Rains

As I look out the window,

of the metro train,

the journey I am a part of,

rather the sojourn is a part of me.

The monsoon is here alright,

the drops of rain show no mercy

as they pound the roof of my coach.

I sigh at the sight,

my station is a few minutes away.

I know the rains won’t abate

when the train pulls into my stop.

The files in my hand will be drenched,

the office reports I take home daily to read.

Oh and what about the chocolates

I got for my kid?

He sure won’t be happy

if I bring them home

as drenched as it can get.

My trousers, my wallet

everything’ll get wet.

I cursed the rain,

couldn’t you have come a bit later?

And I cursed myself,

for not taking my umbrella to work that morn.

My eyes fell on the girl sitting opposite my seat,

she had this charm in her eyes,

seeing the raindrops fall to ground.

And when I looked at her closely,

I realized it was someone I knew.

It was me who it was.

The only thing different from then

is the clock.

Rains were heaven-sent back in the days.

The first day of the monsoon

vivid in my memories,

as I used to run out of my house to get drenched,

the incessant scolding of my parents unheeded.

The sweet smell of the rain

and the total drenching in her glory

was worth the punishment to come.

Or so, was the thought.

Getting drenched on way back from school,

was a ritual as religious as any other.

There was never a question,

the umbrella tucked in my school bag

by a loving mother.

But the umbrella seldom used to get wet,

the drench was all absorbed by me with glee.

Notebooks and textbooks would get wet,

no, I did not care.

There’d be lollipops in the pocket,

that the raindrops would attempt to dissolve,

but never mind the rains,

the drenched lollipops never tasted any diminished

than their originals.

The train slowed approaching my station,

I awoke from my reverie.

The smile I had on my face

was as close it came to the monsoon glee.

But there still was the rain,

there still was a case for my office files to get wet.

Not to mention the chocolates in my pocket.

As I stepped out of the train doors

into the torrent,

the smile was gone

and all I was doing

was running to save the files and the chocolates

running to save them

from the gift of nature.

And running out the station,

leaving a carefree part of me far behind.

Yours Sincerely

Somewhere around high school I remember my English teacher introduced us to the “art” of letter writing. Those days - it was an academic exercise. Those different types of letters, where to write the “from” address, the “to” address, the subject line and all that. The intention was not to write a letter to a government official or to write a leave application to the school principal, the intention purely was to write an answer to the relevant question when it popped up in the English term examination. Make the English ma’am happy and your score-sheet will show up with a smiley face.

As a wide eyed kid, I still remember some of the finer nuances from those English classes. My teacher taught us to keep everything on the left margin of the letter - “from” address, “to” address, the date etc. My father used to write it the opposite way, in a lot of cases he used to put the date and place in the right side of the letter. As a twelve-year-old I have had arguments with my father trying to prove that my teacher was right and he was wrong and he should change the format he used. Aah those priceless days when the words of a teacher used to be the absolute sermon. Unquestioned and inevitably unerring! Poor my father, I’m pretty sure he would’ve smiled when I tried to “teach” him the ways of “modern letter writing”.

Oh, and the other thing, the ending of a letter. A formal letter was supposed to end with a “Yours faithfully” or “Yours sincerely”. On the other hand, an informal letter would end with “Yours truly” or “Yours lovingly”. I’m actually surprised I remember this much details about what I learnt in those English classes. I should’ve taken English literature or poetry and studied further. Instead what am I doing with life?

Little did I realize that what I learnt then would most likely end up to be proficiency in a dying form of communique. What used to be the art of letter writing, due emphasis on the word art, has now been denigrated to snail mail. Imagine that. Once the primary form of communication between son and parents, husband and wife is now collectively referred to as snail mail. The advent of electronic mail has blown to smithereens the “art” of writing a letter, it is now commonly referred as the “format” of an e-mail. I still use letters occasionally when dealing with government officials and banks in India. In fact, I cherish those times when I actually can touch pen on paper, write some lines in the prescribed format of an official letter and sign my name at the bottom, but such moments have become few and far between. I wonder in the future, some few years down the road, will I be using pen and paper at all for any practical purposes? When my kids reach high school, will they have a class covering letter writing? Let me surmise. Oh, they will most likely have a course about writing emails for formal and informal purposes. Some day he or she will probably come up to me, see me write an email and correct me, complaining that I am rudimentary in my computer skills! And my father, sitting beside me with a pen and paper in his hand, will have the smile of his life!

Aey Tee Yem!

ATM. Automated Teller Machine a.k.a Any Time Money. Also known more affectionately as daddy in college parlance.

A decade ago, around this time of the year I left home in the southern corner of India for college to a place far north. There were many challenges someone joining college, leaving his home and native state to a different region in a country like India. But at least one of them was not quite a problem - sending money through a bank. Thankfully, ATMs had started to make their way into India some half decade ago and by the time I was going to college, there were more ATMs than chai-sutta stalls in a locality. I cannot imagine going through college in a distant land without access to ATMs. Scary! Like those little weirdos of posterity will tell to each other about how they can’t believe their parents grew up in an epoch of time where there was no Google and Facebook. Ugh, did they even grow up?

So, ATMs. As with a lot of engineering systems, an ATM has, at least as far as the end user is concerned, has an input and an output. No, I’m not talking about the power supply as input and cash dispensing unit as the output, dumb! I’m talking about account deposit as input and account withdrawal as output! Yes, the account deposit happening in one corner of India most probably around dad’s payday and the withdrawal happening in a different corner of India in most cases on the same day, within a few hours. For practical purposes, the withdrawal happening on dad’s payday as well.

ATM was this often criticized but indispensable part of college life. An ATM could test you and taunt you as much as physically possible. I’ve had to stand in line outside the ATMs for over half an hour. I’ve had to do that in midday on peak summer days and in the midnight hours in the wintry December nights. I’ve had Murphy’s law conspire against me in all possible ways including and not limited to, this day when I stood outside the ATM waiting patiently for my turn for some time and when my turn comes, the machine stops functioning or goes out of cash. Or in another instance when I assume the money has been credited by dad only to stand in realize and check your balance to realize things haven’t moved from status quo for the past thirty days and just as you step out of the ATM your dad messages you saying he is on his way to the bank to deposit some money in the account and you look back and see a line that guarantees you another half hour wait. Aah, Mr. Murphy.

The first couple of days of a month are the busiest in ATM queues. But since your dad is adamant he’ll credit the money only around then, you are left with no choice but to get in line. The lines of credit which started from around the tenth of previous month to yesterday at various shops and establishments in and around the college campus are running perilously deep and your whole well-being (physically at least) depends on your ability to get some cash this day. This is the day you will, like Cinderella (or an equivalent male version) transfer from a pauper to a prince, which ideally would last you for the next ten days or so. Before your equilibrium swing takes you back to the pauper side of the spectrum.

Withdrawing from ATMs are also essential because of the limitations of swiping cards. Make no mistake, cards were accepted at a lot of restaurants, but your account statement is something which your dad has access to (God, is there no privacy in this world anymore?!) and he would be least impressed if he saw your most common points of purchase was in some bar or some smoke shop. To avoid that peril meant standing in the line, no questions asked.

I’ll end this article with an anecdote, an ingenious scheme a batch mate and a good friend of mine devised which is simply brilliant. He, as was the case of most engineering students, never had “enough” money. ATM withdrawals are generally possible only in multiples of hundred and this gentleman occasionally had his balance ending as Rs. 70 or Rs. 80, which meant even after his maximum permissible withdrawal, he’d be left with Rs. 70 or Rs. 80 in the account “unutilized” Necessity as they say is indeed the mother of invention and improvise certainly he did. ATMs had the feature to do an account-to-account transfer using registered mobile number. So this gentleman ended up transferring a Rs. 20 or Rs. 30 from some friend of his using their registered mobile number, withdraw the amount as Rs. 100 and return the amount transferred to the lender. Talk about rigging the system very very legally!