Ramblings #26 - To Swim in Tempestuous Waters

 

I spent my final hours of the first work week of June in darkness listening to colleagues amidst the indistinct rainy knocks on my window.

It will be two years this month that I would have been living in Bangalore. Alone in a 2bhk with furnishings gathered from a rental application and decorations inherited from previous occupants.

It’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left Kolkata permanently more than half a decade ago. And as it is with most lives, there are good moments and bad.

One of which is the rains.

I quite love the rains. Back home in Kolkata, I used to frequently go to the rooftops and soak myself in the downpour – in spite of the vocal and physical backlash received from a concerned mother.

I remember once I waited outside for someone in the pouring rain, with my umbrella a poor excuse for protection as I was drenched by the time classes ended and people came out. I considered it romantic but I guess it could have been a painful reminder that not every planned moment you envision results in the outcome you desire.

No – I didn’t get a cold from the rain. The rain didn’t hurt. What hurt was what got left behind in it's wake.

People have always been more ill to me than a blanket of water from the heavens ever could. And despite the rains proving to be boon and bane in Bangalore, I love it no less.

Why a bane? Well power backup is often a luxury that I didn’t realize or couldn’t care to realize in my rented accommodation. Two years and so many spells of downpour later, I’ve been through dark rooms during my waking hours more than I would have liked.

A few months back, I brought an emergency lantern and an electric fan. Not that the fan is so much needed – the weather is quite wonderful throughout the year in Bangalore and especially during and post rains.

It’s just that the darkness surrounding the lantern brings to light the isolation in my solitary habitation. Darkness often brought forth by the rains as a fellow traveler, telling me that the best way to enjoy such refreshing company is to be devoid of human made luxuries like electricity.

To be fair, there are those moments of reflection that come with the tip tap of rain on the window sill in a dark room that doesn’t in illuminated spaces. For don’t stars appear only when there is no light to steal you from them and them from you?

And now as I sit in a meeting, with a lantern the sole radiance and the fan gently purring along – all concentrated on my face while the rest of my body lies abandoned, I wonder.

Despite the people in the meeting, sitting across the world in different places, comforted by electricity but bereft of the rains – the company that gives me comfort in the dark is the downpour outside. With my headphones on, I go outside and stretch my arm out to the water droplets falling from heavens and for a moment, I forget the world and just bask in the feeling on my skin.

On these days, I feel an embrace that had been forgotten alongside the boy washed away with the rainy days of years gone by – a caress that rushes in like a tempest telling me that nothing is truly ever gone.

As long as I can feel the rain.