RAIN, RAIN , DON’T GO AWAY

By Sheethal Anupama Tito

Moping up the petrichor, pretending that rain drops are on a race through the window panes, performing paper boat hurdle contests, getting fever of unknown origins, being ‘absent’ in school, falling asleep to the music of rain, quenching in the deep blanket slumbers when its poring heavy outside…Being a pluviophile is a cliché definition of bliss. Even my dusted caches of nostalgia gets washed up, every time it rains, even after me seeing a random meme telling that rain is the pee of some senile cloud with urinary incontinence. The world was working from home, I was in my sprint to reach up to my online classes which were, ‘n= “I really have no idea”‘ ,number of leaps ahead and the clouds started to pee. In Kerala, if it rains ,the obligatory aftermath is the infamous ‘power cut’. Thanks to the densely populated coconut leaves for getting into a public display of affection with the power line. To say in local slang, “the ‘ola'(coconut leaf) tried line adikal(try to flirt)”. Me who was waiting for a guilt free excuse to refrain from the marathon lectures, amused in silence watching my phone scuffling with its 1% charge. Here it goes peeeeeeeeep. Dead. Now what to do? As the last piece of the last pineapple from my courtyard swept its way through my food tract(thank God, I am not an elephant), memories about last rain ruminated back. A rainy season when I was not this jobless, those days of my rural postings in outskirts of Karnataka, the one month of Bailur. As told by the protagonist of a well known Malayalam movie in a similar scenario, “This is the place where Dr. Ravi Tharakan was born”, I used to stare out of the windows of our quarters and say myself, “This is the place where the chef in me was born.”

It was a heavy rain day,me and my friend were just back from the center, waiting for a back call anytime. As it grew dark, the bell never rang,yay…it was a no patient day. But destiny always had a patient for us. This time it was Sruthi(unfortunately my friend and cointern) herself. She started to throw up with pain. She had a really bad sensation in her right eye-pain/prick/itch-she was not in a stance to explain it. Apparently I am a doctor, I should save her life!!! The only medicine I knew was to blow on to her eyes. After my huge blow she started to jump with pain even more intensely. Nurse in our center gave the address of the nearest eye doctor ,which was half an hour away and we left asap without having the least idea about what more havocs were awaiting us. At the very first sight of his clinic one can decipher that we were probably the first visitors of the day. An old shaggy consultation room, with an array of sophisticated but rusted ,optometric devices, cracky wooden shelf brimming with long living sample medicines, in the exact geometric center was seated a grumpy old chap, with ‘soda bottle’ spectacles( wonder why all the opthalmologists are “spectacled”?). “Ah, come,come..” ,said Dr.(lets call Dr.Soda Bottle), as we introduced ourselves as the interns of nearby PHC and explained our complaints, we could see a glare of muse in his eyes, magnified to 100x by his specs. He examined her and applied few drops from one of his limited edition collections on her eyes and told her to lie down for one hour. One hour!!! I never knew that one hour of rest for her was the most irksome hour for me.Appatently he is notorious for his attack with whitelies and undigestable philosophy lectures and thats why no one dares to consult him. He started his gruesome lecture on all the impossible things in this universe…right from time before origin of time to time after explosion of large hadron collider!!! I was literally a dump chimp watching a Chinese drama…”Answer me something”, Dr.Soda shouted, “What is darkness?”. Gathering all the sound conscience that got scattered from me since the beginning of the talk, I answered, “its the absence of light”. He grinned in content and said, ” I knew you would say that. Just think, when we switch on light, it takes a while to spread all around. But when we switch it off its darkness all together at once. If darkness was absence of light, won’t it take the same time to go back/disappear that it took to appear. So darkness is a different matter and not the absence of the matter that makes light”. Sruthi came back from her rest,he prescibed her the medicines ,took his fee and let us go. But I was still stuck with the dark matter. Forget the science he was trying to explain, extrapoliting it to humane aspects…Good and Evil, both are two distinct particles existing at same time with different magnitude and velocities. With evil having statistically proven higher relative velocity and magnitude of each being an unknown variable.The one which out weighs the other in effective units of both parameters gets manifested. Its our conscience which has the switch to determine the chosen one… That was infact thought worthy. As the dark matter crawled through my ‘thought palace’, darkness had already built its palace around me.The power that had left long back, is still not back home. Alas! It came back. I left the memories about the dark matter with the darkness which gave its way to light particles, plugged my phone, took my warm up to catch up with the lagged leaps….and the cloud continued to pee the whole night….

By Sheethal Anupama Tito