New Year Resolution!

Chasing the Monsoon

Working in a village, isolated from the world, I read Alexander Frater's 'Chasing the Monsoon' by the dying light in the evenings. I was transported to Thrangali, my tiny village by the River Nila in Kerala.
Our school breaks were in May-June unlike the other schools which had it in the hot months of April-May. So, June was always a lonely, dreamy month...My little brother and me, we learned to keep ourselves happy with such fantastic games of childhood, and also to dream in solitude. Towards the end of May, everyone would start grumbling about how hot it was becoming and if only the rains would come down to cool the earth...And then, on June 1st, inevitably by about midday...the distant sky darkens and down comes the large drops of the year's monsoon. Soon, the courtyard becomes a network of torrential streams, whirling past the high steps to the house. All morning, in anticipation of the rains we kids were rushing about with old newspapers making paper boats not wanting to miss the chance of sailing them over the rain streams.
That afternoon and the ones to come were spent happily racing our boats, fragile yet brave...All this play would surely end in a bath and a dance in the rain...
In the evenings, tired out from play I'd sit by the large windows with a favorite book in hand and daydreams...Weaving stories watching the rain, the fields and thinking of the swollen river across the railway line...
The evenings gradually creep in, darkening to darker shades of black...the dripping green foliage, the heady smell of freshly damp earth, the chirping insects setting up a chorus...No electricity...hopefully till the next day. The lamps are lighted...And the short lived white ants fly suicidally towards the lamps...
Then some wise guy from the evening 'sabha' at our house suggests making a bonfire in the courtyard so that all the tiny lives attracted by a bigger, glorious death rush over to it...I'd rather not, but my voice is tiny, sleepy and they want to go on discussing marx and parallel cinema and intellectual capacity building and small-scale rural industries without getting ants in their mouths...
I go to bed, and I sleep dreaming of a huge fire in hell(so I presumed) towards which lots of men and women are flying to...I start in my dream and the scene in my dream changes to a dark forest with a girl sitting under a huge red flowering tree...