Monsoon

Rain is God's touch. People may ask who, God is and what. I will not say anything, except that I don't know because, God is a language, which the one who knows that language, can only understand. Rain also is a language, thus; a language, which I love and live through. The life that I am talking about is not just the beating of a heart or breathing or the winking of eyes. These are just a few manifestations of life and not life. The meaning of life if not defined, would make it more meaningful. Life never ends. It includes the living presence of the body in interaction with similar and dissimilar things and circumstances, and also its death. Life continues to exist even after the death of the body. Life exists in the stopping of heart beats, struggling for breath, and in the permanently closed eyelids. These are some changes in the manifestations of life, representing a transformation. Just like what occurred in one rainy day with one of my students.

It had been raining for the last five or six days. Roads were flooded in many parts. There was water and water everywhere, in Malabar.

I was on my journey from the university to my home. It was raining heavily. And I was loving it. The road was flooded and water rushed everywhere, when the bus crossed the road. Water turned around, foamed, changed its colour, and pushed into the nearby courtyards and verandas of houses nearby. More and more water deluged into the road, as the bus moved past, swaying and slow, like a canoe through a disturbed sea.

I was in a very 'creative' mood. Each and every drop sprinkling on my face through the pores of the water covers of the bus, filled me with a divine spirit, as if being touched and felt by the supreme Being, the Almighty, God; an eternal referential, a language, and a truth.

When I reached home, it was almost dark. My mother was waiting in the veranda, for me, which was unusual. After asking some usual questions, like where were you this long and why, she confessed that she was upset and shaken.

"Don't you remember Mashood, the last year twelfth passed, he drowned, today."-And she sank into the sofa.

"Dead!"-I turned to her in shock.

"Yes. He was said to be playing in the nearby paddy fields with some kids, and there was water neck deep. He was caught into a trench, amidst the field."

"Didn't he know how to swim?"- I was in a bewilderment.

"No, he didn't. They were small kids, with him, and could not save him."-Mom was almost exhausted by the weight of the pain that she was enduring.

She owned a school. Mashood was one among the previous year's batch of twelfth standard students. I too had taught there, and he was one of my best students.

For a teacher, his students are his wealth, power and pride. And I lost my wealth, my power and my pride. For especially, it is the case with Mshood, that was a loss. He was a good student, one that fits apt for the title of "ideal". He was good at studies and was equally good at games. He had those powerful arms of which I used to feel proud. He was tall, and had height almost equal to me. I think, six feet.

I imagined, him inside the water. My student, my child, struggling to push himself up, on to the surface, pulling out his legs from the clutching mud in the trench; struggling his last moments to get his breath, and nostrils getting filled with water; realising in the fraction of a second that something is happening--a change;a transformation, from one form of existence to another, which no one in their biologically alive body has not yet experienced.

He died. That moment was not a sad one. But a happy moment since he; my student has learned and experienced something beyond his student-hood can ever give him in school. I am not sad. But it is painful since I can never see him again in his biological body, in which everyone used to identify him as Mashood.

He will be understood only through a different language now, like the language of rain...or of God.
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I dedicate this article to the loving memory of my dear student Mashood...

May God bless his life to be a successful and satisfied one.

May his soul rest in peace.

Love.