The external nature gets colored by our subjective feelings. That’s why, different seasons evoke myriad variety of feelings for even any two given persons. But even then, certain feelings remain somewhat common and recognizable in nature, just because of the ‘collective’ aspect hidden in them. As a child I loved the rains: the overflowing streets to dunk our legs halfway deliberately in gutter-water on the way back from school; the ‘speed-boat’ race of our competitive rickshaw-ferries that elicited squeals of laughter and excited shrieks….didn’t find any logic then as to why the parents got so angry with the splash that drenched us. The luxury of a ‘rainy day’ is what I dearly miss as a teacher in college now. The perfect icing to a rainy day happened if there was a major power-cut, which provided the much-coveted relaxation from the stringent study-schedule, thanks to no-generator times of our childhood. The evening then became a toast to the gothic creativity of my mama…who unspooled his endless treasure of bhooter golpo, and actually brought live the impossible world of evil phantasms in the shadowy-yellow ambience of the flickering candle-light. He considered it a tribute to his ‘evil genius’ when even a silent tap on the shoulder sent me and my brother to freaked-screams of luxuriant-dread. The khichudi and hilsa fry used to be the cult dinner-items to mark the closure of such rainy days, though I doubt how much of that love for the same is left in me after surviving the trauma of the namesake, yellow-glob of khichdi in the hostel-years.
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