even the bloody silver lining is only lightning. And then the usual stuff happens. The wonderful black clouds awake the parched earth by sprinkling water on it. Everything turns beautiful at once. The peacocks begin their monsoon dance; the birds start serenading the smell of moist soil…you get the idea. They miss out on all the people cursing… cursing because they forgot an umbrella, cursing because the stupid umbrella won’t open, when they remembered to lug it along, and cursing because when it does open, after taking a finger or two with it, it cannot keep them dry anyway. 

I cursed along with them on such a rainy day. It started as innocently as usual. Ever heard of something like the final feather breaking the camel’s back? An exact parallel to me and my school bag (hey English fanatics, my bag and I is downright stupid here OK?). Why bother risking the straps tearing off by pushing the umbrella into my already overloaded misshapen piece of synthetic something that passes of as my schoolbag… and moreover, only cirrus clouds were in the sky. That means rain-free clear and bright sunny weather ahead. When Mother Nature is not in the mood to play around with our wretched lives that is. I had almost reached the bus stop when it began to drizzle. I looked up at the blanket of nimbostratus that had crept in. Guess what that means? You are wrong – it was just drizzling… amazingly. The whole beauty of a rainy day registered within me for what seemed like a millisecond, when the Almighty took my picture. The thunder reached me a few seconds after the lightning. The clouds began to gather and get darker. Mother Nature was in for a treat.

I frowned. Another picture was taken. After that, it would have been better if it had just rained felines and canines. I ran the remaining distance to the bust stop and joined the surprisingly large queue. When the bus came, it never stopped at the bust stop. It just continued on its way. I ran behind it and started banging on its side, when the driver finally halted the bus. The conductor was polite enough and chided me on something like coming in front and standing. He wanted me to have somehow realised that all those people in the bus stop were just -taking shelter from the rain. The driver, knowing this, had not stopped till I did a Shivamani on his bus. I cursed at them like anything, and prayed to God, that it would rain for a couple of more millennia so that they would be stuck in that stupid bus stop forever. I immediately wished that I hadn’t. 

That’s because my prayers were answered. I endured the rain in the bus. Where the window would refuse to close, not surprising if one notes the fact that the window catch was rusted. Through the open window, I looked at all those people caught in the open, struggling to stay dry, and hopelessly failing. A couple on a scooter had got down and were putting on a raincoat. Now that’s one of mankind’s innovations that is almost as frustrating as the umbrella. It seems the buttons, hooks, zips, and whatever those Velcro-based fasteners are called worked only in dry weather. People were huddling under shops, where the collected water on the shop roofs would fall at once on top of their heads. And just when a few people were safe and dry at a nice cosy bus stop, the bus came along and splashed muddy water all over them.

Then came the train phase, I would have been more or less as dry as I was if it weren’t for the masses of people coming along and sitting beside me and shaking all the water onto their co-passengers. Felt like most of it came on me. It was as wet inside the compartment, as it was outside. The rain had somehow found its way through a crack in the closed window. I was wet, depressed, wet, dirty, wet and did I mention? – wet. I survived college – seems I started a new kind of hairstyle or something. Foiled the rain by managing not to get any wetter on the way back, as I was already 102% water no matter what the science textbooks say. Came home, cleaned and dried myself, and let myself fall on the bed. This was how I liked a rainy day, form the inside. I decided to look at the beauty of it all, and I should have known that something would go wrong. The rains stopped. Immediately. Completely. Totally. Not a single infernal drop of the heavenly h2o. Ironically it was then that the birds started singing… I think in relief.

-Aditya MJ