Way of all sleet

?Hey! Get up, get up. Come on guys. Why do always make your teachers wait? Hurry up, leave the bed.? An elderly, hoarse and demonic voice polluted the almost adored silence of the room. A voice broke? Well Sir!? rather sheepishly, ?Its getting dark? may rain anytime?..and classes?.break, you know.? and tried to disintegrate the pollutant. Just missed the energy that counted. No one to listen to him, only sleepy ears. The ones who were silently in agreement with the soporific lectures had taken an early, what most people call punctual, asylum in the damp classroom. And I, here with my sick belly, had few things to do in this ill-treated dorm; this time hoping for a rain.

Well, I was not the only perseverant body waiting for the rain. Even the atheists had stopped mocking at the manner in which we often turn ourselves to the metaphysics. The million droplets that fall in a bunch, in an unidentified hurry had last embraced the selfless grasses several months ago. They were the Dashain weeks however. Who even remembers yearning for a rain when downpour is true, but for the ritualistic ways of ours? Plainly speaking, there exist very few people who would mind the schedule nature allots for itself while the rest remain ignorant. I can only openly picture myself as the best example of these ignorant ones.

Of course, the situations varied then. Rainy those earlier days, so incessantly, with much of agitation, as per purpose, if I understood right, had kept me aloof from things I?d have loved to practice otherwise. It deterred me from football and virtually closed the shrinking doors of library. Even worse, every step of those days had to be delivered with utmost precaution and as for me who had already suffered a severe bone fracture, each of those precautions needed to be squared.

Believe me, I don?t and can?t even afford to hire what it takes to encompass all the units of chronology. However, with much certainty I can speak of that particular day in the eleventh hour of the festive season. The rain I witnessed that day, hoping it to be the last one I saw for a long time to come was indeed the one I?d see for a long time to come. Suddenly the rain died. Clouds unfolded what deeds it could heed. My eyes that radiated so much scorn to the moist and dark sky were forced to shower unfathomable benevolence to the lonely blue sky. The clouds lost their weapon; they now feared to meet even at horizon. I believed I could breathe a huge sigh of relief; for several weeks, certainly; for several months, unanswerable.

Time flies away doesn?t it? The effect of this very flight, I came to understand of only when Nepal Electricity Corporation made the load the shedding announcement .Gradually I tried to place my self in the lost timeframes that I skipped so, ruthlessly for containing the unpragmatic vision .The entire world or may I say the most of it was accelerating as a kaleidoscope while we, bunch of helpless men were left aside with consolation of patience. Agriculture had already been baptized as the foremost patient of the drought and now we faced as serious cut-off in electricity.

I never hated rain .The apparent disgusts were just the examples of immature opinions which anyone rarely regarded .What?s the deal now? We don?t even play football. For now, I only thought. I thought, mostly in deepening solitude, of the artistic cracks the dry ground fashioned. What if there were many a million rough eyes under those cracks, all looking aimlessly at the sky and still trying to remember a prayer for invoking a shower.

Unexplainably, that voice living amidst the poverty of energy, I don?t know why, carried a touch of ever- widening reality. Yes! it did rain eventually. And for the rain, it didn?t return as it had stopped. As the moon exposes its crescent, the rain shyly poked its wet nose through as if hoping for a party we?d begin for its return. I was pleased enough though and didn?t wait to see others? smiles, not even mine (mind you I can afford a mirror). On the top of the world I was accompanied by pairs of millions of fortunate eyes guilty for the words of disdain they might have uttered. The vibrations of melancholy were instantaneously sucked by the newly born swamps with a swirling air of excitement. Perhaps the first time it was that I was moved by something so gentle, so subtle.

Of late, I have much more to rejoice of. Maddened by the whispers of that charismatic rain, I don?t mind getting ruined within the firm barriers of insanity, if happiness is what smiles within it. I plainly couldn?t stop reminding myself of ,?If it were but for the rain and we would all go the most bitter way of all flesh; so early and that so quickly.?