Morning after rain.
Doing things slowly. No crickets chirping. The lost buzz of the incessant numbers of dragonflies on the tarmac. The stillness of the air, the absence of the breeze. The unseen ripples on the roadside puddles.
Each sound echoing more than the other. The crowded house as silent as the sky. The ringing loss of the pitters and patters of last night’s howling downpour. The craving for a warm coffee. The disdain of the messy bed that still looks as inviting as a Las Vegas casino that is rigged to make you win. The gentle sway of your loose hair around your head, that you had freed to keep your exposed neck protected from the cold.
The soggy newspaper is not so soggy in your hands; just barely is there a hint of dampness about it. The smell of cooking breakfast seems to rebound within the walls of your home, as though each wall decided to play squash with the scents of hot, toasting bread. The woolen shirt on your skin, the one you had hugged around yourself in the freezing chillness the night before, is heavy and stifling. There is a certain reluctance in your feet to accept the loss of this chillness, as you walk bare-feet clad on the nonchalant floor, when just a few hours ago, there was marbled ice that you had stubbornly refused to rest even a toe on.
There is a drowsy laziness about you. You look at your fingers, wrapped around your coffee mug. The sounds from the kitchen sound miles away to you. The TV sits idle in the corner, even though you had but watched it all day yesterday like a raving lunatic. You watch the soft fog licking the surface of your steaming coffee, as though it were but the caress of the wind of the liquid that was supposed to heat your oesophagus. You think about yesterday, the frantic urgency to catch hold of some semblance to your usual life, the way you had tried to hold on to your earlier plans before the torrential appearance of sky-water had disrupted them. You try to think why you had panicked, how your phone hadn’t picked up any signal the whole day of hell yesterday.
You thoughtlessly skim your fingers around the rim of the coffee mug. It is hot, but you don’t notice. You enjoy the sharp, sudden sensation of blood rushing to your stricken fingers. You wonder why fear had seized you last night. You don’t seem to remember the pitfalls of your stomach, of that fluttering fright of the postponed exam date. You look at your bitten nails, wondering why you had been so restless yesterday. You watch the uneven cuticles for a few more minutes, taking in the toll of your single-day anxiety. You lean back, and close your eyes, swallowing the silence that is enveloping you, right now. Your ears pick up, barely, the creaking of the faraway gate and the hum of the fan three rooms down. The floor under your toes has gotten warm with your body heat, so you hastily pull them up and sit cross-legged on the sofa. You hug the mug to your now shivering neck. You look at the clock and note the time. It was nearly an hour since you sat with your coffee.
You taste the liquid you held in your hand inside its porcelain holder. It has gone from steaming to warm to less-than-warm, bordering on cold. Your mother scolds you, tells you it is bad to not drink it when it’s hot, and you chuckle. You don’t like to drink milk hot. You don’t like to drink coffee hot. You like the cold, the chilled, iced versions of coffee, tea, milkshakes and juices. You chuckle, remembering how you did not think like that when you got slapped by the freezing raindrops last night. You had thought of warm milk all the time you had been drenched. You sour up, remembering how deliciously cold it had been the previous day, and look outside the window accusingly, as though the heavens would conjure up the clouds and the cyclone again, and send down the rain. You take a precursory glance at the part of the ceiling of your house, where rain water had leaked in for the past two weeks. It is still dripping wet, pun and all. Now, suddenly, you don’t want the rain to come again, since all the towels you had used to keep your home dry are now hung out to get dried.
You sigh, gulping down the now-cold coffee in a single swallow. It does not taste bad, but you don’t focus on that. Your eyes are now captivated by the frigid scenery outside the window on your left. You put the mug down, and open the balcony door. The light pours on you, washes over you, bathes your skin, basks your senses; but you have no care of it. The You-shaped silhouette on the floor behind does not interest you like it had always in the past, sunny afternoons. The gentle tinkling of the chimes above your head matters not, for you never noticed its intimate meeting with the door you had just forced open. The low parapet in your balcony houses still, the last vestiges of the cold you had missed barely minutes ago. The floor out here, it is still icy, delicious to walk upon. You forget that your feet are sensitive, and walk on as they become numb to the iciness. The walls seem far away, slippery, and the house behind you, nonexistent. Your elbows meet painfully with frozen cement upon brick, but you pay no heed to its cries. Your eyes, ears and mind are in a different world than the one you had just left behind with the cold-coffee mug and the echoing smells. Your senses of touch and taste had dissolved into a higher blend of hyperconsciousness and nothingness. You inhale and exhale, but you forgot to breathe.
Droplets of water cling to every withered leaf on the tree that grew in the house opposite to yours. The bark, twisted and broken, glistens with a mixture of dew and raindrops. The tar on the road under your vision is dark, sparkly, as though diamonds had been hidden in their tiny, innumerous cracks. Your car, which had not found shelter in your garage last night, stood by your house, studded by gazillions of zillions of million water circlets. You stand there, fascinated by the way light bends around each tiny water bob, glinting on the pastel metal surface of your car, wherever little it is spared of wetness. You look right, you look left, as though following orders you had not been dictated to follow, but, still, an innate drill forced you to. The entire street your house stood upon is still. Not a bird flitted past, nor a hungry butterfly drove your neighborhood flowers crazy; a single bee not in hearing range, nor your familiar street-visitors, the crows. Still, like a photograph; still, as a painting. Your intuition now urged you to look up at the tired sky, and your eyes lifted heavenward. Your eyes traced the hollow insides of the clouds, whose ghosts now floated across the vast expanse of blue like tendrils of pure, white, coarse cotton. Now there was a playful rabbit, and then, the outline of a serene face; now, a tiny, curling dragon, and the eyes and nose of a forgotten chimera. Your fingers rose without you intending to, and began to trace patterns in the sky, something you had always wanted to do when you had time to spare. Of course, you forgot you had not had time to spare since you started high school, but you still felt contented to draw shapes of lions and bears in midair as their cloudy imitations were herded by an invisible force of air.
It is a magical moment, and you feel ageless, tracing faces in clouds without a care, with speckled molecules of moisture gently brushing your skin, floating in the same, invisible breeze as the cirrus and cumulus above. You close your eyes as you feel water pushing its way all over your face, and sigh, bringing your hands to your face. They are warm, and smell of the ever too familiar coffee you had chugged in earlier. You close your eyes in divine appreciation of your favored beverage. Your palms close over your face, leaving but your nose and mouth free to inhale and savor the magnificence of the morning.
And then, all is shattered by the loud honk of the passing vehicle. Your palms drop and you glare at the offending old man on his spluttering old Bajaj scooter. Your ears hum and thrum as all sounds come back into them – the echoes of your waiting breakfast, the faraway bell from the temple on the next street, the melodious screeching of the backyard squirrels as they fight over food with their rivals, the crows and ravens. Your eyes begin to dim with dullness as they turn back to the house, where now your brother had switched the TV on and was watching a rerun of a match that had taken place some obscure number of years ago. You stand there for a moment, watching the bright spots of color peeking around the stolid form that was his, and could see only too-green, too-trimmed grass. More vehicles honk their way on the roads below and off to the side. The sun is a little higher up now and no longer are you a neat little silhouette on the floor, but a sharp outline of a dwarf almost half your size. The kid in the house opposite has begun his daily tantrum and his friend in the next door screamed with all her might in answer.
The echoing smell of rich, buttery toast reaches your nose, accompanied by the warm, liquid-y taste of tangy tomato soup, luring you towards the kitchen. You grip the balcony’s parapet, fighting to stay in the magical moment forever, but your stomach rumbles in protest. You resist, and it roars in rebellion. You give in, sigh and oblige.
Your brother looks at you groggily over his bowl of soup. He is momentarily smitten by the warmth of the soup on his tongue and the crunch of the toast between his teeth, and brightens up as only a hungry teenager in the morning would.
“It’s the right breakfast for such a morning, right, sis?” he asks, not waiting for my approval as he wolfs down his allotted number of toasts. I stare at my own breakfast and lean in to smell the heavenly aroma, letting the steam float to my face, feeling déjà vu as the moisture coats my skin.
Ah, mornings after rain. Why do they not last every day?
~ Maitri Harys
