17th July 2014.
It was the day Delhi witnessed its first serious monsoon outing. I stepped out as usual on my way to the office in the morning. Dark clouds at once threatened me with their domineering tactics. They would engulf the sun, growl thunderously and even lighten up the sky with pesky exchanges with neighboring cloud bullies. I stepped back for a while, thinking whether I should take the bait. The clouds were battle-ready; they kept swooping on our skies. They were foreigners with booty collected from the Arabian Sea. With their ranks swelling with each passing minute, and their armaments trained at my head, I decided to stand up to their intimidation and dashed to my nearest metro station. I saw people scurrying back and forth like frightened squirrels. A man wearing a white vest courageously ferried his two kids dressed in similar white vests in a handcart. The metro station seemed like a fort, with pandemonium everywhere. I braved irate security guards and caught a train towards Gurgaon. There was silence inside the train, and it seemed that everyone was deep in prayers. I was hanging by my forefinger at the edge of the door. I wanted to console the people, and inspire them to stay hopeful. But there was hardly any space to even see. I was barricaded at three sides with human hands and backpacks. Slowly, a sense of impending doom began to gnaw at my heart. I felt constrained, confined and helpless. I fought with myself, I wanted to find a reason to hope. There were a hundred similar people like me in that train coach, all resigned to their fate. They knew that they had to face the 'forces' once the doors opened. We knew we had no choice but to flee or get drenched to the depths of our suits. Time slowed, and we waited.
Then the first blow was struck. The rain came in torrents. Our Japan-built metro train chugged on. It was fury at its dance. I teetered precariously between hanging onto my latch and bumping face-first into the woman in front of me, as the train juggled between tracks and speeds. The entire swarm of people in the coach swayed with the tide's momentum. We seemed on a roller coaster ride, only without the thrills and the shrieks. My station was now close by. I toughened up my resolve, and waited.
As the doors opened, we frantically ran to the exit doors to see if the rains had slowed down. I was free at-last, my mind was plotting and pruning once again. There was a roar of joy as people realized that the initial deluge had stopped. It was as if the curfew had been lifted off for a while. The clouds waited in the skies, observing all the brouhaha. People dashed hither and thither to their routes. I plowed through the milling crowd and caught a cab to my office. As soon as I was in, the clouds restarted their reign of terror and drenched a lot of innocent dry people. I watched them being mercilessly 'executed' on the bus stop and I could not do anything. The traffic slowed down to a crawl, and we waited.
When I reached my office, I had two options. I could've either waited like a coward in the guard's outpost for the rains to subdue or made a dash to my building like a true fighter. There were many people who were waiting there, shivering from the onslaught. Overcome by angst at all the things that had been going wrong in my life recently, and rejecting the suzerainty that nature had thrown upon me, I chose the latter one. With my umbrella held aloft like a shield, I slung my backpack on my chest like an army-man and charged towards my outpost. As if sensing my trajectory, the rain slanted to meet my direction of flight. With a mighty tug the downpour hit my umbrella head-on, but I soldiered on. I ran with my eyes on my goal, my feet splashing the water all around, and my glasses becoming increasingly blurry. I reached my building, the sky bellowed, and I smiled, having won my first round. But I knew it was not over, and so I waited.
I kept myself preoccupied the whole day. People had turned out in low numbers, and the place wore a deserted look. I did not want to think about what was waiting for me out there. Still, news about the havoc the sudden monsoons were wrecking kept on trickling down to me. Someone would mention it casually in the next bay, and my ears would suddenly become hyper-aware. People would be discussing it over lunch and I would want to run away. It seemed I was experiencing 'combat stress reaction'. As the day wore off, my anxiety crescendoed, and I waited.
Finally, the moment arrived. I gathered every ounce of my resolve, and reached the gates. The sky wielded a ghoulish dark hue, challenging my very ego. There was water everywhere, it was on people's palms when you shook their hands, it was on treetops when you peered out of your window, and it was on my glasses. It seemed that everything was finally finding its destiny, and getting slowly dissolved into the ethereal oneness of water. I looked around, and could only see harried faces -- people who were frantically searching for cellphone signals and waiting for the rains to end. I clicked open my umbrella, donned my cap, slung my backpack on my chest and out I ventured into the battlefield. I was greeted with thunderous lightning. For a split second, I doubted myself -- after all what was I in front of the elements -- but then I remembered the morning, and strode forwards with renewed vigor. I had to win, and I had to find why. But my wait was soon going to be over, for there was someone waiting for me at the corner.
As I walked towards the exit, I saw someone waving at me. My foggy glasses were inhibiting my vision, but I quickened my pace. Slowly more features came into view: long hair, thin jeans, a handbag, but no umbrella -- this was a woman in distress. She was gesturing to me, requesting to take her under my umbrella. As I came nearer, her face cleared up, and something deep within me churned. She had the face of an angel. The water over my glasses acted like a low-pass filter -- hiding all sharp details -- and she seemed straight from the land of the morning dew. I walked up to her in a trance, and took her under my umbrella murmuring, `Sure'.
`Hi, I am Mihika. I am so relieved that you came by. I would have been totally drenched,' she said.
`I am Dhruv. Would you be going towards Dwarka?' I tried my luck somewhat dazedly.
`Oh are you going there too? Thank God! I have to reach there urgently. You see my cat is very ill, and I have to reach there as soon as
possible,' she parried on, looking distracted.
`I am sorry to hear that, and frankly the chances of you reaching soon look bleak, but we can try,' I looked earnestly into her eyes.
We made eye contact, she started, and both of us smiled. It gave me goosebumps, but the weather hid it away. We reached the exit, but there was no cab in sight. Muddy water had engulfed the road, and the elevated sidewalk was barely visible. There was no let-up in the precipitation. We waited at the gate for a few more minutes, and finally a cab arrived. But the driver was not willing to go towards our place, as there was a terrible traffic jam on that route. She looked at me almost pleadingly. I felt as if it was my duty to deliver. I said, `Okay. We can walk up to the main road and with any chance, we would get a shared auto, but the jam is real and we may not get there before three hours.' I checked my phone and the map application showed red lines on my route. It was as if the city was bleeding out of its arteries due to the relentless pounding it had endured. And so we -- huddled under my small umbrella -- started walking tentatively on the sidewalk.
The rains had made a river out of the road. Sometimes a car would emerge and slush through the water, its engines complaining. Its passage would create waves and the sidewalk would briefly be underwater. We would jump ahead to escape the crest of the oncoming wave, but would get drenched anyway. She would laugh at the smallest such incident, and tell me more about her life. That she was in the technology department like me, that she was a newbie here, and how much she loved her cat. I would chip in with a joke or two, but would listen with rapt attention to all that she wanted to talk about, and would take care that we navigate carefully the tricky parts of our extremely skewed `road'. There was a construction site in our path which had some temporary huts for laborers. Ragtag children were out bathing and playing in the water. Some shirtless men were also enjoying the monsoons. Who could say anything of their misery at that time? They were literally swimming in bliss.
`Wow, I wish I could be as uninhibited and carefree as they are!' she exclaimed on seeing them.
`You could be. But it comes with a price -- the price which comes with only living in the present. You would be open to all kinds of risks, and nobody wants that, because everyone wants to play safe,' I mused.
We agreed, and she started telling me stories about how when she started her career, she was too timid to follow her dream, which was of becoming a chef. Instead, she chose the safe option of engineering on her parents' insistence. She seemed in a fragile mood, and I sensed that she wanted to talk, so I let her. I imagined that even the clouds were not being as noisy as before, only so that I could hear every word that she uttered. We came to the main road, and after a while were able to get into a shared cab. Even though we were now not alone, we continued to talk in the same vein. Somehow it did not feel weird, and we were able to connect instantaneously.
As expected, the cab got stuck in traffic after a while, and even though we were only at some twenty minutes' walking distance from the metro station, our small vessel seemed marooned in the water-logged road. The sky juggernaut was still raging on. I felt defiant against its designs, and suggested to her that we proceed to the station on foot. She said, `I am always up for doing something adventurous!' Our fellow passengers looked at us incredulously, and giggling, we set off on the pavement once again, cozy under the umbrella.
`I love to do things without plans. In-fact I have never been able to follow a single plan in my life!' she chirped.
`That could be really exhilarating. Planning is so non-fun. But then failing is also non-fun. I, for instance, am the exact opposite of you. If I just act on my impulses and intuition, I would feel I am not giving my hundred percent. And that would certainly keep me awake at nights!' I replied.
`But what good is a life which is full of worries of the future and stress of executing plans? You can never be happy if your plans are not succeeding, which they most often are. Murphy's law says that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. What if you had *no* plans?' she sounded oddly sensible, even wise. I had to agree that perhaps being too method-oriented isn't always fruitful. We could sometimes cut ourselves some slack and acknowledge that everything won't always be in our control.
Time seemed to fly by and soon the metro station beckoned to us. We caught a train and were able to get seats. I was now dreading the time of our separation. We hadn't even exchanged numbers yet, but already a deep friendship had taken roots. She also seemed distracted now that it was time to part. A minute before her stop, I finally summoned my guts to ask her, 'Would you mind sharing your number so that we could keep in touch?' To which she replied, `Of course!' and scribbled her number on my hand hurriedly. I almost felt as if she was waiting for me to ask. I quickly saved her number in my phone.
The doors opened and she left at-last. I kept watching her go. Our eyes met once again, and I felt acutely aware of the two of us. That moment seemed to hang in a vacuum. It was the sum-total of our togetherness. Even today, I could relive our entire journey when I remember that instant.
I felt intensely aware of my loneliness now that she was gone. The rain had finally stopped, and as I stepped out at my stop, I wondered whether all of this was a plan of someone high up in the skies, now having a quiet laugh. With all my posturing and defiance, I could not have imagined that meeting Mihika would be the end result of this ordeal. When I set out in the morning, I hadn't an inkling that my life is going to change today, maybe forever. Now, as I walked past the glimmering leaves of the park trees in the moonlight, I missed her terribly, and I felt certain that she felt the same. I felt thankful that this world is uncertain, that there is an inherent unpredictability in nature. Love is perhaps a result of unpredictability.
It was the day Delhi witnessed its first serious monsoon outing. I stepped out as usual on my way to the office in the morning. Dark clouds at once threatened me with their domineering tactics. They would engulf the sun, growl thunderously and even lighten up the sky with pesky exchanges with neighboring cloud bullies. I stepped back for a while, thinking whether I should take the bait. The clouds were battle-ready; they kept swooping on our skies. They were foreigners with booty collected from the Arabian Sea. With their ranks swelling with each passing minute, and their armaments trained at my head, I decided to stand up to their intimidation and dashed to my nearest metro station. I saw people scurrying back and forth like frightened squirrels. A man wearing a white vest courageously ferried his two kids dressed in similar white vests in a handcart. The metro station seemed like a fort, with pandemonium everywhere. I braved irate security guards and caught a train towards Gurgaon. There was silence inside the train, and it seemed that everyone was deep in prayers. I was hanging by my forefinger at the edge of the door. I wanted to console the people, and inspire them to stay hopeful. But there was hardly any space to even see. I was barricaded at three sides with human hands and backpacks. Slowly, a sense of impending doom began to gnaw at my heart. I felt constrained, confined and helpless. I fought with myself, I wanted to find a reason to hope. There were a hundred similar people like me in that train coach, all resigned to their fate. They knew that they had to face the 'forces' once the doors opened. We knew we had no choice but to flee or get drenched to the depths of our suits. Time slowed, and we waited.
Then the first blow was struck. The rain came in torrents. Our Japan-built metro train chugged on. It was fury at its dance. I teetered precariously between hanging onto my latch and bumping face-first into the woman in front of me, as the train juggled between tracks and speeds. The entire swarm of people in the coach swayed with the tide's momentum. We seemed on a roller coaster ride, only without the thrills and the shrieks. My station was now close by. I toughened up my resolve, and waited.
As the doors opened, we frantically ran to the exit doors to see if the rains had slowed down. I was free at-last, my mind was plotting and pruning once again. There was a roar of joy as people realized that the initial deluge had stopped. It was as if the curfew had been lifted off for a while. The clouds waited in the skies, observing all the brouhaha. People dashed hither and thither to their routes. I plowed through the milling crowd and caught a cab to my office. As soon as I was in, the clouds restarted their reign of terror and drenched a lot of innocent dry people. I watched them being mercilessly 'executed' on the bus stop and I could not do anything. The traffic slowed down to a crawl, and we waited.
When I reached my office, I had two options. I could've either waited like a coward in the guard's outpost for the rains to subdue or made a dash to my building like a true fighter. There were many people who were waiting there, shivering from the onslaught. Overcome by angst at all the things that had been going wrong in my life recently, and rejecting the suzerainty that nature had thrown upon me, I chose the latter one. With my umbrella held aloft like a shield, I slung my backpack on my chest like an army-man and charged towards my outpost. As if sensing my trajectory, the rain slanted to meet my direction of flight. With a mighty tug the downpour hit my umbrella head-on, but I soldiered on. I ran with my eyes on my goal, my feet splashing the water all around, and my glasses becoming increasingly blurry. I reached my building, the sky bellowed, and I smiled, having won my first round. But I knew it was not over, and so I waited.
I kept myself preoccupied the whole day. People had turned out in low numbers, and the place wore a deserted look. I did not want to think about what was waiting for me out there. Still, news about the havoc the sudden monsoons were wrecking kept on trickling down to me. Someone would mention it casually in the next bay, and my ears would suddenly become hyper-aware. People would be discussing it over lunch and I would want to run away. It seemed I was experiencing 'combat stress reaction'. As the day wore off, my anxiety crescendoed, and I waited.
Finally, the moment arrived. I gathered every ounce of my resolve, and reached the gates. The sky wielded a ghoulish dark hue, challenging my very ego. There was water everywhere, it was on people's palms when you shook their hands, it was on treetops when you peered out of your window, and it was on my glasses. It seemed that everything was finally finding its destiny, and getting slowly dissolved into the ethereal oneness of water. I looked around, and could only see harried faces -- people who were frantically searching for cellphone signals and waiting for the rains to end. I clicked open my umbrella, donned my cap, slung my backpack on my chest and out I ventured into the battlefield. I was greeted with thunderous lightning. For a split second, I doubted myself -- after all what was I in front of the elements -- but then I remembered the morning, and strode forwards with renewed vigor. I had to win, and I had to find why. But my wait was soon going to be over, for there was someone waiting for me at the corner.
As I walked towards the exit, I saw someone waving at me. My foggy glasses were inhibiting my vision, but I quickened my pace. Slowly more features came into view: long hair, thin jeans, a handbag, but no umbrella -- this was a woman in distress. She was gesturing to me, requesting to take her under my umbrella. As I came nearer, her face cleared up, and something deep within me churned. She had the face of an angel. The water over my glasses acted like a low-pass filter -- hiding all sharp details -- and she seemed straight from the land of the morning dew. I walked up to her in a trance, and took her under my umbrella murmuring, `Sure'.
`Hi, I am Mihika. I am so relieved that you came by. I would have been totally drenched,' she said.
`I am Dhruv. Would you be going towards Dwarka?' I tried my luck somewhat dazedly.
`Oh are you going there too? Thank God! I have to reach there urgently. You see my cat is very ill, and I have to reach there as soon as
possible,' she parried on, looking distracted.
`I am sorry to hear that, and frankly the chances of you reaching soon look bleak, but we can try,' I looked earnestly into her eyes.
We made eye contact, she started, and both of us smiled. It gave me goosebumps, but the weather hid it away. We reached the exit, but there was no cab in sight. Muddy water had engulfed the road, and the elevated sidewalk was barely visible. There was no let-up in the precipitation. We waited at the gate for a few more minutes, and finally a cab arrived. But the driver was not willing to go towards our place, as there was a terrible traffic jam on that route. She looked at me almost pleadingly. I felt as if it was my duty to deliver. I said, `Okay. We can walk up to the main road and with any chance, we would get a shared auto, but the jam is real and we may not get there before three hours.' I checked my phone and the map application showed red lines on my route. It was as if the city was bleeding out of its arteries due to the relentless pounding it had endured. And so we -- huddled under my small umbrella -- started walking tentatively on the sidewalk.
The rains had made a river out of the road. Sometimes a car would emerge and slush through the water, its engines complaining. Its passage would create waves and the sidewalk would briefly be underwater. We would jump ahead to escape the crest of the oncoming wave, but would get drenched anyway. She would laugh at the smallest such incident, and tell me more about her life. That she was in the technology department like me, that she was a newbie here, and how much she loved her cat. I would chip in with a joke or two, but would listen with rapt attention to all that she wanted to talk about, and would take care that we navigate carefully the tricky parts of our extremely skewed `road'. There was a construction site in our path which had some temporary huts for laborers. Ragtag children were out bathing and playing in the water. Some shirtless men were also enjoying the monsoons. Who could say anything of their misery at that time? They were literally swimming in bliss.
`Wow, I wish I could be as uninhibited and carefree as they are!' she exclaimed on seeing them.
`You could be. But it comes with a price -- the price which comes with only living in the present. You would be open to all kinds of risks, and nobody wants that, because everyone wants to play safe,' I mused.
We agreed, and she started telling me stories about how when she started her career, she was too timid to follow her dream, which was of becoming a chef. Instead, she chose the safe option of engineering on her parents' insistence. She seemed in a fragile mood, and I sensed that she wanted to talk, so I let her. I imagined that even the clouds were not being as noisy as before, only so that I could hear every word that she uttered. We came to the main road, and after a while were able to get into a shared cab. Even though we were now not alone, we continued to talk in the same vein. Somehow it did not feel weird, and we were able to connect instantaneously.
As expected, the cab got stuck in traffic after a while, and even though we were only at some twenty minutes' walking distance from the metro station, our small vessel seemed marooned in the water-logged road. The sky juggernaut was still raging on. I felt defiant against its designs, and suggested to her that we proceed to the station on foot. She said, `I am always up for doing something adventurous!' Our fellow passengers looked at us incredulously, and giggling, we set off on the pavement once again, cozy under the umbrella.
`I love to do things without plans. In-fact I have never been able to follow a single plan in my life!' she chirped.
`That could be really exhilarating. Planning is so non-fun. But then failing is also non-fun. I, for instance, am the exact opposite of you. If I just act on my impulses and intuition, I would feel I am not giving my hundred percent. And that would certainly keep me awake at nights!' I replied.
`But what good is a life which is full of worries of the future and stress of executing plans? You can never be happy if your plans are not succeeding, which they most often are. Murphy's law says that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. What if you had *no* plans?' she sounded oddly sensible, even wise. I had to agree that perhaps being too method-oriented isn't always fruitful. We could sometimes cut ourselves some slack and acknowledge that everything won't always be in our control.
Time seemed to fly by and soon the metro station beckoned to us. We caught a train and were able to get seats. I was now dreading the time of our separation. We hadn't even exchanged numbers yet, but already a deep friendship had taken roots. She also seemed distracted now that it was time to part. A minute before her stop, I finally summoned my guts to ask her, 'Would you mind sharing your number so that we could keep in touch?' To which she replied, `Of course!' and scribbled her number on my hand hurriedly. I almost felt as if she was waiting for me to ask. I quickly saved her number in my phone.
The doors opened and she left at-last. I kept watching her go. Our eyes met once again, and I felt acutely aware of the two of us. That moment seemed to hang in a vacuum. It was the sum-total of our togetherness. Even today, I could relive our entire journey when I remember that instant.
I felt intensely aware of my loneliness now that she was gone. The rain had finally stopped, and as I stepped out at my stop, I wondered whether all of this was a plan of someone high up in the skies, now having a quiet laugh. With all my posturing and defiance, I could not have imagined that meeting Mihika would be the end result of this ordeal. When I set out in the morning, I hadn't an inkling that my life is going to change today, maybe forever. Now, as I walked past the glimmering leaves of the park trees in the moonlight, I missed her terribly, and I felt certain that she felt the same. I felt thankful that this world is uncertain, that there is an inherent unpredictability in nature. Love is perhaps a result of unpredictability.
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