Seeing how I’ve already laid the foundation for a nice rainy-day feel here, it seems that the only right thing to do is continue with the theme. The evergreen theme regarding rain. So, another story about the glory of rains it is!
Very early on in my life, my entire family and I had moved away to a little hick-town, because life in the city for so long started to get, well, disgusting. After all that terrible heat and pollution and what not, members of my family felt the need to run away from it all. So we got on a train, and landed in this aforementioned hick-town, where, with periodic interruptions, I spent my life so far. When we first got there, we were all still branded as the ‘city folk’, and being city folk, we bore a considerable ignorance about the ways of the Hick Town. The many new phenomena of the Hick Town like roads that resembled the surface of the moon, a curious thing called ‘power cuts’ and the such were greeted with a general feeling of awe, and later, with raging tempers. But the most profound phenomenon of life in the hick town was the frequent barrage of hail on our heads.
We reached the hick town promptly in time for the rainy season, only we didn’t know it was the rainy season. It didn’t even occur to us that it was possible for it to rain in the month of March itself, it completely blew us away. So as I was saying, we reached during, or rather, moments before the commencement of the rainy season. We entered into our new home, got everything unpacked, and began the long and arduous process of feeling at home. Then, we heard it: a crack of thunder. After that, the light pitter patter of astonishingly fat raindrops. We all quickly ran to the verandah to enjoy the breezes and the like, and then, to our bafflement, we saw small round pieces of something falling from above! We didn’t know what to think. Some thought it was Judgment Day; others sought solace in jumping to the conclusion that they were pomegranates, and so decided to eat them. Following which, it dawned upon us that it tasted uncannily similar to ice. Frozen water. What could these miraculous objects be, we wondered, that looked like pomegranates and tasted like ice? The answer was, of course, supplied to us by the head of the family, the Father, who used the word ‘hail’ to refer to those magical icy pomegranates. Hail, we learnt, was like frozen rain. It happened in colder places, like the hick town which was to be our home.
Now that was the first hail, and in effect, the first rain of the season. Having acquired the amazing and shocking information regarding hail, we prepared ourselves for the next hailstorm, which, if my memory serves me correctly, happened the very next week. By then, we had befriended a few of the local folks, who conveniently enough had children who were in our age group. They supplied us with the additional information that, in previous years, the hailstones used to be a hell of a lot bigger than what we had witnessed, big enough to kill a small animal even. This only helped to up our zeal for the next hailstorm, which occurred soon enough. As soon as we heard the unmistakable sound of ice hitting the roof, I ran outside and found these neighbour kids outside too, picking hail from the ground and popping it into their mouths like peanuts, so I did the same. Then, a loud crunch was heard. One of the neighbour kids started screaming with insane gratification, holding up a large piece of ice in his hand. It happened again, and again, till everyone was desperately scrambling to grab one and preserve it in their freezers for years to come.
However, it occurred to me that the chances of me getting into my possession any of these booster hailstones would be greatly increased on the terrace, so quick as a bolt, I ran up the stairs to the terrace. But on reaching there, however, I found a totally unexpected sight: my two brothers, clutching their stomachs in laughter. Curious, I went closer to them, and I saw in their hands, two ice-trays. This struck me as strange. What on earth could this sight of my brothers laughing and holding ice-trays possibly mean? I looked down at my hand, which held one of the booster hailstones which I had somehow managed to get. And I also saw that it looked a lot like an ice cube. In fact, I was a friggin’ ice cube! It all made sense then, beautiful sense. With not much left to do, I too clutched my stomach and began to laugh.