A rain so different !

' Is life around lives is a real-life ?'. He thought, denied, and rewritten the beginning of his mind's cobweb. Nothing impressed him the way a rain could, but this day something else did, that too in midnight with the eyes partially closed.

Melange was a strange word to his vocab. Looking for the strange word wasn't the story at all. But he wanted to read the pages of that varied mixture, a collage. It was just a magazine, the one from his sister's college.

The beautiful covers of that book took him years back. Back to a half-lit press room where he spends days and nights of his own life. It was an effort, maybe above all the ones he did till the time. People around him also wanted to see the magazine coming out in time. In the end, it was done, with an irrevocable ending! The covers made him silent, maybe the way a 'man can't cry in public' effect. It was a palpable silence that slit through the mind.

He came back to Melange quick.

The colors were deep, just like the petals of a beautiful flower unfold, its beauty untold. But the content did not sprinkle fragrance to his senses. Unfortunate! What an odd combination. Maybe the way people are built, Melange also lit colors in-depth, without fragrance.

On its way through pages, stories, poems, and all those of its kind, the fingers stopped at MUMBAI RAINS. Now the city is in the picture. The place where he lived sometime back. The city that showed him racing trains for the first time! Mumbai! It's great, it's cheap, it's fast..to add are many, that it's a place you should go and see and feel.

But no memories came his way. Maybe he chose to differ this time. 

MUMBAI RAINS was short. He was happy. It's almost 2 in the morning. Eyes wanted a deep sleep. The magazine is full of colors, so is the story. She is playing with them, he thought. The story was never a craftsman's cake. But it was full of neatly executed imagery. That engaged him, just to see the rains in Mumbai.

The story remained calm in the middle of many odd ones. Maybe that made him read it deep, he guessed. As lines pass by he could see two ladies, not so drenched in that rain, speaking something common, yet hesitated. The picture of a city so big was seen, Streets, roads, flyovers, and the fast-moving crowd of Mumbai. A unique one.

What she said is right, " Lit and unlit, there are many places here where life goes on without much of a complaint. There is no silence. But suffocation and doubts. Doubts that makes every breath heavy." The way it was presented seemed so simple, but it was not. In three lines she summed up the city. The city so deep by herself.

The real rain was about to begin. Just as the story ended, those characters could not take a leave from him. He has seen them before. While he spent time in the streets. He placed himself in the middle of the story. ' Yes, I have seen that. I have observed. The bangles, the Mehandi, the aimless looks '. And for a moment he thought that this was the odd one among that mixture. The real odd one!

It was similar to the way Orhan Pamuk wrote, "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed". And he wrote, ' Life around lives is the real-life'. The beginning of new writing. He saw the rain running down the windowpane. A breeze touched his forehead. Still awake he thought of the rains. The rains of life!

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- About a short story 'Mumbai Rains' by Lakshmi Das from the college magazine Melange: http://branch.valmeeki.com/5Rut/NCh8m8xhgy