RainDrops

Some stories start with a railway station. Not the big, noisy ones in cities, but the smaller ones where trains come in unhurried, and the chai seller still calls out each order by name. This one begins in such a place. I first met Hari when I got down from the Mysore passenger at a little town that looked as if it was still untouched by the rush of the world. Hills in the distance, a lazy river running along the tracks, and a row of yellow buildings that seemed to have dozed off in the sun. I had come looking for silence that weekend. What I found was a story. He appeared beside me so quietly that I almost stepped on him. "Sir, you need auto, lodge, or temple darshan" he asked, tilting his head slightly, eyes searching my face for clues. I waved the others away. There was something strangely calm about him. He looked like the usual local guide in these small towns, with a faded shirt, cotton bag and sun browned skin. Yet there was a softness in his eyes that did not ...

There are some rains that do not belong to the sky alone. They fall inside you, quietly, long after the clouds have left. It was one such afternoon when the sea itself seemed tired of its own noise. The rain had just begun, slow at first, like hesitant thoughts. Arun sat by the window of his rented house in Vypin, a cup of steaming tea beside his laptop, lines of code and test cases staring blankly at him. The wind brought in the smell of the sea and wet earth, that faint scent that always carried a hint of home, of something unfinished. He was in his late forties now, with a streak of grey beginning to show near his temples. Life had moved through its seasons. A long career in tech, the hum of meetings, the quiet company of his child's laughter echoing from another room, the careful plans for tomorrow that always came before sleep. His wife, Anitha, was kind and composed, the sort of woman who believed that life was best lived in quiet balance. They shared the same roof, the sa...

I first heard her voice on a wet evening when the sky over Kuttanad folded into rain. The paddy fields looked like sheets of water stitched with green thread. I had come to the village to photograph the monsoon for a magazine, thinking of reflections and clouds, not of people. But the sound that rose from the snake grove by the banyan tree changed my plans. It was an old song carried by a small wind, a voice with the warmth of lamp light. A woman stood near the kolam , the sacred drawing made with powders of rice and leaf. Beside her sat a man with a pulluvaveena , its gourd body resting on his knee. The woman held a small frame drum and a stringed bow. She began with a call that felt both prayer and story. Later I learned her name. Meera. She was a Pulluvan singer who travelled with her uncle to sing for families that kept the old serpent worship alive. They drew the kolam on floor or earth. They sang to invite protection for the fields and the people. They sang to heal, and to th...

I started noticing her in the way you notice the first raindrop on a hot Trivandrum afternoon-without meaning to, and then not being able to think of anything else. Every morning, after the security scanner scanned my badge and I did the little dance with the turnstile, I would take the same spot on the wooden bench near reception. It was my "transition area", where coffee met courage, where I pretended to read emails on my phone and absolutely did not watch the glass doors. At 9:41 on the dot-give or take the vagaries of the Kazhakootam traffic, she would appear. Meera.   Shoulder-length hair tucked behind one ear , laptop bag, Saree draped on as a Friday Casual. And each time I saw her coming, my stomach would flip like a gull catching a thermal. The gut knew before the brain; she's here. The sunlight from the atrium would follow her inside, turning the scuffed floor into water. She walked with that quick, quiet purpose of people who don't waste time, and I watche...

The south-western sky over Kakkanad was smudged lilac when Dr. Anand Menon finally peeled off his blood-flecked gloves. A Saturday that had begun with a factory fire, lurched into a bus collision and fizzled out with the usual parade of chest pains left him feeling like a dishrag wrung dry. At thirty-three he was already the unofficial lynch-pin of Lakeshore City Hospital's Emergency Department; solid, unflappable, and so often on call that his mother joked the automatic doors recognised his gait and whispered "Welcome home." He stepped out of the staff gate, stethoscope coiled in a pocket like a tired snake. The air smelled of damp tar and jackfruit leaves; bus headlights cut silver across puddles. Anand was thinking only of the reheated avial waiting in his fridge when he noticed a powder-blue Scooty stalled beneath a fizzing streetlamp. Two women were stranded there. The rider wrestled a stubborn kick-start; the pillion, legs swung to one side, waved cars around with...