Rain, Rain, Go Away

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Droplets on a glass window
Captured by Avnish Bansal

The light in his room was still on. It was 3 a.m. He had been studying for his exam the next day, and was so anxious that sleep would not come no matter what he did to convince it to change its plans. He listened to chillout remixes (they were known to be of a sleep-inducing nature), closed his eyes, lay straight with hands crossed and gently rested over his stomach and pretended to float in mid-air and even imagined looking at himself sleeping through the eyes of someone perched on the ceiling of his room. Nothing worked. So, he had no choice but to remain awake and proceed to take another exam with a sleepless night behind it.

He couldn’t wait for it to be over. These exams had been going on for too long now and the first one, Mathematics, had been postponed so they would stretch even longer now. That meant preparing for it again. Once was burden enough; having to do it twice was unthinkable. He was infuriated when this had happened but there was nothing he could have done about it. Reluctantly, he started preparations for the next exam.

Two of those had passed without any unusual occurrence. Today was the third. It was raining heavily when he got out of bed. A bad start to the day, already. He hated rains, and this feeling was going to be intensified in the hours to come.

He hoped for the wretched rain to stop by the time he would leave for the exam, but staying true to its wretchedness, it didn’t. When he stepped out of the confines of his home, the rain stared mockingly at his helplessness. When he had read the poem ‘Rain Rain Go Away’ in kindergarten, he could never have thought that one day he would relate so much to it; its first two lines, specifically. It had seemed a pretty mundane poem, then.

 Rain, rain, go away.

 Come again another day.

He donned a raincoat; more to fulfill his mother’s wish to see him in a raincoat than to stay dry. He did hate getting wet, but wearing a raincoat was like submitting to the domination of the rain, which he could never imagine doing.

He divested of the raincoat as soon as he was out of any visual contact with his mother and frustratingly stuffed it in his bag. It was still pouring down when he reached the examination centre. His hair stuck to his forehead like the starfish stuck to the fish tank in Finding Nemo. He liked that movie, but right now his thoughts were as far away from it as they could get.

He had reached an hour early, planning to get a quick glance at everything before the exam began. He had just taken his book out after taking shelter in the building marked ‘Information Technology’ when he heard someone say, “Has the exam been cancelled, buddy?”

No. God, no, he thought. This shouldn’t happen. I have had enough of this crap already. One guy took out his phone and checked on the internet. Many others huddled around him to see for themselves if it was really true.

Hoping against everything for the news to be false, he stared back into the Electronics textbook but the words seemed to have no meaning at all. His thoughts were elsewhere and they couldn’t be put to rest until he had confirmed the news. So he made his way up a flight of stairs to the Exam Control Room. There was a group of students there too and the way they were standing looked like another phone-carrying guy was the cynosure of their attention. He joined the group.

“See, there’s the message from the university,” he showed on his phone’s screen. The guy was an official of the control room. His information had to be reliable. “The exam’s been postponed. It’s written on the website.”

True enough, there were the words, as mocking and apathetic as the rain.

He wanted to flail his hands in disbelief, break the glass windows that were hosting a raindrop race which would make all those raindrops fall to the ground (not that it would matter to them) and set his textbooks ablaze (the fire could hurt the rain before getting vanquished); but he realized he was in a social setting so he put on a mask of sanity and went downstairs, out of the building and straight into the rain.

Another reason to hate it. He couldn’t see how anyone could love it.

It caused huge inconvenience to everyone.

It caused accidents and deaths every year.

It was whimsical. It started and ceased as it pleased so no one would be ready for it.

Countless repercussions of its whims affected everyone, as one of them had just done. Apparently, the exam was postponed due to many areas in the state being flooded by rains.

All of those things were condoned by helpless people for one sole reason – sustenance. The wretched thing, however wretched it may be, gave something without which no one could live. It had people’s lives in its hands. They depended on it for their survival.

No wonder the rain was so whimsical.

No wonder it acted as it pleased.

No wonder it didn’t care about the aftereffects of its actions.

If something as colossal and powerful as rain couldn’t prevent its authority from getting to its head, what chance did puny humans have of remaining modest?

They ignored the limits of their influence when they exploited nature. Why shouldn’t the rain do the same?

He couldn’t decide who he should hate more: the wretched rain or those “prudent” fellow human beings of his.

-Avnish Bansal