The evening rain

“I hope it’s not raining”, said I to my colleague Shilpa. She flickered her eyes and smiled. Her warm smile soothed my burning eyes. I had had a long day. I shut my laptop, stuffed it into my bag , slung it onto my shoulders and ran towards the lift. The heels of my shoes make a crackling sound against the stone floor. I reprimanded myself for wearing stilettoes to office. I work at a pharma company situated at one of the fancy business parks in Bangalore. My building is situated at the end of the park. The end of the world as I always call it. I need to walk for almost a kilometre to reach the front gate to catch the bus which ferries us, the corporate cattle to our sheds.

Now, coming back to the lift: It wasn’t working. It wasn’t working because life had decided to be hard on me. Life and I were in a relationship where we both knew it won’t work. It was a relationship where we both had trust issues. I didn’t trust life and it seemed to hate me. I raced down the stairs and reached the door. And, no surprises: it was raining. Disheartened, I fumbled through my bag for an umbrella, only to realise that I did not have one.

“It’s just drizzling”, I thought. Using the permutation and combination skills that I had acquired while studying for B-school entrance examinations, I calculated the time that I would take to reach the front gate and concluded that if I jogged towards the gate, I would be able to catch the bus without getting much drenched. So, slowly and steadily, I started running. The heels of my stilettoes threatened to break any moment. But the challenge was accepted, failure wasn’t an option.  Just as I crossed my building, the drizzle began to turn into a downpour. Clearly, there was a reason for my failure of all those B-school admissions: My permutation and combination skills were really poor.

I ran faster. The rain water seeped through my clothes and soaked my skin. I looked like a helpless chicken wading through the rain. There was a thunder and  some lightning. The rain Gods seemed to mock at my helplessness and also click a picture of my misery. “I won’t let you put me down", I said to the Kohl coloured clouds with my eyes full of tears. I ran faster, while trying hard not to let my bag slip off my shoulder. As I reached closer to the gate, I could see the bus waiting. Victory was near but little did I know that there were few more hurdles to clear. As I sprinted towards the bus, I failed to notice the maze of puddle what awaited me. Splash! And I fell into one of them. I looked like one of the buffaloes bathing in the lake at my grandfather’s village. 

I picked myself up, while recording from the corner of my eyes, the number of spectators of this royal fall. Marching into the bus, I was relieved to see an empty seat next to my friend Indu, aptly named after a rain God. As I sank into the seat, I was about to start lamenting about the trouble that I went through, when he chirped, “Lucky you! You got to run in the rain!”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. I had been cursing the rains throughout. I had been complaining about life, the clouds and the rain Gods while the rain had been trying to play with me, trying to wash away all my worries. I realised that it was not the rain, but the negativity that had clouded my mind and that was responsible for my misery. The cloud in my head seemed to clear. I smiled and said to myself, “Lucky me! I got to run in the rain!”