Rain Diary

Orchir was born on the 24th of Boishakh. It was just after noon that the rain came pelting down. In that rain the mango trees at the bend of the road at Shantinagar and the single-storey house dissolved to become as one. By the time one came to the verandah on this side from the other side it was like the Meghna-Jamuna crashing headlong into each other. A household's daily life supposedly has its portion of tears. Compared to human tears the raindrops were like well-buckets. And in the month of Chaitra came Agniborna--Orchir's daughter. The sky was clear the day she was born, when Bangladesh had bloomed. That day was the day Bangladesh was born. That girl is now four years old. She can smell the rain's scent. Suddenly she'll sniff the air and say, "I smell rain." Even the ants know about the coming rain. Even when all around is nothing but a desolate sunshine, when not even scraps of cloud can be seen in the sky, one will spy columns of ants marching on floors or up walls. Sure enough, not even an hour goes by when suddenly a shadow settles on the earth, darkness walks in from all sides, and then the dense rain. Are they twins, these children and insects who can foretell rain? Or do they simply sense it, pick up the scent or some change in the wind or in nature? Our Tara Miah, on the other hand, can't foretell a damn thing. Like the bullock tied to a stake beside the hayrick. Even as the rain slants down Tara Miah would muse, "Ah, I suppose it's finally coming down, eh?" The bullock would be placidly chewing cud with the rope slung around its neck -- but then, was it its job to explore life's boundless mysteries?
1. Ah, this rain, its varied turns, its myriad whirligigs. Its many qualities and characteristics -- rain that ranged from the weak poseur to the musclebound! From dark to fair, rich-poor! There is bazaar rain, there is rain that is home-bound. Just as there is a singing rain, there is too an actor rain. Sweet rain and bitter rain. Hot 'n spicy mingling with sugar 'n sweet to dance in a trance, and then, not in a trance. And outside of these is also rain wrapped within cats and dogs, fishes, and kadam flowers. And how can we not also talk about rain for sleeping, rain of desolation, flower rain, rain with flowing hair?
Even as we name all the above, leaves become wet, umbrellas bloom -- crows alight on clouds that flounce. The rain of memory strips away husks, and sap and juice flows from sinew and fibre.
The rainy season. The floodwaters did not even spare the yard. One more push, one more heave and the waters will overflow into the house. What was my age then -- perhaps seven or eight? With noon overhead the rain comes down. Big drops of rain fall onto the yard's cloudy water like parched rice popping and crackling on the hot pan on the stove. Oh what joy! Its fall, its grace, billowing across the yard, running beyond the shed and sweeping across the breast of open fields to lose itself in the horizon. With the arrival of the rains Suruj, the son of our Tara Miah, also disappears. Returning alone in a shallow-dredge boat unable to control the pole the ten-year-old boy can't sound bottom. The empty boat comes back laden with the rain's tears.
2. The rain is racing. It comes panting out-of-breath from the depths of a blue-and-white Ashwin month; restlessly it touches mouths and hair. To a school-bound boy sitting on a boat's wooden deck to feel it is something out of this world. Before one can sift or touch it, the rain sprints over the heads of cornfields to lose itself in the middle of lakes and beels. The hide-and-seek of sun and rain means that all colour contained in drawing pencils is to be exhausted. This is precisely what happens one holiday afternoon. Rice to be eaten on a plate is forgotten while pages are filled with raindrops. It lives on for a very long time within my heart, in the irises of my eyes. Isn't it still there?
3. On my back is the geography-arithmetic of Class Eight. No sooner do I pass the police lines that there is crackling thunder. Before I can barely collect my wits, fat drops like river otters start to crash down on my head. Books along with clothes begin to get wet. Even though I take shelter beneath a roadside tree the collected water on leaves splash down as if in reply to an insult. The melee of wind and water starts my teeth clattering against each other as I reach home only to see my temperature creep past the thermometer's red line. After that I don't remember anything. Except that my schoolbooks had to be bought all over again that year.
4. Even though the rains during my college years gained in insolence yet by that time I too have become more self-assured. Even though black clouds, muddy clouds, red clouds, grey clouds tossing around make me restless, yet some last-minute strategy for salvaging myself is there at hand: a leap into the shelter of the nearest tea stall, the unfolding of a rickshaw hood, or an braced umbrella's fenced-in space preserving the part in my hair and the creases of my shirt. And if the rain does manage to invade this space, well, then, who can ward it off then? There I am on the grassy playing field all bollocks-ends up! Can I wash away that embarrassment with the rain? Even today when I remember that young woman's glance with its mix of amusement and curiosity I feel a tingly rush in my chest!
5. Wrapped up in the rain's balance-sheet are tea and shingaras, parched rice, lentils - even ilish fish. The belly of the frying fish being turned over as I get wet on the way from then EPUET to New Market. On one side is Polashi girls school, and Eden Girls' College somewhere in the middle. Sitting in a rickshaw getting wet returning in high spirits from viewing 'Number 13 Feku Wastagar Lane,' there is no rush of traffic to contend with. The spewing rain forces the fire hose, the pipe of Liaquat Hall, to transform itself into the neighbourhood property water tap. The mail lying in the mailbox flies away merrily, the potted plant in the verandah forgets about modesty and washes its body. The peon turns back without distributing the money order's cash. The street vendor in front of The Azad's office is admitted into the hospital's emergency room when the electric wire over him snaps. And sensing an opportunity, the dining hall's white stray cat gives us a gift of two black kittens.
6. A full-blown rain, black rain, oh, 1971's red rain. No sooner has Boishak begun than the swine are chased and fall down in the mud. With the rain's spitting in their noses-mouths they raise their gun barrels, but no bullets come out. "What a beating the scorpions were given," the folks say, "like stupid fish slapped down in the rain's cot." During these days of agony, in the midst of raindrops, in that wind and rain is the fragrance of kadam flowers. The rain is the weapon of protest, of rebellion. I am given to understand that this is The Year of The Rain.
7. It rains not only in Baghdad but also in Kuala Lampur. The flavour of rain in Baghdad is different: boiled chicken without oil or salt. Wrapped up in winter, the sky there thickens to rain down tiny drops on date-palm leaves, to drip on sand. Like a baby's nasal cry -- whining on and on. Pour some arrack juice on this rain in foreign land, and it heats up. Nothing is at a standstill there: with a whoosh and a roar out comes a Fiat, a Caterpillar bares its teeth to bite on metal, stone and tar kiss each other, Nature rent asunder and torn apart by machinery. It is as if even the dinars bow down to the wind and rain. While in Kuala Lampur the rain washes away misery and bitterness. The palm trees' bile is washed clean by the cooling rainfall. As the stomach is cooled by 'nasiam' and 'teh o liman ais' there is a brisk run on raincoats and umbrellas. The difference between rain in the Middle East and Southeast Asia from the swaying of luxuriant palmyra fronds to betel nut leaves is monumental.
8. Day after day the weather office plays hide-and-seek with the rain. A depression, the onset of the monsoon -- the change in Nature's fashions amid the hullabulloo of our national life - in place of sunshine it is as if the rain grimaces and grins, or pours knee-deep waters on our streets where boats have to ply. Starting with the telephone lines giving away, the taps, the gas lines gone going gone, all the way up the line to schools and courts, all downed. The cloud cannons fire boom boom, big huge drops with hail the size of sour karmachar fruit - as if every day there is a change in garlands. Its force - the northern wind's triumph, the rain's silver slivers - tosses tin roofs and bales of hay helter-skelter, uproots crops. Oh, the role of the sun as brother to the rain is immeasurable -- so much so that rice being eaten may dry up in the throat!
9. It is amid the rain's toing-and-froing that our Tara Miah's hair turns white. The other day he remarks, "Oh, look what times are these! Chait's month's ended, Boishak's gone, Joishtho's almost gone, and yet nothing's been given. On the other hand, last year's Ashwin's flood was God's curse on us. Why blame the sky? What the earth sows the earth will reap. Greed, envy, vanity - the rain stands on the other side and looses pestilence on us. Doesn't the rain's to-and-fro mean that that our lives are coming to an end?"
10. Friends and foes are part of the rain's business. It's 'jol' falling down in Hindu rain, and 'pani' when it's Muslim downpour. In this 'jol-pani' conflict on the ground floor the poor rain ululates, while upstairs its azan calls the faithful to prayers. And is this the end of the fight? At the end, my friend, the rain's jol over one's head and the rain's pani beneath one's feet flow together to form the Ganga-Padma and tumble into the Bay of Bengal!
In this heated-up temperature, just as there is the fragrance of the rain-pine flower so too there is rain-corpse's stench. Rain during the day mixes with the night rain for sunrise and sunsets. It is the addition and subtraction of two droplets of heat and cold that makes up life. May rain be a symbol of flowers, the first, true principle of a cleansing bath!
Habibullah Shiraji is a well-known Bengali writer. Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.