Of cloudless mornings and rainy evenings

It was a run of the mill summer morning. The clear sky was painted bright blue by the golden sun. I woke up, bleary-eyed from a good night's sleep, groped for my watch on the nearby study and squinted to see what it showed. There was just enough time. I got out of bed with the sadness of a child who has inadvertently dropped his candy bar on the roadside and can't pick it up and eat it. How I wish I could leap into my bed and snuggle up to my pillow and sleep away the rest of the day! The thought did fleetingly cross my mind but I dropped the idea just as well. Went through the mundane morning drill of self-ablution, wrapped meself in some denim and a Tee, rummaged my study-table for the books needed for class and made a dash to the mess for breakfast. It was 1045. No time for a princely breakfast. Speed-fed myself a small bowl of corn flakes and milk (that's what you have to make do with when you reach the mess when you oughta be in class), and then scrammed towards the classroom. Sat through the class, had a cuppa during the break in between classes, took the next class and then it was 1330. Lunch time. Ate lunch, went back to my room, and kipped down for another catnap before the next class at quarter past three. Woke up in a deja-vu. I had experienced similarly disorienting feelings the last time I had woken up. Class for the day got over at 1630 hours and we trotted out of the classroom. An average day you wager???

No! It was to get interesting. And how!!! The bright blue sky that was the canopy in the morning had turned into an ashen grey, replete with lour clouds that seemed pregnant with their rainy largesse. Were the heavens going to open up, at this a time of the year when it was the sun's business to patrol up and down the sky??? Where was the sun anyway? Well...by the looks of it, he had been given a ticket on an early bus ride home, so to speak. The menacing clouds looked all set and raring to make heavy weather (pun intended!) of whatever was left of the day. And voila!!! The first drops of rain trickled down from above! Was this unbelievable? Or purely unseasonal? Well, to tell the truth, it was both! Soon, the teasing trickle made way for a delicate drizzle that was enough to soak you. And how I wanted to get out and get wet!!! The child in me couldn't resist this temptation that nature was tantalizing me with and I did finally venture out in the rain. Not only myself, I also enticed a few of my reluctant friends to revel in this natural shower (some of them don't bathe so regularly anyway and this was literally a God-given opportunity for them!!). And did we have a good time getting drenched or what!!!

Soon enough, typical of its idiosyncratic nature, the unseasonal shower subsided unseasonally. It had lasted a full hour. You can send a woman into seventh heaven if you can last in bed for an hour!!! But this was satisfaction of a different kind. Like the jack-in-the-box actor who turns in a surprisingly refreshing cameo performance and leaves the audience hooting and applauding for more, this sudden cameo act of Nature - I am talking early March here, Summer's still tying up its bootlaces to get started - was both surprising and refreshing and left me...well...wet and wanting more!

The Great Escape!!!

I am back!!! After a longer-than-expected hiatus of close to five months (I sometimes wonder why I started this blog!!!), I am back to what I do worst - blog regularly. If my first four posts were intersticed by roughly three months, this fifth one comes after an even longer time - five months. I had experienced a strange, a rather weird feeling sometime around January (when roughly three months had elapsed since my 4th post). A feeling that almost willed me to write a fifth post but I somehow managed to kill the urge. But this fifth post holds a special pride of place not because it is the first one for the year but for the fact that it should not have been written; it should never have come about yet here I am writing it! Yes, if it wasn't for the miraculous escape I had on the road when I hoodwinked certain death, this blog would have died a poor death with just 4 posts. And I want to thank the Lord Almighty for "chipping in" just in the nick of time and bailing me and my friend out.

I was riding pillion with a friend on our way to the festive party thrown by the seniors in our hostel to celebrate their placements and in keeping with the rules of safe driving, were well within our lane. We were riding behind this bus and must have been doing 40 kph. The bus in front was rolling along at the same rate. And then the bus in front moved nonchalantly over to the left and the next microsecond, we realize why. It was making room for another bus - this one coming at us from the other side in the middle of a high-speed overtaking maneuver - and it had ALMOST made mincemeat of us before my dear friend jerked the bike to the left and made just enough room for the monstrous thing to pass by and as they say, we “escaped unscathed”. But boy, was it close or what!!! I saw the huge facade of the bus bearing down as it zoomed past us in a blink. Lucky for us my friend had the presence of mind and the reflexes to yank the bike just enough at the right time. And we were lucky there was no one behind us on our own lane to run us over as we twisted and turned our way to safety. We stopped on the side and tried to figure what had just happened. We had a hearty laugh about it but deep down, we knew we were a couple of feet away from being roadkill. And we spent the rest of the journey riding as far away from the middle of the road as we could!!!

And as before, I can only thank the Almighty for saving our hide and for saving this blog from being relegated to the virtual dustbins of history. This was a far cry from the typical miraculous escape routines that you get to hear and read where you have people trapped in a snowstorm for days on end or the boy from the slums who falls into a deep manhole and has to be rescued with great effort while he hangs on bravely. This was more "life or death", an ephemeral split-second that decides your fate one way or the other. And life is like that. That's all the time you have got sometimes. And as Al Pacino would say in Scent of a Woman, "You can live a life in a minute", so can a minute or a second decide your life.

As I round out, I am reminded of those hackneyed pieces of advice that you find on the inside covers of notebooks these days that go something like..."If you want to know the value of a month, ask a woman who has delivered a premature baby"..."If you want to know the value of a second, ask a person who has narrowly escaped an accident"... Well, I think you can ask me what a second feels like...