A quintessential Monday morning, the phone's mechanism trying to wake me up with its ascending decibels reached my ears when it was half through. After two days of being in bliss Monday is perhaps the day you wake up from the best dream of the week, at times it is like literally pulling you out of a dream that you wanted to last for a lifetime and that’s the reason why most of us mourn about it all day; the reason behind the blues. Exactly my state when my eyes were half open searching for the phone. The digital display said it is quarter past 6, my god, already, and a message waiting at the inbox. Good night text sent by a buddy at 2 am. Understandable!
At 7 am packed my bag and left home to catch the office bus. A 5 min walk from where I live. It started drizzling the moment I reached the bus stand. Had to wait there for few more minutes for the office bus, they usually don't come on time, either early or late but never on time. I don't think I'm an incessant complainer, they are not on time is a fact that could pester anybody so why not me?
When it rains, when the skin is cold when the things around you look water washed and the leaves that appear with extra pigments you tend to enjoy it a bit and start to give an extra look irrespective of the complaints you have, everyone becomes an observer at that point. At the end of the platform there was a boy awaiting his school bus, a gang of college students pushing their fellow mate in a small pond and an old man protecting his bald head with a polythene cover rushing home with a milk bag in his hand. Sort of regular happenings you could see in a bus stand on a rainy day. My bus arrived and as always enough empty seats to occupy a window seat.
I love getting drenched in rain but I hate it to the core when it abandons a cricket match or when I’m stuck up in a heavy traffic or the 'kolak-bolak' in the shoes that often the Chennai roads offer for every brief pouring. But the joy of hearing the thunders, seeing the lightning in the dark sky, the sound of rain hitting the ground with full force and the aroma it produces when it blends with the soil initially could never be appalling.
An hour to go to office, I was not interested to plug-in the headphones and bang my head rather I was completely glued on to the early morning scenes, kinda lost somewhere in the nostalgias. The drizzle then transformed into a heavy rain, I closed the seat window but my mind remained open. The memories that were travelling faster the velocity of light from somewhere covered me completely.
Those were my school days where rain on a weekday is the happiest happening on earth. Dad usually asks me to take leave when it rains. That too when a cricket match is going on and dad asking you to bunk classes, nothing can better it. Certain days I even wondered whether it is possible to go few feet above the ground level and start pouring water around my house from a filter until my dad is convinced. I wished there was a possibility for that!
I was not a pampered child or the one that was monitored all the time by parents. I’m usually not asked questions, never in fact. I always had the liberty to do all I want and do them the way I want. Perhaps, the reason behind how I created a fascinating bond with rain, when most of the kids hid away from it, I enjoyed every drop of it.
College days monsoon is a package of memories, the cricket match we played where we the batting team urged to score the runs before it could get heavy and how much hurt we were when it denied us an easy victory, the footboard heroics that our college mates do with enormous skill in the slippery bus steps, the way it acted as a savior to postpone a semester exam which could have easily been an arrear were cruising along.
Few minutes later, the bus stopped at a Tollgate. The viper was in full swing and it somehow resembled most of us sitting inside with every 180, doing the same work over and over again. I looked around if there’s someone who was lost in the memories or creating one; to my surprise about half the crowd was talking on the phone in nil volume, hard to understand how they are actually converted to 0s and 1s when there is absolutely no data. Few of them were lucky enough to continue their dream of life and very few were looking here and there like me. I couldn’t guess what was going on their mind, if only they could write a blog on that.
8 AM, wondered if we got into a river by chance, the stagnant water made our bus look like a boat and every driver became a captain without training. We sailed for the next 15 minutes and there we entered the destination. Rain stopped right then and yet another week started all over again.
Have a great week folks.
