“It’s not mere conviction but the courage to act upon it that characterizes men.”
“But it requires the strength of character for that,’ he said, and began recapping his childhood. “There was hardly any schooling worth naming in the village setting in those days but one could still get into the first-form in a nearby high school through a written test. When I was nine, my father made me seem ten the cut-off age for admission, and took me to a nearby town for the test; even as I sat nervously in the exam hall, the invigilator, who was brash, made it worse for me and so I refused to take the test; but the offender’s apology that my father extracted as a sop made me relent in the end, and lo I was into the first-form that you call class six now. We were no more than a handful that made it to that school from our village then and my seniors used to vie with each other to take charge of me, each claiming that my grandfather had entrusted me to his care. But as it all tended to turn farcical, I asked them to let me be on my own; what a joy it was walking all those five miles both ways, well, sans the backbreaking schoolbags of these days. But, when my grandfather took me back to school to retrieve the umbrella I forgot there, it was no fun to my weary legs, more so as he lectured about the pitfalls of forgetfulness all the way; maybe my subconscious absorbed it all for I consciously avoid being forgetful.”
“Did you find it?” I asked rather instinctively.
“The odds were one to ten as you know and it was no odd case any way,” he said. “But the thought of umbrella brings my grandfather’s fondness for rainy season that I share. It was his wont to have his siesta lying in the easy chair in the verandah, and in the monsoon time, whenever he woke up to a deafening thunder, he would declare that ‘it portends downpour,’ of course gluing his eyes to the pitch-dark clouds in the sky. Like all landlords, he too used to rivet his eyes onto the sky, worried about the kharif crop, and how as children we loved when it rained and used to dance in the downpour wetting ourselves to the roots. But for my mother it was always ‘oh, enough is enough’ but my grandfather would say, ‘why not let them enjoy now for they might give up all this as grownups’. How true, but then the phases of life are varied, each with different possibilities of fulfillment; when it ceased raining all kids used to place indents on the elders for paper boats for playing with them in the roadside water pools or backyard water bodies. Why the rainy season afforded the elders their small pleasures as well; as I see in hindsight, all used to ogle at women’s legs as they hitched up their saris as though to save their hems from getting soiled on the muddy roads. I wish I lived a little longer in my village to cherish more of my life but then maybe I shouldn’t be greedy for I had enough and more of the village life.”