AS LONG AS IT RAINS

The incomplete imaginary short story which i had started way back in 2008 in a dairy..was completed somehow few months back....posting it now :). Please read at your own risk :)


DISCLAIMER:
THIS IS A WORK OF PURE FICTION. ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ANYONE, LIVING OR DEAD IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL. THE CHARACTERS ARE FICTIONAL AND OF MY OWN CREATION. THE PLACE, TIME AND INCIDENTS ARE PURELY FICTIONAL.

‘Get inside Vighnu’, my Mom yelled from kitchen who fondly called me Vighnu, while others who knew me preferred to call me as Vighnesh including my Dad.
Watching the thick rain lashing all over the place and feeling the sprinkles of water carried off by the wind over your face, is very soothing especially after you spend the first half of the summer day in a hot place like Chennai.
For many of the kids of my age, summer vacations are the days eagerly awaited for, enjoying with friends and with all those distant cousins whose existence known to you is just for playing and running around the streets. As far as I’ am concerned I don’t have any cousins of my age. Most of them are grown up men who only like to crack some stupid jokes among their age group people which I don’t understand at all.
My Dad works in a private bank and he is so crazy about his job that in my past 13 years of existence, I can remember about 3 transfers of him. But Mom says that after my birth Dad had infact 4 transfers. Hence we never have stayed or settled in a single place for more than 5 years at a stretch. I being rolled in and out of schools so many number of times that I eventually never got the opportunity of making good friends with my classmates or neighbours. Two years back we shifted to this nice area of T Nagar in Chennai.
It was early June two years back, when we shifted to this beautiful and well furnished house in Chennai from Delhi. Dad and one of his colleagues made all the required arrangements with no major issues. After two weeks or so, I got enrolled in the nearby K.V school in the 6th grade. I had joined almost a month late but that did not bother me much because I was used to it and I was not bad in my studies so I knew I would catch up things without much difficulties.
I still remember the first day of my school here. My Dad was completing some school admission formalities in the principal room and I was a little surprised when the principal asked me to join the ongoing maths class on 1st floor, room 6A. I was not actually mentally prepared to attend classes so soon. But I still reluctantly said bye to Dad and proceeded to meet my new classmates and teachers. As I entered room 6A, the entire class which a moment ago was sounding like some market place was dead silent all of a sudden. Initially all of them thought that the maths teacher had arrived and after seeing me, the momentary silence faded away and the market noise resumed. I then had a good look for a comfortable seat in the class and very quickly decided to sit in the third bench of the middle row where 3 boys were seated.
The class had 3 rows with 5 benches in each row. The dais with the black board was 10 feet away from the first bench. As I sat at the leftmost corner of the bench, the boy beside gave me a good top to bottom look and turned to his other side to talk something with his other two friends. They all gave me a nasty look but did not utter a word to me. I thought may be people who entered the classroom without school uniform and without attending the morning assembly prayers are treated like this only. Then all of a sudden the class went silent again and all stood up to greet our maths teacher. A collective ‘good morning sir’ wish is heard and the maths teacher wishes back but I guess only the first benchers would have got the privilege to hear what he said. Our maths teacher, Mr. Sripad, was very tall and fair with thick black moustache. He had a very serious look on his face as if the entire maths problems inside the textbook which he was about to open is going to explode anytime.
The day progressed with me sitting quietly, listening to lessons and taking up few notes. Our English teacher, Mrs Abraham, who was also our class teacher, introduced me to the class and I was introduced to our class mentors, Keerthi Prasad for boys (who liked himself to be called as K.P in short) and Poornima for girls. By the time the school ended for the day, I noticed that K.P was a tired boy who had to look after his studies and at the same time responsible for maintaining discipline in the class, plus carry out all the odd tasks given by our teachers such as carrying notebooks and other stuffs to and from the staff room. On the other hand, Poornima had no much work to do since our class had only 15 girls to manage compared to 35 odd boys.
Morning school prayers even though how much ever repetitive it is, is always fresh for me. I enjoy the gathering and the musical rhythms of prayers even though most of us are not at all good in singing. So the next day, after the prayer we entered the class one by one in a single line. When I was about to sit in the same bench where I had sat the previous day, the same boy on the bench said politely ‘sorry, we are waiting for our friend. It’s his place and he was on leave yesterday. He has come today’. Well, then I understood the whole point of them not talking to me and giving me a ‘who are you?’ look the previous day. Anyways I smiled and wandered my eyes around for an empty seat. ‘You can sit here’, came a voice from the next bench boy who was beaming at me with a pleasant smile. I took his offer and settled myself in the leftmost corner beside him. ‘Hi, my name is Raghu’. Well, Raghu had taken punishment not once but two times the previous day for causing too much nuisance in the class and for too much talking and was changed his place by our class teacher from last bench of last row to 4th bench of middle row. ‘You have a very nice bag’ he said still smiling at me. ‘I’ am Vighnesh and thanks for both the seat and the compliment for my bag’. I heard myself speaking a long thanks giving sentence to someone after a long long time. ‘my Dad bought me this when we were in Delhi last year, its my favourite one’ then came his instant reply ‘good choice, I too had a similar kind of bag but my little brother spoiled it one day when we were playing around with fire’. For a moment, I was in shock to hear that two young boys play with fire just like that, but I did not question him about this. By this time, K.P came over to our bench ‘Raghu, another warning’, to which Raghu replied ‘thanks again k.p’, not forgetting to smile. K.P left to the dais. Raghu turned to me ‘so, where were we?, oh yes, our favourite bag’. He continued to speak and after a few minutes our science teacher arrived. ‘oh no, I thought she was absent today, she was not there at the assembly’. Raghu said with a disappointed look in his eyes but still managing a smile on his lips soon.
The day progressed with Raghu doing all the talking from the clips of my bag to the hooks of the water well in his native place in kerala and I simply giving a node with an occasional smile in between. Fortunately Raghu did not get punished that day, thanks to our K.P’s negligence in monitoring the class. But the next day Raghu had to suffer some severe kneel down punishment awarded by our maths teacher for throwing a paper made rocket around. I felt sorry for him, but astonishingly he never showed a sign of pain throughout the duration of punishment.
I liked his attitude and guts which I lacked. All my classmates made a point not to wander around Raghu, but in the coming days I was the one who never wandered away from him.
Days passed, weeks flied off and months raced along. Raghu and I enjoyed each other’s company. I came to know more about him and his family and so did he about mine. By end of November we had given 3 monthly tests and a mid term examination. Raghu was not bad in his studies. He made sure that he never failed in any of the tests and also showed progress with each and every test.
Though Raghu showed some improvement in his studies, he never showed any changes in his mischievous attitude. But one good thing was we never got influenced from each others habits. By the end of jan, Raghu got shifted to first bench and soon I also accompanied him. Being in first bench was not that easy. I used to get a feeling that we first benchers represent the whole class and had to node our head frequently to the teachers who stood right in front of us. And I had become more conscience since a small yawn also gets noticed.
Since exams were fast approaching, we soon went to full study mode and by mid April our exams got over and it was time for summer vacation which meant two months of boredom for me. Raghu went to his native, kerala. He tried his best to convince me to be with him for few days in kerala but in vain. I spent most of my vacation days by carrying out the assignments as slow as possible, roaming around few places in Chennai with Dad and watching a lot of television programmes. I also met some of my relatives during our visit to Bangalore. Since dad was running short of leaves, I could not stay for long and we soon came back to Chennai.
When 7th standard classes began, we saw few additional faces. One among them was a girl named Meghashree who was made to sit next to Raghu in the first bench.
Initial few days Megha was very quiet. What we noticed was her voice was very sweet which came to good use when she was singing. She was a good singer. After the school sometimes she used to attend singing classes. She used to talk more with other girls and had nothing much to talk with me or Raghu. But as days progressed we started to interact. She was getting more and more interested in Raghu’s mischief and was always looking forward for more.
I also noticed that Raghu was at his wits best when Megha was around. It was good for me as I was getting more and more chance to laugh and I was happy. I remember an odd incident which happened one day in one our English classes. Raghu was playing around with his ink pen. And all of a sudden all the ink from his pen got splashed over his face. I and Megha started laughing at this sight. Megha was quick enough to stop her laugh as Mrs Abraham had set her eyes on all of us. I did not notice this, I kept laughing as I could not control my laugh. Then I realized that Mrs Abraham was looking at me with seething anger. I looked at Megha who was grinning with her heads down and Raghu was looking at me with his funny blue face and shaking his head indicating as a sign of trouble. But without wasting much time I spoke out trying to make things look funny, I said with a smile ‘sorry maam, but look at Raghu… he has spread ink all over his face’ and then came her instant reply ‘Raghu is a stupid monkey, but what made you to act like another one?’ and she turned towards the black board to continue with her class. I got a feeling that this was just enough for me to die with shame. Getting embarrassed in front of the whole class for no mistake of mine, that too with a stupid tag, I was not able to sleep properly that night.
Dad was having some kind of trouble with his job. Some days he used to discuss with mom about some problems where he was working. Though I was not able to understand everything he was saying, what I got to know was that he was not happy. And from past few days he spoke less to me also. He would just lock himself in his room and never come out to even have dinner with me. Mom would tell me that Dad is not well and I should not worry much about this.
My days in school were getting better and better. Though I was disturbed thinking about Dad, I was able to forget everything when I was with Raghu and Megha. We helped each other to revise during our monthly class tests and this group study helped to improve on my spoken English as well. Megha always ensured to speak in English eventhough Raghu was hell bent on breaking this rule by speaking either Tamil or Malayalam. English was something he was not at all comfortable with. Megha used to pinch him hard if he spoke anything other than English when we were particularly studying English subject. I never gave her a chance to pinch me because I always obeyed her.
After the mid term examination was over, the dates for co-curricular activities were announced. Our school was divided into 4 houses. Me, Raghu and Megha were in ‘Raman house’ which was headed by K.P. And Poornima was the house caption of ‘Tagore house’ which topped for winning most number of competitions last year.
Megha though was very passionate about singing, was never interested to take part in any competition. Raghu was really good in drawing. He had showed me some of his paintings and sketches when I had been to his house once. Though I did not understand what they meant, I realized that he had some talent. He kept this talent to himself and never talked about it much.
In the next two months many events were held like singing, drawing, dance competitions and many other sports competitions were also conducted. My favourite was Hindi story telling competition. But we three preferred to be among the spectators and never played any significant part for earning points for our house. Whenever there were no class while some sports events used to take place, we three dared to pick our cycles and roam around the city streets and come back when the classes resumed. We managed to escape the watchful eyes of teachers each time we escaped from such events. We did come close to getting caught when we once got drenched in rain and were late to one of the Hindi class. But luckily our Hindi teacher Mr. Duggal was very kind enough to allow us to get inside the class without asking any questions. We had the best time of our lives that rainy day. We then decided that we should give some time to ourselves when the school ends to roam around the city like this. We eventually ended up doing this quite regularly in the coming days and we particularly enjoyed even more when it rained and it was a kind of pleasure to get drenched when such good friends were around.
Back home, Dad’s mood was still sombre. He was still lost in his own calculations and thoughts. I noticed that my Mom was taking more care of him. May be she was the only person in this world who knew what exactly my Dad was going through. Since Dad was in no mood to do any house work which he used to do, Mom was getting busier by taking up his part of the housework as well. It was quite amazing that she never complained about all this.
The results of the competitions held recently were announced and this time our house ‘Raman’ won by a close margin with ‘Tagore’ house which stood second. K.P was ecstatic to say the least as he had led from the front to win most of the sport competitions for our house.
The schedule for the final examinations was announced and by march end 7th grade would also be done. But before that we had our annual day celebration in few days. A school trip was also supposed to happen but due to some reasons it got cancelled. The annual day was celebrated with great discipline and enthusiasm by our teachers and house leaders. We all had a wonderful time.
Since exams were fast approaching we decided to give a break to our evening cycling outings. We had couple of weeks of study holidays as well, so we all made good use of these days and as a result all the exams went by quite peacefully without much difficulty. Soon after the exams Raghu had to visit his native but he promised to come back early to give me company. Even Megha was going to her native with her parents for few days. While bidding good bye to each other we all had that feeling of eagerness to meet again.
So here I’ am standing in the veranda of my house with just few days left for the arrival of both Raghu and Megha. But all this while I’ am still trying to come to terms that I wont be here when Raghu and Megha will be back. We won’t be able to meet. I’ am now waiting for my dad. He has gone out to get a cab as we had to catch the Rajdhani express back to Delhi tonight.



Dad has come to a decision all of a sudden. We are moving back to Delhi. I guess he had come to this decision for all the right reasons. But I was very depressed when Mom broke this news to me few days back. I wanted to tell my dad that I like this place now and it’s not easy to move out again. But I held it back. Mom had few convincing words for me. I have asked my class teacher Mrs Abraham to hand over a letter addressed to both Raghu and Megha.
‘What are you staring at, get inside Vighnu’ Mom came over to me from kitchen this time. ‘We need to leave as soon as your Dad comes, put this in your bag’. I quietly picked the packet from Mom and continued staring at the rain for some more time as the rain droplets successfully erased my tears. I knew I would remember this rainy day and few more forever. But I now feel that many such experiences would always come and go. And as long as it rains I will always have some sweet memories to think about and smile.