Portrait

yesterday was your stereotypical ‘bad day’. it would’ve made a perfect monday, too bad it wasn’t.

my house was completely marooned due to the heavy rains that started somewhere on monday night and didn’t cease entirely, not even momentarily, till tuesday afternoon. literally marooned. turned into a temporary island. i was told that mine wasn’t the only house, and even my cousin’s place in the center of colombo 7 went under atleast a foot of water. firstly, i woke up late. then i had to get up to concocting ways to get out of the house and atleast half way up the road, which is the only point from which the road was accessible to vehicles…and to anyone who couldn’t swim. because I HAD TO. damn it. when some days that are made for people to stay at home come along, its a curse to have to leave. i had to go because i was starting exams, and i wasn’t about to risk staying home because a) i knew the half-wit that runs my school couldn’t care less about how people get there, its easy for her, her quarters are on the premises, thus school wouldn’t have closed and exams wouldn’t have been postponed b) i knew that in case the exams hadn’t been postponed, which i was fairly sure they weren’t the complete bitches who were the senior teachers in my school weren’t going to think that the fact that i technically could not leave the house would count as an excuse, and they sure as hell weren’t going to understand enough to consider letting me sit the paper another time. my brother and i had a semi fight which i ended by telling him to ‘take whatever you know and shove it up as far as you possibly can’. i put shorts, a t shirt and rubber slippers on, stuffed my things into a bag and waded out of my house in waitst-high water. it was beyond disgusting and the mere memory of it gives me shivers.

we were on the road for 2 hours, a drive that usually takes the maximum of 45 minutes, with all the traffic thrown in. the situation was bad, everything and everywhere was under water, there was bumper to bumper traffic on even the widest roads, fallen trees and frustrated motorists creating a bigger mess. i went to my cousin’s, which had already started flooding and my aunt was having a fit, and smriti was having her own case of hysterics as she was late to work and had no way of getting there. i showered, changed and went for my exams at 10.30, still wet, cold and dishvelled, but clean. this was the kind of rain that soaked you in the 15 seconds it takes to get out of a vehicle, or the 5 second dash from the gate into the building. i got 1 hour for a 2 hour paper, and the supervising teacher practically took the paper from right under my hand. another 2 hour paper without an interval because pretty much the whole class had turned up really late and hence set the whole exam schedule off its course. by this time i was (still wet and cold) really hungry and needed to take a leak pretty badly. after that T and i had to walk down to catch a tuk tuk, and we stood in the rain for a good 10 minutes because they were all full or broken down. by this time we were so wet we really couldn’t have cared less. looking back at the morning then, standing where we were, utterly soaked and totally exhausted, it all seemed so ridiculous that we just cluthced each other and laughed. a passing car spalshed us from head to toe with all the dirty mud-water in the puddle near the pavement where we were, and the rain was still coming down in steady bucket fulls, it was time to look to the skies and say ‘yeah, fuck you too’.

the evening was better, we all sat at tracy h’s, which had also been underwater, and bitched about the weather, among other things. that class is always fun. yet in more rain, i headed to dancing with T, and realized that the ankle i had twisted the previous day (also due to the rain, thank you very much) was actually giving me more pain than i had expected. my mother yelled at me for ignoring it. maybe i shoudnt have.

anyway, my mother always says there’s no point in getting worked up on days like those. if you’re late, everything that could possibly happen to make you even more late is going to happen. your car is going to break down, you’re going to hit every single red light on the way. have you noticed that? when it rains, it pours. and when it pours, you get wet. that’s just the way it is. and then you’ve just gotta take a deep breath, sit back and say ‘you know what? screw this. you’ve gotta try harder than that to piss me off’ and mean it with every nerve you possess.