Rainy Evening

It was grey outside the window. Not the gloomy winter grey when hope starts to shatter only to be never lifted up and reconstructed. It was the season’s first shower, more precisely, the moment after the season’s first shower. Grey clouds hung over the streets and the trees on the sides and people. It was that time when everything looked clean. Trees without dust, people without rust, birds without silence and walls without crust. It felt cool outside when I decided to take few sips of the coffee and entered the next door coffee shop. I like French windows. It’s there where you get to feel the world outside without its trammels. So after having claimed my temporary ownership of a lousy chair by the French window, which by the way still had trails of water droplets gone by, I saw him. He entered the coffee shop drenched in rain, closing in his umbrella that was half his height. Droplets dripping through the drenched door.  I think when you are as drenched in water as he was, you tend to not notice the fact that it has stopped raining and that your umbrella has turned out to be utterly useless.

I stuffed my ear with noise-cancelling earphones and heard the tunes of a remarkable movie Lootera which I think is the most perfect movie ever made. I was roaming through the streets  of Shimla of the bygone era when I saw him sit on a tall chair by a tall table, the kind of chairs which you find in the bars on which people sit on Fridays and waste their money and themselves, all alone. I do not understand such people. I cannot fathom why someone would go out alone only to come back alone, struggling to insert the keys to their own house, alone.

I was out on the street when it started raining. People started to run under shelters by the roadside. Too many people. I threw the over-priced coffee bill after rolling it into a ball on the side of the road. It would be easier to shoot him at point blank with the silencer on the cold metal nozzle, when you have many people trying to save themselves from rain – bloody idiots – stuffing their filthy bodies into each other.  Although it will result in a big hullabaloo when he’ll fall on the ground with blood all over him and on the footpath, but it would give me ample time and the crowd ample confusion for me to escape. I went to him and was about to hand him his cell phone, with the gun and my right hand in my right pocket, when it vibrated with a humming tune and the picture of a girl appeared – she would have been 6 years old – on the screen. She didn’t have front teeth. The tooth fairy would have visited her on quick successions. I am sure it happened because she was smiling at me. When I was younger and smarter and much younger, my sister used to smile at me. And I used to smile back at her. Once I had scared the hell out of her by impersonating a monster with my eye-lids rolled inside out. She had screamed like there was no tomorrow and then I had rushed to her rolling back my eye-lids and had hugged her. And she – the most stupid person I have ever met on this Earth – had hugged me back tightly, crying. Once when she was in her first year of Pre-school, I had told her that if she brushed her face like our father brushed our shoes every morning with the black wax polish, she would shine just like the shoe. 5 years younger to me, she was. So, she shoe-polished her face, especially the cheeks when Daddy came in.

“Oh..Oh..Oh.. girl, stop right there. What do you think you are doing?” and then she expressed her desire to shine like her school-shoe and explained how she was engrossed in the whole process of achieving that objective. And also gave me the full credit of showing her the way.

Daddy came to me and said – “Mister. This is not the way to treat your sister. She is my little girl and yours too.” I thought he would hit me but instead he gave me the soap and asked me to take her near the bucket and wash her face. So, I washed her face, that toothless face. She asked me while I was washing her face – “Bhaiya..How is it possible that the same thing polishes my shoe but not my face?” – That stupid, stupid little girl. I was about to answer her when his phone started vibrating again.

“Dude.. You had left your phone at the coffee shop. Bloody take care of it!”

I walked back, on the street. It was still raining and I felt the weight of cold metal in my right pocket increase, as if it soaked water.