A Rainy Tantrum

When the topic for the month was first announced, I racked my brain about what I could write. Because, you see, people talk about rain so much- hence, you can’t just write the first thing that comes to your head. Someone else would have probably said it already. So I wondered how I could approach this topic.

The idea came to me at one of those grossly inconvenient times. You know what they say about the best ideas coming to us in the washroom? Kind of like that. I thought of writing this at about 3 o’ clock in the morning, when literally all I wanted to do was go back to sleep.

Well, I was having a dream, and like most dreams, it was quite inexplicable. It was pretty uncomfortable too, involving me and a mouse. The two of us started off on good terms, but then the mouse took a sudden dislike to me, and started to chase me. It was shouting the whole time, but I can’t recall what. I’m pretty sure it was in Tanglish. Then for a while, things got very confusing, but then somehow the two of us ended up in a final showdown, me prepared to take the evil mouse down. But before anything else could happen, an eagle swooped down next to us and landed with a BANG! Please don’t ask me how an eagle could create such a boom, it was a dream.

You may be wondering – “Well, this is a very interesting dream, and I’m sure James Cameron or George Lucas could do a lot with it, but what does any of this have to do with rain?” Well, the sound which our beloved eagle created coincided with a real-life sound that woke me up from the dream – the most frightening sound I’ve ever heard. It sounded like something trying to break the roof apart. It took me about two minutes in my confusion to figure out that there was a thunderstorm going on!

To all my friends not in Chennai right now, a little background- very early morning, 29th October, thunder and lightning. It sounds so normal. I can almost hear you thinking, “Well, yes, but thunderstorms are noisy. That’s a known fact.” This wasn’t like that. It felt like those really, really terrifying storms described in all these books about the sea. Or, better still, like how my brother described it – “like ten mridangams playing at the same time!”

Speaking of my brother – that boy gave me the shock of my life! Well, obviously, I was thinking of switching off the A/C. You know what they say – switch off unnecessary appliances during a storm, right? Safer that way. Keep in mind, at that minute, I was feeling very nervous: I could feel the thunder vibrating under my feet. While I was hovering between my room and his, wondering what to turn off, I didn’t want to wake him up, so I tiptoed across to the switchboard. And then, when my back was turned to him, he said suddenly, sleepily and not very softly: “Wha-at, Harshitha?”

In horror movies, there are statues that shouldn’t be moving (because, well, it is a statue, after all), which suddenly talk or move and then there’s a lot of screaming that happens. This was kind of like that.

I’m still plotting my revenge.

Anyway, after that got sorted out, and we switched off all that we needed to, both of us crawled back into bed. And, I do have to say, falling asleep again was quite a task, considering that I felt like Godzilla having a temper tantrum above me.

And it was at THIS moment that I thought of writing this down. Yes, at 3 am in the morning, trying to ignore the thundering soundtrack (pun intended). You’ll agree, I think, most inconvenient time possible.

Eight hours later, no one in my family had got over the heavenly music of the previous night. I could hear my sister chatting about it with a colleague on the phone right next to me (thanks to work-from-home!).

Perhaps that’s why people talk about the rain so much. It needs no introduction. Wherever you come from, whatever you do, it’s a part of your life, whether it’s just enjoying the cool weather, praying that colleges declare a holiday, or grumbling about the Wi-Fi disconnecting.

You know what? Just as I was typing out the previous paragraph, the power went off for a couple of minutes, so I was left looking at a white screen in the dark. Why did this happen? The rain, obviously. Such an attention-seeker – really has to keep reminding us of its presence, doesn’t it?

Harshitha Suresh

20/UECA/009