Buckets of Rain...

Megh peon er bag-er bhetor monkharaper deesta…

(The cloud postman’s bag is full of sad papers…)

This was what I was listening to when it finally rained today. Life loves a laugh.

Rains are very good storytellers.

They tell me very old stories of running around in uniform around the school field. I feel a weird tingle of joy rush up to my head that makes me want to keep turning in giddy circles. I feel the wetness of the thin white cloth on my back as the air fills up with screams of giggly, running school girls who were in too much of a hurry to grow up.

At times, they tell me of a boy and a girl sitting at a bus stop. The lanes in my head fill up with roadside puddles as the girl’s sandals get muddy with the muck reckless taxis splash on her feet. For those twenty minutes it doesn’t matter that her feet turn a dirty shade of brown, or that they don’t have money for a cab. The boy rummages through his pocket and takes out a soggy handkerchief and the girl smiles and refuses to wipe her feet with it. He probably decides that when he grows up he’d make sure that this girl never has to take a cab, or wait for buses with dirty wet feet. Water droplets run down their hair but for those twenty minutes, it didn’t matter that they’d catch a cold or that their bus had broken down somewhere in its route-far away from their muddy potholed bus stop.

I hear of a woman who remembered how her husband used to silently wipe a tear in movie halls, how he sniffed at some music. Maybe it rained one of those afternoons when the vinyl screen flickered and he sniffed silently so that she wouldn’t know, and when she stole a look at him sniffing and faintly smiled to herself. Maybe it got very difficult to get a cab back home that evening.

Rains always paint me a watercolour of a very old story-hurriedly scribbled and hidden away in some moth-eaten, dog eared diary. Rains make me wish that they weren’t in so much of a hurry to grow up.