Rain...

As the water trellised down the windscreen and a hundred white feet of bodiless birds splish-splashed on the road ahead, a silent vacuum filled in as I sat in the rear seat of the cab. All those billowy clouds of multitudinous thoughts floated away, as my senses, soaking in the apparent surrounding, hypnotically suspended the banalities of humdrum thoughts. I allowed the splinters of rain to prick at my face as I slumped back and slowly rested my head on the seat; nonchalant to where the cabbie was taking me. Over the past five years I have travelled this stretch of road so frequently that even a stolid inert gaze at any part of it would be a satisfying assurance. The faint darkness of the damp air had cast a silent tranquillity on an otherwise cautious and involved passenger, as I am, and on the busy bustling road of incessant honking and unending traffic congestion. The old cabbie drove on the empty Sunday-road, but I could see the meandering trail of tyre tracks that the preceding car was leaving ahead of us. I looked up at the dark sky through the cab window and felt the grey smoke and dampness around me. I wanted to write something. No, I'm not a poet or a story teller. It was just about the weather, about the drive and I tried capturing in my mind the feeling that was impressed upon my countenance, but I failed in finding the words that would adequately express them. I wondered why it is the rains that inspire me most. Why the bright sunny morning didn't appeal me better? The faint darkness of the rains is as cool as the pleasant winter winds of tropical lands that ignite the warmth of passion, but its dampness reminds me of a suppressed melancholy, somewhere in the distant corner. I heard the rumbling train pass-by in a whiff below. I saw the miniature suns, formed of the water drops, upon the windscreen. But I didn't smell the parched earth. I missed him. I thought of our meeting that was a while back. I longed to feel that presence again. It, however, suddenly crossed my mind that a friend of mine is bereaving the loss of her father. I thought of aunty, at her loss, her startling change in life; but I also thought of a friend who had just settled in for a conjugal life. I wondered if the rains moved all to their passions of love and pain. Would one, at the noon of one’s life, be moved to the passion of love when the dimness of rain approaches? Or does it just fume the passions of a young heart? The cab crossed the road by the lake. I saw the water swell to its brim. I saw the multi coloured umbrellas, with heads propped under them, lined around its bank. It started pouring rapidly. The splish-splashing and splattering increased, as I heard the raindrops dance on the roof of the car. Fog percolated in the windscreen and vision obscured. The wiper swished and squeaked and the cabbie wiped the screen to clear off the fog from within. An otherwise sunny afternoon seemed like an early twilight today, with street lamps all aglow. I thought of the street dwellers, the dogs and cats. Rats could creep through the tiny gaps but the dogs and cats and men couldn’t. I wondered if the rain washed all the leaves of a tree clean. Could a leaf, unwashed of its dust smear, belie of the rains? I was yards away from my home; I finally broke the silence and asked the cabbie to stop right up. It was raining as one would say with a conventional idiom “like cats and dogs”. I got off the cab, ready with an open umbrella which was evidently insufficient to keep me dry. Mud and dirt reached up above my ankles as the rain splintered them on me. Later, sitting by the window in my room, as I saw the smoke float pass below the bright yellow street lamps as rain drizzled down like flecks of gold!