It’s been raining since yesterday night—evening actually. Started at about 5-6 o’clock, and its 5 am as I’m writing this, and it’s still raining. Makes you kind of think of all of those people who don’t have a roof over their heads. (There’s this guy who plays one of the lead characters in Dhobi Ghat, who lives in a slum, and you kind of get an idea of what it’s like when the heavens start to pour and all you want to do is nothing else but sleep. Or better yet, if you’ve seen Slumdog Millionaire—the moment where jamal and lathika come together to get out of the rain—it’s just like that.) So the house is pretty dry, of course, but the window panes which were broken (and my mother had been after me to get fixed, before it started coming down like today), have become funnels for all this rain water, and oh-my-god—do we have a lot of rain water in the house right now. The ground floor’s alright thankfully, nothing wet there, but as you come upstairs—the first floor staircase is pretty dry, except for the second floor one, and yeah: that’s where the whole water has now stagnated. It started pouring down from those plates in the second floor and hasn’t stopped since. Well, now it has. It’s subsided a bit, but it’s going to take a whole lot of mopping for me tomorrow to get rid of this stuff.
My weight was 67 the day before, and I was quite happy with myself, but then it started to touch 66, and I was overjoyed. But then yesterday, I maybe had a bit too much to eat (I knew I shouldn’t’ve had that two egg omelette, but then a one egg one’s no good, especially after you’ve been fasting for the whole day). So I was a bit trepidacious getting on the scale after iftari and checking my weight, and you know what—it’s back upto 68. I did have that tiny 200 ml bottle of pepsi that I always do, but I think it was the chapattis that might’ve sealed the deal (although mom always says how healthy they are, so maybe it was the soft drink after all).
As my father can’t fast because of his medical condition right now, he asked me to get him some idli from the joint around the corner. While going there I noticed a drunk lying on the road—totally oblivious to everything happening around him. He was so out of it he couldn’t even realize that the water’d even started coming down to the dry part of the street where he’d passed out. I didn’t do anything about it, thinking that one of the other guys standing around him would, but by the time I came back—everyone was standing right where they were: least bothered. I wonder why that he was bothering me so much, and more importantly—why wasn’t I doing anything about it. So I came back home, gave my father the idli, took the cash from my dad (I still have to take money from my father to buy these kinds of things) and then thought I’d go back to the fast-food place, where I get my pepsi from, and see if he was still lying there… he was. I decided to pick him up on my way back and just drag him to the dry part of the street.
So, after finishing my drink—I’ve discovered this new way of drinking—one sip at a time, slowly, to really cherish what you’re putting down, instead of just gulping it in one huge gulp. Which I used to, in my spoilt-youthish-brattish days. But yeah, back to the fast-food place… I’d finished the tiny bottle of pepsi, and was on my way back to help the guy out, when it suddenly struck me. So that’s why I was having such a hard time coming to terms with helping this guy out. He was lying in front of the rajeeve gandhi statue, right in front of the spot where I’d been hit that day. And he reminded me of the guy who’d struck me that day.
I didn’t want to help him—there were loads of people around him to help him. But then as I’m passing him to go, I remember the people who’d helped me that day, and even though this guys not been in kind of an accident, or is afraid of dying—I just couldn’t leave him in the freezing water there. So, just as I’d turned around to grab a hold of the guy, these two other men turned around and picked him up by the arms and put him on a dryer part of the stoop.
