by Muthukrishnan Rajaram

(1)

“Expect rain at 5 PM” is the note that somebody had left for me in my mailbox today when I wasn’t looking.

They must have dropped it in when I was asleep, busy building dreams that I do not remember now.

I felt emotional when I read the message first – and I still do – my hands gently tremble even now.

I do not receive letters or notes from anyone, but this anonymous message – almost a happy warning of things to come, to tell me something about the future (my future?) feels nothing short of a miracle.

I wash my face – and sitting alone on my favourite chair by the window, I drink a tall cup of thick, black coffee, listening to “Love minus zero – No limit”.

I searched for the mixtape (that I had once got as a gift for my birthday) – the tape that had “One more cup of coffee for the road” on it, but I couldn’t find it – so I had to settle for the other Dylan mixtape – this isn’t bad too.

I drink the coffee slowly and the warm bitterness is soothing – I keep thinking about the rain, promised to me at 5 PM – I feel calm.

I worry at the same time too, that if I keep thinking wild thoughts like this I would forget and stop expecting rain, at least consciously, and it feels sinful to do something like that.

I sit quietly, trying to stay calm, and through the window, I look at the deserted streets below, as I drink my coffee.

I take the last sip when a large yellow van takes a turn at the end of the road – the only movement I see on the streets and the world becomes quiet again when the van vanishes.

I take the empty cup to the kitchen sink and wash it with soap – the bottom of the white porcelain cup has nicely browned with all the thick, black coffee that has been poured into it all this long – for many, many years now – I have had this cup for a long time– I think I bought it – or no, somebody gifted it to me for my birthday – there have been so many birthdays and now I do not remember much about them anyway.

(I get all sorts of useful things as birthday gifts but as long as I can remember, I have only been gifting books to my friends and others – and when I learn later they haven’t read the books I gave them, I pretend that it doesn’t bother me – “oh, take your time!” I tell them, casually.)

 (2)

“I would go on a walk,” I think to myself.

I put that little note into the pocket of my shirt and wear my slippers.

I lock the door and pull up the zipper of the black windcheater that I wear on top of a plain white shirt.

I take a deep breath and I start walking, whistling a gentle tune.

The streets are still deserted and nothing moves – the breeze, the rustling of dry leaves – that’s all there is.

I look at the sky – I see dark clouds – I expect to hear the sound of the moving clouds across the sky in the surrounding silence – and I expect rain, promised to me at 5 PM.

I smile to myself, I don’t know why.

I finish the tune I have been whistling on a mental A-minor chord, perfectly harmonizing with the last three repeating notes of the melody.

I like the A-minor chord too, but I am a big fan of the strains of sorrow that hide behind the strum of a D-minor chord and I miss it now, suddenly at this moment when I’m expecting rain.

 (3)

I walk past a fountain and I think about my fountain pen which sleeps in my table drawer – I had filled it up with black ink many months (or years?) ago and with it, I had written a letter.

I do not remember if I had posted that letter – the ink in that pen must have gone dry now – I should wash it sometime soon whenever I remember – I wouldn’t want the nib to rust.

Right now I should be, and I am thinking only about rain – I am to expect rain at 5 PM and nothing else seems to matter.

What use are the thoughts of unsent letters and ink drying inside the barrels of fountain pens?

I feel like a character in a Godard film – a film yet to be made, with just a one-line script: “The main character dies in the end” – meant to be improvised with the camera.

Improvisation or not, someone, well, everyone always dies in the end but I don’t know if it is the end – but that is not a question I would like to think about today, because today I am busy expecting rain.

At 5 PM.

 (4)

I remember the smell of roses when I walk past a rose-shrub that isn’t flowering now and I think about the Little Prince who must have gone back to his planet (with an almost insignificant name – I try hard to recollect the name of that planet, but I fail – memory is a wonderfully weird thing at times) – to be with his flower.

I wonder what dreams must he be dreaming in his little planet, alone.

I had once dreamt that I was walking down a deserted street on an evening exactly like this one here and now.

In that dream, I met a tortoise walking slow and steady with a question mark for a walking stick, singing “we shall overcome”.

It felt like the tortoise got offended (or I might be totally wrong in feeling that way) when I cheerfully said to it “out on a leisurely walk, are we?” – it just turned back to tell me that I should have known that it is running, and not walking. 

I was quick to apologize, and I continued walking.

When I was in that dream, I knew that I was dreaming and that I would wake up very soon.

The sky grew dark and on that day too, in my dream, I think I must have been expecting rain (unlike today when someone else has told me that I should expect rain) – I am almost sure that I am always expecting rain, but this is the first time I am thinking about me expecting rain.

They have turned on the streetlamps and I walk through the golden glow of the yellow sodium-vapour lamps – I love the light from sodium-vapour lamps on empty streets – it makes me nostalgic – that golden yellow, in my mind, is the visual equivalent of the D-minor chord.

On my way back, I saw a rabbit that was running fast and I mistook it for the White Rabbit from the wonderland of Alice (god bless her soul!) when I heard it muttering “Oh dear, oh dear, I shall be too late!” but it wasn’t wearing the fancy waistcoat.

The rabbit looked like it had just woken up from sleep and was hurrying to get somewhere – like almost everyone else, always busy going somewhere or coming back from someplace else, never being where they are, at that moment.

But then, I am not good at remembering things – and like any bad writer who wants to write multilayered intellectual sounding po-mo stories is wont to say, “it could have been a dream from the past, or a dream of the present – or, or, it’s just this moment in time, the reality that I am in, now.”

 (5)

“I left a secret message for someone,” says the writer, with a naughty twinkle in his eye.

He has been wanting to write a multilayered intellectual sounding po-mo story – he has written many stories so far, but isn’t satisfied with any of them.

“I write and I write and I am never happy with what I have written after I finish writing something – all I have with me now are these ink-stained fingers and not a single good story!” he says – “Maybe I’m not meant to be a writer – and now I have taken to writing anonymous secret messages to people, and that makes and keeps me happy”

When I ask him if he too is expecting rain today he smiles and gives me a piece of hard candy.

Looking at his ink-stained fingers, he says “How I wish the ink in my fountain pen would dry up soon…”

 (6)

Not just today, but in the past too, I have thought about rain.

I have thought about that place where the rain ends – I mean, when it is raining here, it must not be raining at some other place and I have always wanted to get to that place where the rain of here ends – and I would stand in the middle with rain pouring down on one half of my body, and on the other half, there would be no rain.

I have always imagined this place to be a hillock where the rain ends and on that hillock is a small hut in which lives a painter – a bearded old man who makes miniature paintings of scenes that appear in our dreams.

He eats a hot bowl of rice gruel every night, cooked soft to perfection on his lonely stove inside which burns stumps of wood he gathered from the valley.

He sits by the stove and paints listening to the occasional crackle of burning wood – he paints throughout the night and neither he nor I seem to know when he goes to sleep – but he always sleeps well and feels well-rested too, I am sure.

I hope he too is expecting rain today, wherever he is.

 (7)

Expecting rain, thinking about things this and things that – all with words, I reach the boundary of my vocabulary and I wonder if I have reached the end of my thoughts.

I know that I am left with nothing else to think about: having exhausted the things I could think about with all the words I have learned so far, I go completely blank.

It feels like I stand at the end of my world, expecting rain at 5 PM.

But it doesn’t seem to happen so easily – thoughts replace thoughts – strings of words with apparent or obvious meanings, supposedly inherently in them, with a little help from their friends, probability, permutations, and combinations, give birth to newer meanings, creating newer universes in my mind and a girl named Lucy smiles at me from the sky with diamonds.

Lucy plays the lute when she feels bored and she writes silly poems in a secret notebook that she keeps hidden in a little trunk under her bed.

On some nights when it feels like it would rain – or on those nights when the wind howls like a foghorn, even when she wants to write silly poems, she never feels courageous to get her notebook out of the trunk under the bed because her friends have told her many stories about monsters that live under the beds of children – Lucy knows that she is a child.

But the monsters that lived under the beds, she thinks, are mere shadows that have escaped from those people who have been careless enough to let go of their shadows, only to lose them eventually.

The shadows then develop minds of their own and become monsters that feel warm under the beds of children.

Lucy wants to know what the shadowless people do – do they feel lighter than the others who haven’t lost their shadows yet?

Lucy tells me that there comes a point in the life of everyone when they lose their shadows, and she is quick to add, “but that doesn’t mean anything, really!”

Lucy then goes on to talk about reality – she has a lot to say about reality, dreams, and ‘mind’ – way too much for a little girl of her age.

Once when we were talking about coffee, I told her about how I always drink my coffee in slow sips and how it felt like time stood still when I drank coffee – always, always, I said.

And I loved it when she asked me “So you too measure your life out with coffee spoons?” 

That line of Lucy’s about life and time and coffee spoons, I learned much later, was borrowed by a famous American-British poet – but I know that it is Lucy’s line – I would know it forever.

Lucy is a nice name for a little girl who talks like this – she probably exists only inside my head – I don’t know.

Because I believe that she exists only inside my mind, I know that she too is expecting rain today, because I want her to.

 (8)

A man wearing a long black coat and a deerstalker hat – smokes a pipe too – obviously a detective, given all this, comes walking towards me from the other side of the road.

Walking along with him is a woman in a flowing white gown.

“I am the philosopher’s mistress,” she says, “and he is the detective hired by the possessive philosopher to spy on me…”

“And we have fallen in love,” says the detective in a smoker’s deep baritone, “and we don’t know what to do…” he pauses to sigh, continues, “I wish it would rain now,” he says and looks at the sky wistfully.

I want to tell them about the rain that I’m expecting at 5 PM today, but before I could even begin, they quickly move away, telling me that they should start working on the spy report to be submitted to the philosopher.

Standing alone on the road, I feel happy knowing that there is someone else too, expecting rain.

 (9)

Mersenne jumps out of my copy of “Harmonie Universelle” and talks to me about the D-minor chord.

I love listening to the things he says about the D-minor chord just as much as I love listening to the D-minor chord.

After a small lecture on the nature of prime numbers, with a quick ‘poof’ he becomes a postbox.

I drop the note (“Expect rain at 5 PM”) I had received today into the postbox hoping that it would be of use to someone else who would receive it.

 (10)

I walk on, remembering all the seventeen stories that my grandmother had told me when I was young – seventeen stories about seventeen frogs that had wanted to fly.

She would tell me those same seventeen stories every night – and I never grew tired of them – I remember all those seventeen stories, with the same words that grandma had used every time.

Seventeen is a lovely number – a prime number – a Mersenne Prime too!

I love prime numbers – I love how mysterious they are.

At times, I count my steps when I walk and I smile at every prime number count.

I smile at my forty-seventh step now when I hear the roar of an automobile engine behind me.

I see a large blue bus – it slows down and stops right next to me – the doors open.

The bus is empty but for the driver – who turns around and nods his head at me as if to ask me to get on the bus.

Hesitantly, I board the bus and take a seat.

The bus moves on and once when I ask the driver where we are going, he doesn’t seem to hear me at all – he doesn’t speak a word, he has his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

I take a seat in the last row and I count the number of empty seats – there are 99 empty seats, and the one that I have occupied, 100 in all.

I think about all those 99 people who should have boarded this bus but haven’t been able to, for some reason – and I know that each of those 99 of them has a story why they couldn’t make it to this bus ride today when I am expecting rain at 5 PM.

I make a small note in the little notebook that I always carry in my pocket – “99 empty chairs, 99 stories” – something for me to think about later.

The bus stops in front of a large white building – the door opens – the driver sits still and I understand that I need to get off here – and I do.

 (11)

The white building in the middle of nowhere – with its doors open – I have nowhere else to go – I get inside.

All the walls are white, all the floors are white – and it looks like an auditorium.

All the chairs inside the auditorium are white, and they are all empty, unoccupied.

I see Lucy on stage, playing a bluesy tune on her lute.

I sit and listen to Lucy’s songs for some time and I count the empty chairs – there are 99 empty chairs and the one that I have taken, 100 in all.

I am sure now that there are 99 stories behind each of these 99 empty chairs too – or perhaps they are the same stories behind the 99 empty seats of the bus– all of those who were supposed to take the blue bus to get here to watch Lucy’s performance this evening couldn’t make it – but I am sure, that there are at least 99 stories (or 198).

The concert ends and Lucy walks out of the stage – the stage is empty now but for a small painting that hangs on the wall.

I get up on the stage and take a closer look at the painting – it’s the painting of an old man painting a miniature of thirteen people sat around a table, to eat.

I feel happy that there are thirteen of them in the painting – thirteen, a prime number!

I see the rabbit, Godard, Lucy, my grandmother, the tortoise, the philosopher, the little prince, the bus driver, the philosopher’s mistress, the painter of miniatures himself, the detective hired by the philosopher to spy on his mistress (but the mistress and the detective are in love – but that’s a story for some other day), Mersenne, and the writer with ink stains on his fingers – thirteen of them sat around the table.

“So the main character dies in the end?” says Godard, looking at the writer, and the writer nods and sighs.

But no one knows who ‘the main character’ is.

 (12)

I get back home and I am happy that I am back before the rain started.

I do not mind getting wet in the rain, but I don’t feel like it today.

I find the note I had posted in that Mersenne postbox (“Expect rain at 5 PM”) back in my mailbox – with an additional line on top that reads “Return to sender” in large, red letters.

I feel emotional again when I re-read the message – my hands tremble gently.

I look at the clock on the wall – the hands of the clock do not move – the clock has stopped working – I must have forgotten to change the batteries.

Time stands still.

I make another cup of strong coffee and wait for rain.

It would rain at 5 PM – but there is no way for me to know the time – or perhaps it would be 5 PM when it rains.

I sit comfortably on my favourite chair by the window and drink my coffee in slow sips, savouring the soothing warm bitterness, expecting rain.

At 5 PM.

 (13)

 5 PM.

                               

The End.

                                

(Excerpts from the epic novel “Expecting Rain” by Pedro Fernandez)

About the Author:

Muthukrishnan Rajaram is from Batlagundu, Tamil Nadu, India. He lives in Bangalore, does a 9 to 5 job, and spends the rest of his time doing things he likes.