Rains during Ramadan evoke a strange feeling. A feeling which has nothing to do with the irony of being in a downpour while abstaining from drinking water during the day.
Unlike the torment of summers or the ease of winters, fasting during rains is strangely fulfilling. Not that the feeling is missed out during other seasons, but fasting during the monsoons fill you with a feeling of refreshment, of being replenished with what was missing, and being fed with what is needed to become fertile again.
Much like the way Ramadan is supposed to be for invigorating the faith residing in our soul.
Giving us what we need for beginnings.
It didn’t rain all the way to the airport; it just came to a halt as soon as we hit the highway. The potholes would never leave this highway. This used to be a single road without a divider, on which you would often have to get down on the kuccha to avoid getting crushed under an oncoming bus which was in a hurry to overtake a truck. Today it is a four lane highway, with a divider which has even been ‘beautified’ with patches of greenery planted by the road administration; after all, they charge a toll tax for this road now. If there ever was an irreconciliable undefeated land mafia which refused to leave its pieces of encroached land in India, it is the pothole.
A quick stop at the airport. Hugs. Kisses. Teary eyes. Khuda Hafiz.
On the way back, the only thing which I saw was green fields on either side of the road. It helped that it was a middle of the afternoon hour with hardly much traffic, so I could steal my eyes off the road and take large gulps of the freshness which surrounded everything.
Rows of eucalyptus trees with a dense green undergrowth, between which sometimes you would spot the boy from the nearest village holding out his arm with a polybag filled with jamuns. Normally, any Kanpur Lucknow road trip at this time of the year would involve stopping by at least one of these boys. Not today.
Beyond the eucalyptuses, all the eyes saw was green. I remembered how some elder in my family, maybe it was my naani, telling me about the properties of colors and the effect they had on our senses. Green was said to be cool and a giver of a sense of peace; this didn’t make any sense at the time. But one has to lose peace first in order to know what peace is. At thirty four, the eight year old boy finally got the best possible interpretation to make him understand the meaning of that lesson in color.
Green punctuated with pools of water. Some pools punctuated with the shapes of cattle whiling away a siesta, others empty, and one in particular filled with shoots and large leaves, occasionally marked with large pink and white buds waiting for the time to blossom into the fullness of their beauty. There might not have been a better place than here for Thom Yorke to break into a jig to the sound of “Lotus Flower”.
You wonder how far the greens go as they blend into the mist which takes up the far end of the spectrum. The foreground is too hazy to be comprehended because of the almost negligible relative distance. It is just the middle ground which is clearly visible. Just like memory and how we make sense of events.
Each memory with its own beginnings.
In many ways, this month has had its own share of firsts.
First Ramadan since I quit smoking.
First instance to have missed Taraweeh prayers on the first day of Ramadan.
First time in almost fifteen years to have spent Day 1 of Ramadan with parents.
My sister got on to a flight with her two years old son. To join her husband and start a fresh chapter in their lives together and make a new city their home.
Beginnings.
Some such should be in effect right now for the soul and faith. We’ll know when it reaches middle ground.