Volume 8 Issue #3
D ĂŠ ja v u
Uluru.................page 3
Harlem Blues ................page 4
A Killer Script................page
Saved by a Catapult........page 10
Bus 9...................page 11
The Black Flower...................page 15
Your Space...........................page 18
COVERS cover art by Eesha Srinivas back cover art by Aiyana Gopalan
Contributions for Raindrops are always welcome, especially art for the covers! If you'd like to send
The monk within monkey. Photography by Eesha.
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something, please contact us at raindropsmag@gmail.com (or contact the editor if you know her)
April 12, 2016 Dear Fellow Organisms, April was not my favorite month of the year. January, with it's mild climate; December, with it's chilly nights and misty mornings; September, with it's exuberant promises of festivals and timid ones of rain;all were fierce contenders, and April was, to say the least, nowhere in the picture.This is not a place where you dance about humming ' Sum, sum, summertime'. If you ARE dancing, the sweat will be pouring down your clothes and dripping off the end of your braid. Everyone around me, (including myself), is telling each other,' It's really hot!" I realized I was repeating those words over and over to whoever I met, regardless of the true temperature. Say it's too hot, hear it's too hot back, we're all in this together.In what together? I have no idea, 'cause soon as I'm old enough I'm OUTTA HERE!! Then, a few weeks ago, somebody mentioned they were glad that summer was here. I was quite flabbergasted. Summer? The plant-wilting, school-stopping,sweatpouring,scorching menace that banishes all your favorite people to some remote place until October? I would've regarded the said person in an I -don't-knowwhat-way and moved back to summer-blazing ( err, bashing ) but before that happened, I met a friend who was returning to her country the following day after 3 months in India."I'm saying how hot it is here, " she smiled," and soon I'll be moaning about the cold over there! There's always something...everywhere.." I couldn't believe being cold was that bad. But then again, I haven't been shiveringly cold in a long while. I suppose I'm lucky to live in this hot, and happy, place with it's 'ridicolours' climate and even more ridiculous people (Gotcha for April!) Ridiculous, specially when you're skyping with sweat dripping down your cheeks with a friend who has a wooly blanket about her shoulders. I may like summer eventually, but the heat is a different story. And, actually, what's summer without heat? Ok... gotta go sit in the a/c for a bit!
Peace from Pondicherry,
Eesha Srinivas Editor, Raindrops 2
T h e w a x i n g mo o n h a d r i s e n p a l e o v e r U l u r u , I w a t ch e d t h e r i p p l i n g cl o u d s o n t h e a r i d d e s e r t r o ck . A s h a d o w p a s s e d q u i t e n e a r me i t w a s a k a n g a r o o I t ma d e i t ' s s i l e n t mo o n w a l k t h r o u g h t h e s i l v e r y t r e e s . T h e mo r n i n g a i r w a s f r e s h a n d t h e s u n r o s e o r a n g e r e d I c l i mb e d t h e w a v y c o n t o u r s o f t h e a r i d d e s e r t s a n d s . T h e b u s h l a n d a l l a r o u n d me w a s p a r c h e d a n d d r y a n d d e a d . T h e a i r b e c a me s t i f l i n g a n d t h e r e w a s n o s e a b r e e z e T h e s a cr e d l a n d I ga z e d o n , a n ce s t o r s o f t h e e a r t h , T h e d r e a mt i me l e g e n d s l i v i n g h e r e a w a i t i n g r e b i r t h . I c l o s e d my e y e s a g a i n s t t h e s k y a n d d r e a me d a n o t h e r t i me . A n d a t t h a t mo me n t s o me t h i n g s t i r r e d a s i f a d a n g e r s i g n . S mo k e b e g a n t o c i r c l e a n d r i s e i n g r e a t b l u e i s h p l u me s I w a t c h e d l i v i n g t h i n g s e n c a s s e d , c r y s t a l l i z e d i n t o mb s . A n d t h e n t h a t mo me n t p a s s e d w h e n I t o o k a g r a i n o f s a n d , I w a s h o l d i n g t h e e n t i r e c o s mo s , i n o n e s ma l l h a n d .
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O THE FAMILY OF 312B The sun sets over the rickety roofs of Harlem, streaks of orange and pink across the sky as though a painter had haphazardly run his brush along it. People whistle as they jog down the cobbled pavements, work caps being pulled off rumpled heads as men make their ways home. In nondescript building after nondescript building, women push meatloaves and pies in and out of ovens. Children squeal in their runs up and down the gravel roads. All is as it should be, and in 128th Street’s redbrick building, in ground floor apartment 312b, it seems like a normal evening.If you stood on the peeling mint green wood of the porch and looked in through the floralcurtained window, you would only see a family settling down to dinner. Not an unusual sight anywhere in the world: four people sitting around their oaken dining table. The father sits at the head of the table, as is customary, and the mother; pulling an apple pie out of the rusty oven, laughs at something her daughter says. The son is helping himself to hearty servings of mashed potatoes, and now the husband is digging into the chicken placed before him with a ferocity that is attributed to men on battlefields. Piling her hair up onto her head and shrugging off her calico apron, the mother finally takes her seat at the table. Dinner conversation is casual; uneventful. Slowly, members of the family excuse themselves the son goes off to write ‘meaningful’ poems for his girl, the daughter runs to her room and pulls out her music sheets. The mother pulls out a stack of mail that they should sort through, but her husband tells her they’ll handle it tomorrow, because it’s Thursday and all such boring things are done on Thursdays or at least that’s what he insists. They head upstairs, arminarm, and all seems right with the world. Across the street, a woman pulls her shawl up over her greying curls. She shuts the curtains of her own dusty window, wrinkly caramel hands shaking, just after the lights in 312b flicker off. She smiles contentedly before her eyes begin drooping shut, her teak chair still rocking in the dark.
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Just as the ships begin to toot their horns in the harbour across the river, and orange begins to swallow up the darkness above them, the residents of 312b awaken the next day. Not all of them, of course the son lies in his room, snoring into his yellow bedspread. The girl is awake: she puts on her makeup, careful not to make it obvious enough for her parents to catch on, and rummages through her wardrobe. "What should I wear to school today?" she thinks. Back in the dining room, her father is rubbing his bleary eyes vigorously, earning himself a tuttut from his wife as he struggles to comprehend what is being said in the pile of letters before him. Placing a ceramic plate of steaming bacon on the table, the woman wipes her hands on her apron and takes a seat next to him. Opening, reading and sorting envelopes, she works at a mechanical pace and her husband chews on his bacon thoughtfully as he watches her. Their son comes out of his bedroom, quietly closing the door and placing a tiny lock on the door. The mother seems to have a problem with this, asking him what secrets he keeps that entail locking the door to his bedroom. "What’s in there that the rest of your family can’t see?" is her stern question. The son rolls his eyes and turns the key pointedly. His mother takes a deep breath, ready to let out another torrent of words, when she hears a gasp from the table. The husband is staring at one of the letters, eyes wider than she’d thought they could even be. She asks him what the matter is, and even the son is curious enough to stop his tantrum and find out. Just as the man of the house opens his mouth, a door slams elsewhere in the house. The daughter saunters into the living room, hair done and dress smoothed out, apparently unaware of the mounting tension in the room. She wonders what’s for breakfast, and is told to shut up by her brother. Their father continues speaking, detailing the offer he’s received in the letter before him. Their mother is unable to hide her surprise, despite expressing a sudden interest in cleaning the stove. The daughter’s eyebrows go higher and higher up her dark forehead as she, undoing the style she’d spent thirty minutes on, scrapes her hair into a comfortable ponytail. The son just stands agape, his earlymorning confused brain trying to take in this information, trying to grasp what this entails. His mother is apparently trying to scrub the stove into nonexistence, while his sister resumes her indifferent attitude and grabs a plate from the shelf. The husband meets his wife’s eyes and immediately asks his son to get him some stamps. At this time in the morning? His son yawns. Yes, the father replies, handing him three quarters and telling him to get whatever he wants with the change. The son laughs and says he can take a hint, stomping out the door without a second word. The mother turns to the daughter, handing her a casserole, and telling her to take it to the neighbours’. The daughter dazedly pulls on her slippers and follows her brother, waving goodbye to her parents as she steps out into the sunlight.
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" She smiles contentedly before her eyes begin drooping shut..."
To be continued... 6
He was of below average stature, small-framed with long hair, an unkempt beard and introduced himself to the class as a Yoga teacher. The thing I remember about him most vividly is that he usually wore a black T-Shirt and was the only one with a Macbook Pro for taking notes, while the rest of us used old fashioned notepads. Other than that he made absolutely no impression on me - I‛m not sure if we exchanged any words at all during the course of the week. Even if we did, they must have been inconsequential. It was an interesting mix of students. There was the young doodler with remarkable talent who I always shared a desk with and had long discussions about films. There was the writer for documentaries who I never got to know very well during class but became close friends with later. The playback singer for Tamil films who moved to New York and with whom I attended a Martin Scorsese workshop. The model-looking engineer/MBA graduate, unhappy with corporate life, happiest as a drummer. The engineering student, the home-maker, the IT professional etc. OH AND LET ME NOT FORGET, THE MURDERER.
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During the course of the next few years some of these students joined film school, began working in television, quit their corporate jobs to make independent films, joined a band, while others continued with their lives as usual. And then there was one who decided to murder his girlfriend and stuff her body into a freezer. Who would have thought that we had a future killer in our midst, learning the technicalities of script writing? From the introduction you may have figured out that it was the Yoga teacher. An individual you would expect to associate with serenity, calmness, spiritualism turned out to be the one to strike his girlfriend with an iron rod, attempt to hack her into pieces, stuff her into a freezer and continue to live with the body in his home for 18 days along with his wife (yes there was also a wife in the same apartment!) after the deed was done. Either the guy was remarkably smart or his wife, despicably stupid. How does a fight between two individuals end up with one of them dead? I get the screaming, shouting, throwing stuff at each other, hitting, slapping, crying. But killing? On the anger-meter how angry does one have to get to be able to justify to himself during that split second that its okay to take a life? And then the seeming lack of remorse. The fact that he didn‛t turn himself in to the authorities and hoped to go about his life as usual seems fairly mind blowing.
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'The Following' - a television show about a cult of killers, is not only squeamish and creepy, it is disturbing on so many levels. The cult seems to be made up of people you and I would meet in our daily lives. It‛s a show I avoid watching last thing at night because it gives me nightmares. Such people must exist. You know what they say about truth being stranger than fiction. And while crime shows are my favorite genre on television (not because I love to watch people die, but because I like to use my detective skills to solve the case!), I had never really thought that a nondescript man sitting at the desk in front of me would make headlines for all the wrong reasons. Makes you wonder, doesn‛t it? The next time you‛re at a conference or a party, interacting with people you‛ve never met before, be aware that there may be a murderer in your midst. Hopefully it isn‛t you that‛s the target. And hopefully you're also not the perpetrator.
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It was early 2011. I'd bought a catapult from one of the nomadic tribal people who were passing through where I live. It was a fine creation of twigs, rubber and sweet wrappers; practising every day with stones (I would sneak a few from the pile used for building purposes) on the farm, I was soon quite good at it. Little did I know how that would serve me a few months later ... We'd stayed back at the farm one night. My dad and I were in the kitchen, a fairly open area with a good view of our fruit trees in the daytime. They were currently in darkness; but we could see something big moving near the Papaya trees. "Brindle!" called my dad. Our inquisitive dog responded with several deep, fast sniffs, then he abruptly pounced. "He's got something!!" my dad exclaimed. "Brindle, leave it!!" Brindle ignored us and caught whatever it was in his mouth. I was then seized by a fleeting, useless and remarkably stupid idea. For reasons best known to my overexcited, 11yearoldself, I grabbed my catapult and shot a stone into the darkness, somewhere slightly to the left of where I thought Brindle was. What happened next was bizarre. There was a 'thunk', then a very loud, rustly THUD. Shortly afterward, a baby rabbit dashed to safety. What just happened? The stone from my catapult had hit a fat papaya on the tree nearest to Brindle, and the papaya promptly fell on his head. He was so astonished that he dropped the rabbit! And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is what we call a "Providential Paradox!"
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THEY STAND GATHERED AROUND THE CROSSROADS, sipping chai from small plastic cups, their talk peppered with short bursts of laughter. Laxmi adjusts her dark green coat
—
the kind they are all wearing, and walks up to the man
handing out thick yellow gloves. Beside her, a lady with flowers in her hair picks up a broom and thumps the handle end onto her palm to align its numerous brown sticks. Laxmi starts across the road towards her green trolley, pausing when she sees the girl in khaki trousers and a maroon T-shirt. The girl carries a bag over one shoulder, the sleeves of her jacket rolled back to her elbows. Laxmi smiles as she does every morning, and the girl smiles and waves back. The girl continues up the road, past the group of BBMP workers that Laxmi is a part of. Past the newspaper distributors bending over bundles of The Times Of India and The H indu. She pauses on the bridge over the railway track, watching the 7:04 a.m. train to Erode as it curves away from East Railway S tation. Past the wide footpath outside French Loaf where the fruit sellers set up their mini market, where one day she had tried and failed with her brother, to bargain for just one orange from the stern lady who sold only in Kilos. A round Richards Park, and there she sees Bus 9, slowing to a halt at her stop. Some people believe that God watches over each one of us. Perhaps, like the leader in V for Vendetta, God sits in a room filled wall-to-wall with a million T.V. screens, each one playing short episodes of our lives. Have you ever wondered what it must be like to see so many lives in little bits and pieces? In fleeting snapshots and floating fragments of conversation? To see these lives, (as you speed through a city just stretching itself awake,) pass by your window in complete, blissful oblivion of your watching?
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Bus 9 heads towards Lingarajapuram. Up the flyover, over the narrow roads that squeeze between the peach, blue, yellow and brown buildings that taper out into the horizon like three-3 dimensional patchwork. The girl in maroon sits in the very last right-hand side window seat, looking up at the billowing billboards as they throw out their proud chests and advertise for everything from Jockey underwear and Big Basket Bombaat offers, to the iPhone 6 and Sunburn Arena’s latest concerts.On the terrace of one bright purple building, a man in shorts and a banian pulls clothes down from a clothesline that runs parallel to the flyover, and beneath a billboard with Shah Rukh Khan’s plastic face beaming out of it. He pauses briefly to stare as a neon- clad cyclist flashes past. The cyclist glides down onto flat ground as the flyover slips to an end, his feet beginning to work furiously as he zooms past pedestrians. Leaning heavily to the right, he shadows Bus 9 onto Nehru Road, but is left behind at Bright Public School, as the bus begins to pick up speed. The girl in maroon slides off her shoes to pull her feet up and fold them beneath her. Her backpack lies beside the shoes, and she lets the convenience of leaving it there overpower the thought of all the dust and mud on the floor. In front of her, a girl from ISC sleeps soundly, head rolling each time the bus swerves. Across the aisle, a group of 10th grade boys laugh out loud as one of them attempts to pull the other off his seat. The rest of the bus is lost in their earphones, and soon the girl turns back to her window. I don’t know what it is about little kids but they always stare at me. They fix their beady black eyes on me, unblinking, with the kind of determination that ought to be declared utterly unacceptable for social beings of their age and size. Yet for some reason, sitting in that very last right-hand side window seat of Bus 9, I find myself less apprehensive of these creatures. Though I suspect the vertical distance that keeps me safely above their eye level may have something to do with it. Bus 9 slows to a stop beside the footpath. From her seat at the back the girl cannot see the junior school teacher get on the bus, but she can see the two people who dropped her there. The man standing with his hands deep in the pockets of his loose track pants, and two steps ahead of him, a little kid. The height of his knee. The little kid watches intently as the teacher gets on the bus, his eyes unblinking until she waves to him from inside. Then he takes two small steps back, his eyes still fixed on the bus, his mouth a tight line, and moves slightly behind the man’s leg, half hiding himself as Bus 9 begins to move.
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Years ago, the girl used to go with her father to drop her Amma off at the Vidhana Soudha bus stop. She wonders if someone from that school bus watched her wave every morning, glad as she is now for the distance between them. Bus 9 continues on towards Jal Vayu Vihar, past the chai shops where men stand smoking their morning cigarettes. Past Sathya Hospital and the temple just next to it, outside which, just 6 months ago, a large Peepal tree had spread it’s magnificent branches out to embrace the sky. The tree had fallen during the rains, uprooted right out off the footpath and thrown across the road to be stared at in horror by the students of Bus 9 the next morning. But now the footpath has been repaved, the battered tree shifted away, and there is no sign of it ever having lived there.Driving through Kammanahalli Main Road at night is like entering psychedelic tunnel of spinning lights. Lined with shops and restaurants, the road is alive with the buzz of pedestrians, with the clamour of impatient cars, and sitting in those cars are always people with their noses pressed up against the windows, mesmerised by the glow of beckoning signage. People like the girl in maroon, on her way home from their weekly Sunday evening drop-in at her grandfather’s house. But now, staring out from Bus 9 at 7:30 in the morning in a city that really wakes only at 11:00, what she sees is a ghost town. The signage switched off, the footpath suddenly visible, and stray bags of plastic strewn around tree stumps. Dark lifeless halls and frozen mannequins behind sheets of glass. Corrugated metal shutters drawn halfway down across shopfronts, the frozen faces of models mid-gasp, mid-laugh, mid-pout. At the CMR Road intersection she glances up at a building to see that the billboard advertising Painless Waxing at YLG has crashed back onto the terrace. The model probably left smiling at the sky. To take a photograph is to seize a beautiful moment and freeze it. To stop it right there and wrap your arms all the way around
—
so tight that time itself may never take it
away from you. But sometimes, you come across a moment that you just can’t capture. Perhaps it’s too fleeting, perhaps it caught you by surprise, perhaps the lighting was too low, or perhaps… you’re just not a very good photographer.
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Bus 9 turns at last onto the Outer Ring Road; down the underpass and out onto the fast lane. It picks up speed, zipping alongside the service road where the girl in maroon sees morning walkers (in snapshots between trees) striding forth, preoccupied with their strange arm-whirling exercises. Past Nagavara flyover and onto the next one. The girl struggles to keep from breaking out into a ridiculous grin as she thanks God over and over for whoever it was who invented Flyovers. She looks down for a moment and thinking of Kangana Ranaut staring out of her window as the plane takes off for Paris in Queen, selects a playlist on her phone. A playlist with songs that start out slow and pick up along the way, building to a wonderful arms-spread-open-wide sort of climax. Songs that would, under any other circumstances, feel a little too optimistic. If you could see eternity, it would be the view from the elevated expressway. To one side, the airstrip streaks out into a horizon defined by the uneven high-rise of cityscape, to the other lies the whole of Sahakarnagar and further along the way, vast breaths of green. Overhead the sky opens up, like an overarching dome of softly floating clouds and beautiful blue. Bus 9 passes NCC Urban Windsor and the girl in maroon can see it’s reflection ripple across the building’s large glass front. She wants to one day enter that building, climb up to it’s 7th floor and turn towards the expressway, watching for buses. Below, Sahakarnagar unfolds
—
a network of intersecting roads. The girl in maroon used to have friends who
stayed there and she remembers a plot owned by Hindustan Coca-Cola Distributors that had tall sheets of corrugated metal all around it. She remembers wanting to know what lay within. Now, from up above on the expressway, sheets of metal are mere lines on a blueprint, no wall can keep her out anymore. Terrace gardens, people with newspapers on balconies, the large, empty parking lot outside More supermarket, each detail rushes at her from ahead, swings into focus and blurs out again like the black and yellow stripes on the flyover parapet. Here, in what was once the outskirts of the city, tall blocks of apartment buildings rise into view. Most are still under construction, the slender but powerful metal cranes forming striking silhouettes above their towering grey skeletons. During monsoon and winter, the entire landscape is cloaked in mist; the sun fading behind layer after layer of cool morning air until it could be mistaken for the moon. The girl thinks of Batman. There are about 10 minutes left before Bus 9 reaches school. It turns off towards Yelahanka at the Splash and Shine so called ‘touchless’ car-wash, rumbling past a group of men playing volleyball in an empty plot of land, and lighting up faces with false hope as it passes by the public bus stands. Torn posters on the walls declare a “Grand 50 days” of the blockbuster movie Bahubali. The girl sinks into her seat, wishing the ride would never end. When I decided to write about my morning bus ride to school, the most frustrating bit was having to choose which of those billion beautiful moments to write about. It was like seeing a bunch of puppies on the road, each as ridiculously lovable as the other, and wanting to just scoop them all up at once. Check out shalomgauri.in for more! :)
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Continued on page 17
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SPACE. Who's space? Your space, f_ll it up! This section is for oddments, jokes,riddles, opinions,pondering and announcements.
I w a s 1 0 , I b e l i e v e , w h e n I f i r s t b e g a n t o ' r ui n ' m y n e w , p e n c i l w o o d d e s k f r o m t h e l o c a l m a r ke t . N o w p r a c t i c a l l y e v e r y i n c h o f i t i s c o v e r e d i n l a y e r s o f s c r i b b l e s , a s o ur c e o f i n s p i r a t i o n a n d s ur e f i r e b o r e d o m b us t e r s . I s ub j e c t e d i t t o a c l o s e s c r ut i n y a n d h e r e a r e m y f a v o r i t e p ea r l s f r o m t h e y ea r s p a s t . .
A QUOTE " The only good man is a
POETRY "Farm Fresh Cobra Of A Pool"
wo-man" - circa 2010
circa- ?
GOOD ADVICE " Je pense. Je sais." POSITIVE THINKING Be precise. "I love lots of circa 2013 people" circa 2013 AN INTERESTING THING " Alaska's Famed Bridge To Nowhere" -circa 2014 BAD FRENCH ' Ou est toi?" "Ici!" - circa 2011
SELF-AFFIRMATION " I am not an idiot. XYZ is not an idiot. But idiots do exist-I
" Dhoni est ennuyeux" -circa 2012 "Je suis une dumbette" -circa 2012
know a few" -circa 2012
A CARTOON " Mr. Bhopla" - circa 2012 SPELLING PRACTICE "DACHCHUND" circa 2010
A MNEMONIC " Snakes Go Far On Crawly Prickly Kippers" ( To remember Species, Genera, Family.. Kingdom)
- Circa 2011
A DISTURBING QUESTION "When Boom runs out...?" DISAPPOINTMENT circa 2009 " 1 WEEK ONLY?" -circa-?
A NAME TO CALL SOMEONE YOU DON'T LIKE " Disgusting Long faced Fake Prototype" circa-?
ONE WORD THAT SUMS UP YOUR WORLD "Aiyiyo!" circa -? 16 18
" In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence." -Robert Lynd
"Some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away,the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice. But still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they've gone." - Anonymous
"A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because her trust is not on the branch but on her own wings." - Anonymous