The Meteorological department says that it is going to be a rainy weekend, much to a pluviophile’s delight! Since it’s a weekend and we don’t have to rush about on water-logged roads to reach our workplace, anticipating the worst traffic jams, let’s sit and reminisce about those good old days when we were wee kids and had all the luxury to enjoy the rain.
The first thing that comes to my mind and most certainly to most of my contemporaries is– Holiday on a rainy day! You wake up to find it’s an overcast day with dark clouds meandering through the skyline and you join your hands in prayer, “Oh God! Let the rickshawallah play truant. Let the school campus be water-logged. Let there be knee deep water on the roads leading to school.” Lo and behold, the rickshawallah, that is deployed to ferry you to school, fails to turn up and you burst out, “Yippee!” Now you have the entire day to you to sit in a corner and read; to make paper-boats and sail them in puddles; to run about in streets with your friends while it poured cats and dogs and singing yourselves hoarse to ‘Rabba rabba meeh barsa, saadi kothi daane paa’. Kids of the century might never experience what fun it was to come home drenched to your mother’s rant and then surreptitiously changing into a set of dry clothes only to be treated to a steaming cup of tea to keep you warm.
A teenaged memory, which is strongly etched on the canvas of my mind, involves my dearest friend, Aman. My mother, an educationist and a strict disciplinarian, ensured that I carry my mackintosh neatly folded in my schoolbag during monsoon season. Aman, on the other hand, never bothered about such things. She was as careless as a normal teenager could be. We used to cycle our way to school which was twenty minutes away from our place. On afternoons, when it poured unexpectedly on our way back, I would, like an obedient child, take out my floral raincoat and bedeck myself in it. And that would be when the nation would be in deep trouble!
Aman would insist that we share the raincoat. It would simply become impossible to make her see reason. ‘You wear the raincoat halfway to our homes and then pass it on to me for the other half’, she would persist. ‘That’s insane. This way both of us will get drenched.’ But my pleas would fall on deaf ears as she would make a sad face and allege, ‘You are not my friend if you can’t share your things with me.’ Oh how I miss those days! We would reach home, both drenched to the bone and to my mother’s confused expressions who failed to fathom the reason why I would be wet despite my raincoat! A scene flashes right in front of my eyes– two youthful, teenaged girls bubbling with uncontrollable giggles and chuckles, one in a raincoat, the other without, yet both drenched, cycling down the road much to the mirth of the onlookers.
How I wish someone would ask me to share my raincoat or an umbrella on a rainy day like this! How I long for the company of my dear friend on a rainy day like this! How I long for those youthful sniggers and squibbles!
Koi lauta de mere beete hue din…
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