Rain

It just wouldn’t stop pouring that day. 

Sam was sitting on his bed, looking out the window, all dressed up, ready to go to his best friend Rishi’s birthday party. He was waiting excitedly in anticipation all week; the cake, the candles, the gifts wrapped in printed glaze, the piñata filled with goodies, the pointy party hats that kept slipping off the tiny joyful heads. He wished he was invited to someone’s birthday party every single day, such that life would be one endless game of hide and seek, giggling with friends and dancing in circles. He looked down at the street below, but could see no gravel. It seemed like a meandering river of muck flowing by the houses, eroding the corners and laboriously sweeping away all the tattered bags of plastic that people had dumped by the roadside with élan. Men with trousers rolled up to their knees, balancing overstuffed grocery bags in both hands, waded through swirling pools of rainwater, cautiously, feeling every patch of ground with their toes in the effort to avoid being sucked into gaping manholes. Lonely slippers made their way past a sea of bobbing black umbrellas, aimlessly searching for their barefoot owners. A bedraggled crow landed on the window sill for shelter. It was shivering. Sam’s heart went out to that poor wet scavenger. He held out his hand to the bird in a gesture to usher it into his room. Frightened by this inexplicable movement, it flapped its dripping wings and flew away, turning its head and cawing querulously. Sam wondered why the bird was so cautious. He had only intended to help the homeless creature. He sighed and instead focused his attention on a Carpenter ant, crawling its way up a water filled crevice on one side, slipping back every time, but refusing to accept defeat.

Sam heard his mother step into the room. He thought it was time to leave for Rishi’s house. With excitement brimming in his voice he asked, “Ma, are we leaving now?” “I don’t think we can Sam. It’s raining too heavily.”  Sam didn’t understand how something as beautiful as the rain could be a reason for not attending his friend’s birthday celebrations. He stared at his mother blankly. “Sam, have you seen the state of the road below? It’s flooded and your father told me that the traffic situation today would make it impossible to go anywhere. I’m sorry honey, but we just cannot go today. I’ll give Rishi’s mother a call and tell her that we can’t make it.” Sam kept staring at his mother. He couldn’t believe how she could just walk in and say no to something he was looking forward to for days – all in that cold impassive voice. Tears welled up in his ten year old eyes, until all he could see of his mother was a quivering blurry outline. Fat saline drops began rolling down his flushed cheeks. It felt like he couldn’t breathe anymore. He turned his face away.

Sam’s mother tried her best to explain the situation to him. But Sam was but a child, and what made perfect sense to her meant nothing to him. She tried bribing him with future promises of chocolates after school and brand new boxes of crayons. But the tears of disappointment just wouldn’t stop. They kept rolling down his face, one after the other, and made a little pool of their own in the hollow of his knees. It broke his mother’s heart. She finally relented and said she’d try and convince his father to drive them there. Sam leant forward and hugged his mom with one hand, crossing his fingers with the other.

An hour later Sam found himself bundled up at the back of his father’s car. He was humming a jolly tune. You couldn’t tell that it was the same kid who was bawling his heart out not so long ago. He paid no attention to his father, cursing the roads ahead and his mother for forcing such a ridiculous decision on him because of a crying child. “Kids cry, Anu. There’s a reason why they’re called kids.” She didn’t say a word. She merely looked back at Sam and seeing his radiant face knew that she had made the right choice. “I love you pumpkin,” she said. Sam was busy drawing boats on the frosty screen. “I know,” he said distractedly. ..

Everything happened in a flash. Sam found himself lying by the curb, his new yellow shirt, now soiled with all the muck. He saw a few men run towards him. They were asking him a ton of questions. “Are you hurt?” “Can you feel your legs?” “Where do you live?” He knew the answer to all those questions, but the obvious now baffled him. He looked beyond to see a silver car in the distance. His father’s car. People were flocking towards it from all sides, like bees to honey. He spotted his father amidst the crowd. He was holding his kerchief to his head. It turned red in a second. Was that blood? He couldn’t understand how he had landed on the road, robbed off the comfort of the backseat. He remembered a brilliant and unexpected flash of light, a grinding vibration that shook his bones and a clanging of shattering glass. Where’s Ma?

The hospital was a weird place. Everything in there was an unblemished white and it smelt distinctly of moth balls. People were sitting in straight back chairs, hard and uncomfortable, catching up on their night’s sleep. The overshadowing stubble on their faces said they hadn’t had a bath in days. Sam loved his things to be clean. He wrinkled his nose slightly at the sight of the waiting visitors. He looked up at his dad. He had a band of gauze round his head, its corner still red. His face looked gaunter than ever. It felt like he was holding the hand of a stranger; cold, firm and sweaty. He wanted to ask him where his mother was, why she hadn’t come to him yet to tell him how things will all be okay. But he held back. His father told him to sit down and wait for him and not wander off anywhere. He said he had some work to do. Sam obliged willingly. Those were the first words he heard from his dad in three days. Somewhere behind all that fatigue, he could hear a familiar voice. He smiled a shallow smile.

He sat there for what seemed like eons. He was getting bored staring at the white plaster walls. Impatience made him tap his fingers on the chair handle; a pattern he reinvented every few minutes just to break the monotone. He saw a lady in the distance all dressed in white. She had a trapezoid hat perched at an angle on her head, which made it look bigger than it actually was. It gave her a strange alien-like look. He couldn’t see even a strand of hair sticking out from underneath. They were all in place; neatly pinned, tucked under the hat. She was strutting down the corridor, an unwelcome air of arrogance about her. Sam imagined her with a red pom-pom perched on her lofty nose. She’d make the perfect clown, he thought. He let out an audible giggle. The haggard man sleeping next to him grunted in disapproval.

Sam saw his dad walking towards him. He was excited at the prospect of going home and finally escaping this dreary monotone. He still couldn’t see his mom though. “Where’s Ma?” he finally asked him. “Let’s go home,” he said. His father hardly looked at him, his hand still cold and sweaty…

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It just wouldn’t stop pouring that day. Sam was at home with his dad, alone. It had been six months since the accident, the day he last saw his mother. They hadn’t spoken about it since. Not one word. In fact, he could almost count the number of words his dad said to him in the past months. Those that did escape him were either functional or meant as a reprimand. He remembered how the house resonated with laughter once, when dinners were filled with animated conversation about the mundane. Now it’s only about food, often cold and wanting salt. He hadn’t made paper boats since that fateful day, but today he wanted to. He rushed upstairs to his room, tore out a ruled page from his notebook in one swift motion and folded it neatly, sharpening the edges with his fingers. His boat looked perfect. In fact it was his first perfect boat that required no help. He filled up a tub in the bathroom and let it sail, as if nothing had happened. An unexpected tear escaped him and spilled into the tub; the ripples rocking the boat slightly, egging it on. The tears kept coming. An endless stream. A final release. I love you too mom, he said.

The boat went on in circles.

Dark... darker...

They say drugs are a poor man's escape from poverty and a rich man's escape from abundance. For Mrin it was an escape too, from her nightmares. 

The nightmares started when she had barely turned a teenager. They were always different and yet every night she would wake up with the same terror. She would wake up wanting to scream her lungs out and thrash around in her bed. But she never could. It was as if a hand would choke her mouth and hold her down. Not that if she did shout anyone would hear, unless she was very very loud. Because by the time she was 10, she had moved on to a room on the roof. Her mother had given birth to twins and they needed her spacious  room. 

The drugs started when she was 17. Her step sister, Meera, was on the roof at 2 am one night, smoking. Mrin had seen her smoke on countless occasions over the last many years when she would wake up with a start in the middle of the night shivering after a nightmare. The glowing stick being held by her silhouette framed against the street light brought her a sense of comfort. But it was a few months after she had turned 17 that she finally gathered the courage and walked out to meet her. Her sister looked back at her, her beautiful brown eyes glinting with reflected light from the street lamp. She offered Mrin the rolled paper wordlessly. Mrin knew it was wrong to smoke but she still accepted it falteringly.
Her step sister was her biggest idol in the house. The beautiful face, the grace, the confidence - she could turn heads whenever she walked into a room. And for a particularly awkward teenager, Meera was the perfect person to be. As Mrin took her first drag, she burst out coughing, tears rushing to her eyes. Meera dissolved into peels of laughter.The thought of embarrassing herself in front of Meera drove Mrin to take a second, deeper drag. The coughing got worse. Determined to show Meera she was an adult, Mrin kept taking puff after puff till she could take it no more, her throat burning as if on fire, her eyes watering and her head feeling light and dizzy. She flung it down on the floor and ran inside her room crying. Slamming the door behind her, she threw herself face down on the bed, sobbing helplessly. Through the open window and her tear stained eyes she noticed Meera reach down and pick up the little roll of paper, dust the end and put it back in her mouth. She didn't know then that she had had her first experience with weed.

Determined to not let Meera think of her as a weak cry baby, next day she went and procured 2 cigarettes. It wasn't easy. But she took money out of her lunch allowance and then got off the bus 2 stops before her tuition class. Then she walked to the nearest Paan shop and asked for cigarettes in her most adult voice. She even wore a Salwar Kameez to look older and more mature. He looked her up and down but then gave her the cigarettes wordlessly. That night she puffed away gallantly through the burning throat and the watering eyes. A week later when she woke up to find Meera smoking outside, Mrin confidently strode outside and asked for the smoke. It tasted different, but she was not going to let that be a hurdle. Meera started laughing, only this time it didn't seem to Mrin like she was mocking. Mrin too ventured a smile and handed back the roll of paper. Why was her head feeling so light though, she thought. 

That night the nightmares didn't come back. She slept peacefully for the first time in years. Since that night  many years ago when she had woken up because there was someone in her room. She could feel his presence and smell the familiar cologne. She could then feel his hand covering her mouth so she wouldn't shout, her body pinned under his shoulder. The rest she had successfully blotted out. All that remained from that night were the nightmares and that overwhelming smell of cologne.

Digits on paper

This corner of the bar was especially dark, and Sam liked it that way. At the other end he could see people striking up animated conversations with others they were meeting for the first time and probably would never meet again; their words slurred, their eyelids drooping, their breath laced with the heavy scent of alcohol. It’s strange how that coveted sparkly drink in your glass breaks down the invisible shackles that you struggle to cope with every day, broadening the boundaries and stretching the range of possibilities that life supposedly has to offer. It makes you smile at things that you wouldn’t have found funny otherwise. It makes the world seem like an ever changing kaleidoscope of neon lights, weaving impossible patterns in the air that eludes the rational sober eye. And most importantly it makes you forget and there is nothing more comforting than oblivion.

But Sam found it hard to forget. He remembered every little thing in excruciating detail, like it happened only yesterday. There were those initial nights at Labyrinth when alcohol did the trick for him; where amidst the cacophony of deafening beats and pulsating hearts, he managed to forget. He often found himself curled up at some desolate corner of the pub, sleeping, till someone took notice and woke him up, only to clean up last night’s drunken human mess. But those days were long gone and no amount of tequila seemed to work anymore. He tried taking sleeping pills, lying on his bed for hours, waiting with wide open eyes for that elusive thing called sleep till the first rays of morning seeped in through the window. He just couldn’t sleep. All he needed to do was to forget; forget who he was, forget who life made him to be, forget all those people that sucked meaning out of Samarth and left behind an empty hollow shell of a man called Sam. He was tired of waiting and the sagging circles beneath his eyes told the same story.

He turned to look at the million people dancing twenty feet away. The faces in the crowd never engaged him. They were all the same, like broken peanut shells, wrinkled and ochre. Grazing across the sea of bobbing heads, his restless eyes stopped for a moment. There was a girl in the middle of the crowd, a distinct dark face amidst the blur, dancing with abandon. She hardly had any makeup on which made her seem inexplicably real; her beauty almost arresting, unconventional. Her hair spilled over her face in a bundle of curls, disentangling with every other beat to reveal a long gradual neckline. Her limbs were slender, one embellished with what seemed like gaudy clanging wedding bangles, and the other nude. Bare. Her eyes were shut the whole time while her head swayed aimlessly from side to side. Maybe she was catching up on her sleep. Maybe she was waiting to forget too.

It was a strange place to be for a newlywed, especially dancing alone in the middle of the night. Sam was curious. His best guess was that her husband was boring and fat, unaware of his wife’s clandestine nightly adventures. She must be one of those spoilt bored rich kids whose life revolved around the sole concept of fun, he thought. Maybe she was bored of her husband already, looking for the scent of some new nameless man in the dark corners of the pub. He knew he judged her, and he didn’t care not to. He noticed she was walking towards him now, her kohl smeared eyes transfixed, as if she read his mind. He was embarrassed and quickly averted his eyes. He hadn’t realized that he was staring at her for that long. He felt a tiny dint of shame.

‘Is this seat taken?’ she asked.

He looked up at her. ‘Are you talking to me?’

She laughed. ‘You were staring at me for a really long time. So yes, I am talking to you’.

He sensed a tone of condescension in her voice. He felt nervous and for him, it was a first. He felt uncomfortable.

‘The seat doesn’t have my name on it. It’s a free world. Be my guest.’ He tried to be smart with her.

‘You have a way with words I see,’ she smiled, the disdain intact. ‘I’m Meera, by the way.’ She extended her hand out in a gesture of peace.

‘I’m Sam,’ he replied curtly, making no effort at reciprocation. Truth be told, he wanted to run away. He felt restless, annoyed at having to make unnecessary conversation. All he wanted to do was to enjoy a quiet evening amidst all the noise, like every other day. He was a slave of routine and hated change of any sort. And exchanging words with strangers was his last priority. Sam was popular among women, more for his success and physique than anything else, and he treated them like mundane wayside trash. But there was something about this girl that made his mind race and his heart pound till it threatened to explode his very being to bits. He was not accustomed to being talked down to, especially by women. He was a chauvinist and he took an unnatural pride in it.

‘So what was the point in staring at me for so long, if you had no intention of talking or returning a friendly gesture?’ She sounded a little bruised.

‘Well I wasn’t staring at you. Everything’s not about you. Please.’ He was looking down the whole time.

Meera laughed. It was a loud resonating laugh. She jerked her head back, and her silver dangling earrings twinkled for a fleeting moment. ‘Well, aren’t you a bit too old to be sulking like a kid? You were staring at me and you got caught. The world will continue to go on like it never happened. Get over it will you?’ she continued in a jocular thread. She curled a stray lock of hair behind her ear. Her earrings quivered earnestly.

God she’s beautiful, Sam thought to himself. And suddenly, he felt his blood rush to his face. He tried distracting himself by playing with his watch but he couldn’t help but steal a glance at Meera. He noticed she had changed her posture. She was now sitting with her head rested on her elbow, her eyes on him, steady and unblinking. ‘How does that feel now sir?’ she giggled. Sam couldn’t take it anymore. ‘Please excuse me for a moment.’ He hurried towards the restroom. He banged the door behind him, panting. It felt like he could still hear her laughing. Her loud resonating laugh. He covered his ears and knelt on the floor. He shut his eyes tight…

                                                  .......................

He wasn’t sure how long he had been sitting there on the bathroom floor. But now he felt calmer. He felt his confidence rushing back. He laughed at his asinine behavior. It was ridiculous. He strutted back to the bar, head held high, determined to make it right this time. But Meera had left by then. He felt oddly dejected. But he noticed something on her seat. It was a scrap of tissue with ten neatly formed digits on it; running across it like an undulating wave with a newfound destination. He felt an upsurge of relief. He folded the soggy piece of tissue and tucked it safely in his wallet, ensconced between his many credit cards. He decided he would call her. One day.