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!