the sadness of beautiful things
What do you think of when you see the rain? I think of many things; I find myself thinking a lot when it rains- notions with no end, ramblings with deceitful façades of fruition, meanderings that twist into each other and meekly unravel with every new syllable- does it have to do with the rain itself or something else entirely?
I stood by the large, not-too-stylish, not-too-ugly windows of my bedroom-cum-kitchen-cum-living-room flat and gazed at the nascent penumbra of rain echoing noiselessly upon (and beyond) the cobbled pavements that broke every footstep in my town.
The rain washed away the dirt, small broken portions of yellow leaves and the pale veneer of seldom-noticed normalcy from the trembling skins of tiny squirrels as they whizzed from branch to branch;
the branches seemed painted anew with a glowing, heavy shade of brown, glistening mutely; the lone jogger seemed strained; cars seemed to slide off the slippery roads with even less control than usual; stray
sprays of rain found their way into plastic bags of shopping that young boys hurriedly carried back to their hostels; scarps of newspaper flew away with near-insouciant grace, kissing the shoe of a pedestrian here,
hugging the metal pole of a street lamp there, rocking tunelessly this way and that; a policeman stood still at the intersection of three winding, narrow lanes, letting the rain bob on to, bounce off and bound away from
his lopsided hat, past his already wet uniform; two women, one with her hair coloured purple and the other clutching a book close to her chest, stood under the folds of a green umbrella, amidst the slosh, the sludge.
I felt myself caught between two heavy emotions- one, of feeling happy and light in the face of such a shower, one that began to get progressively louder, as if finding its voice with the momentum of having drummed down relentlessly, without reply, without respite, and two, of feeling inexplicably but undoubtedly (and so, unshakeably) morose.
That such lightness- one that seemed content to appear on command, a lightness that was redolent of the simple pleasures of childhood (of football in and amongst muddy puddles in the school playground, of rare occasions of pakodas being made just because of the rain), a lightness that loquaciously summons vagrant, small, fulfilling thoughts from the past-
and such obfuscating tenebrosity- of a familiar but incomprehensible kind, of a raucous but intimate fear, of a subtle but pronounced spell of desperation and listlessness-
should manifest themselves simultaneously with enough discord and mutual disdain to seem almost seemingly in tandem barely manages to surprise me anymore, for before I realize I am struggling between drifting away with the sweet, arresting call of nostalgia and disappearing swiftly with the dying embers of a past I cannot reconstruct, before the mellifluous sadness of a lilting rain turns everything else parochial, the rain ceases to be.
Karthik Ramakrishnan 16 October 2017