“I will manage, you just take care of her,” He told his grandfather and he smiled in return. He was visiting his grandparents after almost a year. He wasn’t a guy who would visit his tiny village every once in a while. There wasn’t any railway station nearby, not even a bus stand. However, there was just one bus stop that somehow managed to stop two or three buses a day.
He checked his wristwatch and did a few calculations in his mind. He still had time. On his way, he bought a box of strawberries and filled his water bottle from hand pump. He had a thing for strawberries since first standard. He used to believe that they are candies and are manufactured in factories.
A breeze full of sand hit his face and he brought out his shades. He ate the red part of the strawberry and left the green leaves in the air. Sun wasn’t at its best, but was playing hide and seek with the clouds. The clouds were all grey and black. It could rain any moment. He reached the bus stop and almost leaned on the pole.
A humming distracted his thoughts and he turned around to find a girl. Hair tied neatly on the back of her head, he could manage to see her face quite clearly. With depth of black kohl in her eyes and the glow of pink on her lips, her face grasped his sight for a long while. Her ears held earphones that river down her waist getting lost in her denim’s pocket. His eyes traveled through the wire. She was beautiful.
He tried to get her attention by walking to the center of the road and looking far away to spot the bus. She ignored him completely.
He got some attention when it started to drizzle and he opened his umbrella. She plugged out her earphones and looked around for a shelter. There wasn’t any except the umbrella followed by an attention seeking stranger.
“Hi,” she tried to initiate a conversation.
“Hi,” He pulled out his shades. Shades in rain, not so cool.
“Can I?” She pointed at the umbrella and then at the sky.
He nodded.
“Thank you,” she said and ran to stand next to him. He looked at her from the corner of his eye. The beauty was magnified. She pulled out the rubber band from her wet hair and rolled it over her wrist.
“So, do you often come here to listen to the songs,” He looked into her eyes and smiled.
“No, actually I was going back home with my boyfriend. We had a little argument, it heated up a bit and he decided to push me out of his car. But, look he dropped me to a bus stop. How sweet of him,” She said sarcastically. She was all okay when she starting the sentence but was almost fuming when she completed it.
“Look at those clouds, how beautiful they are,” there were these dark grey clouds with silver linings, decorating the sky. “These clouds are same as humans. Not always white, not always grey.
Sometimes white, sometimes grey. And those who are grey, carry thunders along. They break into drops and fall sooner or later and become white again. Same is with human beings. They soak themselves with too much of feelings and emotions and become grey. They hold thunder in their hearts. When they become too heavy, they break down into drops and fall.”
The cracks in sky become bigger and the size of drops grew. He look around and found a box generally used to transport fruits. He places it near the road and then look around to find a stick. He found one.
“Can I have your hair bands?” He asked as a few droplets manage to slide down his cheek and neck.
She rolled out hairbands from her wrist and passed them to him.
He pushed an end of the stick in the soil and tied the umbrella on the other. The box was tiny but was big enough to accommodate both of them. They sat down and he opened the box of strawberries. He offered her and she pulled out one from the box.
“You have got green eyes,” she bluntly sliced the strawberry into two pieces with her teeth.
“Wow, and you have got a pair of black eyes…” He picked one for himself.
“Black are usual, green eyes aren’t,” she ate the second half of the strawberry she was holding.
“If you look at it this way, everything here is unusual. I have hardly visited this place twice in my life time. Same goes for you. It’s the fifth day of January. Have you ever seen a rainfall in January? I never carry an umbrella. It belongs to my dad. They left it here last year. It was his favorite so I picked it to surprise him. Not even a single thing should be here right now. Still, we are here, having strawberries in heavy rain under a yellow umbrella.”
“What else is unusual?” She was still lost in her eyes.
“And… If I have a choice to mark things unusual. I would say your eyes are unusual. It’s incredible how I can distinguish the black color of your eyes with the rest of the black colors in the world. Your lips, they are unusual because I have never seen any lips and then the very next moment imagined what kind of impressions they leave on everything they touch.”
“Damn! You are good…” she blushed.
“I will call myself honest,” he chuckled and they both laughed together.
The conversations didn’t end that day. They missed the last bus. It stopped right there in front of them. It even waited for them to tag along. They didn’t. The sky was stuffed with clouds, but they were seeing the sunset of their lives.
*****
A yellow Volkswagen beetle stopped in front of her building and he dialed her number. He came there to pick her. They were visiting the same village, the same bus stop once again. She had chosen the day they met to be the first day out of the five days she got. However, nothing was going as per her plan. He was already down and she had no clue what to do. Everything she had planned now seemed impossible. One just can’t plan the unusual.
Her phone rang. She was too scared to take the call because if today she failed, there won’t be any beginning to their story. There won’t be any Snowflakes in summer.
...to be continued...
-Himanshu Appie Chhabra
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