Saturday, September 05, 2009

Monsoon Mayhem - October 2, 2002

I was returning home. I didn't know monsoon had already flung in its full swing. There was hardly any sign of rain when I was leaving Delhi. The train had already pulled in the state of Bihar, and it was morning. I wondered why there wasn't warmth of the sun to wake me up.
There was a pristine outlook outside the windows. The paddy fields were all under water, seemingly an endless lake on both sides. No wonder the cloud had drawn a thick blanket and cast away the sun. There had been a heavy pour and that must have meant catastrophe, I couldn't help myself loosing in its beauty.

I have been perplexed by the vastness of the Ganges while crossing over the Farakka dam near Malda in West Bengal. While passing over the bridge, I could sense the danger of depth and coldness in the deep blue water. The river seemed to make horizon with the sky at distant, as though it would engross me into its infiniteness.
Thank God, at least these seemingly endless lakes weren't so. They were temporary.

But there was loss everywhere. While nearing Hetauda, I saw fields in level with the road. And the paddy like tiny grass outgrowths. The rain had washed away soil from the hills and filled up the fields. People were roofless, and they had barely managed to collect bits and pieces from their broken houses.
We had to walk about 3 km and cross Krishna Dhar to catch another bus. It was hard hit by river and there were large boulders on the crumbling road. It would be accessible only if the boulders were removed and the road restored. It was a walk under heat of the sun with quite a load on my shoulder, yet it was a wonderful small trek climbing those boulders.

When I was home one of my little kittens had been ill.

I had suffered a loss too. Delhi was a bitter experience. At the Canadian embassy in Delhi I was treated like a filth to be filtered. All my sincere effort towards my dream of attending a Liberal Arts College was drowned with the paddy under water, like the damage this monsoon had done.


It has been slow and creepy. I could hardly sense a dark cloak pulling up to eventually cover me into a world I had been trying to break free. I was terribly frightened by the very thought of the kind of world inside the veil after the tragedy struck its unkind arrow deep into my inner aspirations.

That is my Karma.

Well, it does communicate. The sequence of events, the situations, timings, everything adds up to that big picture of one's Karma.

1 comment:

Kumar Ale said...

but it is a joy to read 'Monsoon Mayhem', i am not very good in English, but I do know that this is nothing short of 'bitter sweet symphony'