Memories of rain

I sauntered down the cement ramp, semi-deaf to the severely unpleasant vehicular orchestra playing out to my left, training my concentration instead on the complex drama unfurling in my head.

Strange things were happening. Darkness begged to be my friend. Light wanted a vacation. In their vehemence, they bumped into each other sideways, to form smoky self-styled Venn diagrams and condensed areas of rainy grey in between.

And, so, it had to begin with a drizzle.

Only, the drizzle was really just overzealous mist. It hung heavily in the air, weighed down by gravity, relenting in miniscule droplets. They dripped onto my hair inconspicuously, forming a talcum halo. I was reminded vaguely of several patches of paradise. I walked in the first paradise for a while, listening intently to the bright green grass beneath my feet rebuke me for intruding on its morning dew bath. The air was redolent of vanilla and something musky. Voices of children wafted about in the fading background, intermingling with the explanatory tones of an older man- an uncle perhaps. I was almost transported to another time… in a car from the past, in which I now sat, listening to my heart beat feverishly. I looked in the rear view mirror to find my lips stained a bright orange and my face red and raw. There was a wild glint in my eye, and my lips curled in a manner that suggested feral moments had been partaken of in the muggy confines. As I turned to my right, I could discern but a waning mass of memory. My arms, however, and my neck, bore scarlet imprints that I could only begin to comprehend. I touched my arm to imbibe a sense of that time, but it wasn’t my arm. An older woman held my hand, and steered me down a wet boulevard. I tried to look up at her face, but she was too tall. I was too short. I had taken my first steps not too many moons ago, and the damp tar road seemed to teem with possibilities. I was being fed stories. Tales from the epics, epic tales. In my head, pictures formed, like a comic strip. A bunch of young Brahmin girls fighting wordlessly for a comb, for the next turn in the bath, for the one extra biscuit. Sisters. My aunts they must’ve been; and my mother. And then, I was on her hips. The hips that, not too many years ago, took part in emergency ejecting me into the world. She was running. It was a drizzly morning in the city I call home. We were racing against time and alongside the bus we desired to board. An angel’s hand, she later said, pulled us in, just when she thought the destination would be forever lost to her. And, so we sat in the bus. I was around 19 years old by then; talking to my peers, as we sped into the verdant wild. I cosied up in a corner, by a window, feeling the wind course through my curls and the mounting drizzle gently attacking my rods and cones. I was happy, I was sad. Teenage pangs did their job well. I had to shut the window before long, because the drizzle had built into a promising rain. It was extremely stifling inside the bus.

So, I stood up and pressed my ears against the large window in my hotel room, which looked like it was sweating. I faintly heard the rain sing to me, in a voice that was layered beneath the more apparent percussion patterns she beat on the glass pane. She began to tell me secrets from lands afar. That she had left her home in Egypt; evaporated from the Nile so cruelly. I listened to her cry of longing. She and I both sang the same song that day. When I could no longer bear the piercing pitch of pain, I moved away. Walked away. Into a dark room where the television took pride of place. On a large bed sat an apparition. Young love set my cheeks on fire, stoking something I identified as desire. The warm specter and I sat in harmony, not saying anything, just relishing the heat that separated us, brought us closer. And there was the heat of the hot chocolate we shared- a delicious contrast to the steely concrete wild which was being hosed down by the Gods. Broken lyrics and unchained melodies looped around us. I shut my eyes, lost to the world, swimming in swelling streams of anticipation. I woke to the sound of thunder and dangerous creaking of branches. I sat huddled under an old oak; a thin stole my only respite from the copious tears of heaven. I was alone in a dark jungle, infested with reptiles. A lizard, the colour of bile, began its ascent up my leg, even as a red snake slithered across my collar bone, turning slowly to look me in the eye, as if to establish its superiority. I thought I had died. They say I fell into a cold, cold coma.

I woke at all because they say I was struck by some kind of sympathetic lightning. I believe I was struck by a mysterious epiphany, if ever there was such a thing as a mysterious epiphany. I looked at my limbs to find them covered in the glittery salts left behind by heaven’s temper tantrum. On closer inspection, I found that the minerals had formed rapidly-absorbed miniscule pictographs on my skin, depicting forefather secrets.

I got on my feet and stretched memory’s moisture away. In the dazzling sunlight, I glittered like a life-sized diamond, as I sauntered down the ramp. Walking towards and into a lifetime more of liquid remembrances and shifting shapes.