FIRST MONSOON RAIN

It was well past midnight when I heard a soft splitter splatter against the pane of glass on my window. I rolled closer to the window and listened carefully. It took a while to realize that it was the heavy water droplets of rain that were making the sound. I threw the window open and saw that it was raining rather heavily. It was unusually quiet for such a heavy rain. Rain like alcohol amplifies emotions. It makes a happy man happier and it makes a sad man miserable. I was sad and as I watched the droplets falls to the ground softly I felt increasingly sad. It was the first rain after Kamala's death. It had rained heavily on the day Kamala died. Kamala and rain were synonymous to me and I could never think of one without thinking of the other. Rain was nothing more to me than an excuse to wake up late until I married Kamala. Rain was a character for her and a part of her life and existence.

Kamala waited eagerly for the monsoons each year and she would stay awake late for invariably the first monsoon rain always came in the night. She would sit by the window and stretch her arms outside the window and feel the cold droplets on her skin. Rain always made Kamala happy irrespective of what mood she was in. She was not someone who hummed or sung much but on the day of the first monsoon rain she hummed. I started liking the rains after I married Kamala but not quite like how she did. I liked it more when it rained in the nights and when I was indoors and complained when I had to travel in the rain or when a late afternoon summer rain caught me on the road by surprise. Kamala though loved rain unconditionally and nothing about the rain inconvenienced her. Life was a celebration for her and the rains enhanced the colors and flavors of life like nothing else did.

Kamala was tested positive for cervical cancer and when I had broken the dreaded news to her on a Tuesday afternoon she had looked into to my eyes and asked if she would be alive to see it rain one last time. The battle against cancer did not wipe the smile off her face and although she suffered physically and was turning frightening frail she managed to retain the gleam in her eyes. The monsoons were delayed that year and for the first time I feared if she would die before it rained and I felt indescribably helpless.

To be continued....

MY FIRST KOREAN MEAL

My hosts in Philippines took me to a Korean barbeque joint for lunch this afternoon. Like any other Palakkad Iyer I had evolved over time from puking at the pungent smell of meat to managing to eat a vegetarian meal sitting besides people who ate meat and that way I thought the Korean barbeque joint escapade could be pulled through. I was in for some serious trouble though.

We walked in and sat on a table that had a pit in the middle and I was naïve enough to wonder why an upmarket joint as that would have broken furniture. I looked around and realized that all tables had this pit in the middle and my hosts spotted my inquisitiveness and offered that the pit is where the barbeque would be done.

I let out a gasp and even before I could take in the shock a petite waitress lowered a bowl of burning coal into a pit in the middle of the table, put a lid over it and then layered slices of beef over it. For once I thought I was blessed to have the cold that I had been nursing for the past 4 days as the heat charred the pieces of beef.

The elaborate menu had the word "vegetable' just on one dish and so that's the one I had to pick. My host gave instructions to the waitress on the things that should not go into the dish and the puzzled waitress was not sure on what was left in the kitchen that could actually go in. I realized during this second meal in the Philippines that when you say 'vegetable' or 'vegetarian' what you usually end up having on your table is quite literally 'vegetable'. So the dish that was placed before me after about 15 minutes of wait was cooked white rice with raw carrots, raw spinach, and sprouts and again for some strange reason the waitress wanted me to mix it up myself. I found the rice to be sticky and uncooked and although I had to risk offending my hosts I had to leave it at just half a spoonful.

Thankfully I had ordered for coke. One lesson I learnt from my meal the previous day at a Filipino joint was you got to have at least one thing on the table that you can eat/drink so you are not offered suggestions on what to try. I was intensely focused on the coke therefore and comfortably ignored some suggestions to make my food palatable. Despite all the pesticides and fungicides, the coke was blissful and when we walked out of the joint after 2 hours it was raining heavily and I felt terribly hungry.

MILLION DOLLAR SMILE

A stranger smiled at me in the bus this morning. In India, if a stranger smiles at you he will either be an LIC agent or a multi-level marketing guy. Mine happened to be the latter and to make matters worse he had a bad breath. He moved closer by pushing me to the window and slowly and unsuspectingly weaved a web around me and harped to his heart’s content about the MLM philosophy and how I can mint millions without moving my ass. One of the arts I have perfected over time is to look absolutely delighted when I am utterly bored and that makes me a star amongst the sales and marketing brethren.

I nodded happily as he chewed my ear with the quality and range of the products that I could in turn harp about in buses and trains to unsuspecting strangers. His bad breath was making it tougher and tougher for me to continue my grinning and maybe he mistook that as undecidedness and he promptly opened a bag which was as unsuspecting as him. He pulled out a torn magazine and having been subjected to forced classes on MLM before I instantly recognized Sagayamary and Paulraj who my torturer claimed paid an IT of 35 lakhs last year and left it to my imagination on what kind of money they minted.

He then went on to pick samples of the products that we could sell and to my utter delight one of them was a mint mouth spray. I was seriously hoping that he would spray some of it in his mouth and blow on my face like a toothpaste model but to my disappointment he chose to spray it on my palm and made me smell it. Fuck you stranger. For the first time that morning I felt happy for the simple reason that I was not traveling with him the whole day to a godforsaken place. He sensed that his prey would be off his claws any moment now and scribbled his mobile number on a piece of paper and offered it to me. I promised to call him one of these Sundays when I felt like smelling some bad breath from close quarters and jumped off the bus even before it stopped. Paulraj, you should seriously consider telling your clan to use more of that goddamn mint spray man.