Monsoon Memories

  It was getting pretty dark and cloudy outside. At the fag end of another hectic, mad day in my office, the thought of going drenched in the rain back home, walking that muddy stretch from company gate to the main road, and fighting World War –III with the kind and large-hearted auto guys of Bangalore  who would turn especially magnanimous with another reason to add,  with the rain, was itself further demotivating .What a grand finale to another glorious weekday!!

Maybe it was not that bad too, for I managed to get a lift back home with my colleague. On the way back home, among several other topics , the “rains” also came into the discussion. It is just mid-April, monsoons are a long way to come, somebody remarked. And pat came the reply, ”well these are called the “pre-monsooon showers”. I just wondered, we have come to that stage , where we have this fancy of giving a name to anything and everything happening around us. Be it “tension headaches” or “quarter-life crisis”, name the phenomenon, and there we have a name!! Riding through all such names and news , I somehow managed to rush home and escaped the rains.

In another hour’s time, it was pouring heavily, but nicely. It was not that heavy sounding rain, but the one which just managed to fall down so easily and calmly. I felt a cool within the house and just peeped through the window to watch the reddish dark sky and the silently falling showers. I don’t know if it is my personal feeling, or maybe many of us share, “rain” always had this beautiful magnetic power which drew me close to it..I went out into the small balcony in front of my flat to feel the rains. I have always felt, rain is like a mirror , it reflects your mood, your feelings at that point of  time. When I’m happy and feeling good, I feel like the down pour is celebrating my joy like a little kid jumping with joy splashing water. When I’m sad, and look at it, I feel as if it is crying along with me, for me…

As I got drenched a little from my balcony , it opened a casket of good old memories, of the monsoons in my native ( Kerala ), in my childhood.. Kerala as it is, is famed for the first rains of the year..it was always special out there. Monsoons was always deeply entwined with the warm memories of my school days as it always coincided with schools re-opening after the long summer vacations. I still vividly remember my mom repeating with an impish smile every year , as to how the rain was a villain soaking our newly stitched school uniforms on the very first day of  school. And she was right most of my school years also!! As the school days progressed , the rains witnessed new friendships  , the little anxieties of examinations, new teachers, new lessons, the new class rooms..

The image of the vast playground with muddy water in it while it rained and how we carried those colourful umbrellas excitedly , still is so fresh in my mind. How well I remember those rainy mornings when I was so glad to have an excuse for not wearing socks and shoes, which otherwise would have invited the wrath of the strict nuns of my Convent school..The morning assembly would be cancelled, and we used to cluster into the dark classrooms and sing hurriedly those hymns, watching the heavy rains outside.

As time flew, and I grew up, through my school and college days,and into the frantically busy, mechanised life of a professional, the nature of the monsoons and their timing was greatly altered, with all those alarming facts of climate change and stuff.  However what never seemed to change , was that spark of thought ignited in my mind, with that first drop of rain that fell on me, everytime. Just as today, when I am totally in a different space, a different land, with a much confused mind, still these rains managed to drench me in the sweet downpour of the memories of those good old days..the nostalgic monsoon memories soaked me absolutely…

Hridya