For a happy piece of prose

He had been sitting there tapping the pen on the mahagony table for the last 30 minutes waiting for the next magical idea to dawn on him. The sound of his tapping, along with the tick of the clock and the flutter of the papers on the table interlaced themselves and gradually reached a crescendo waking him up from his catnap. He stopped tapping, got out of his chair and started pacing the room talking to himself and coming up with words and phrases that he magically hoped would group themselves, adorn an idea and become a story. He was supposed to submit a "printable" piece of work by the end of the day. There was only one condition - it shouldn't be yet another melancholic tale. For the last 2 months, he's been spinning tales of lost love, blood and death, pain in its most naked form that everyone - the publisher included - needed a reason to smile. Literally!

He couldn't see how he could help it - Pain is the only emotion he knew. Happiness was a fad, a monotonous, too-brief-to-capture state of existence that never stirred a single string in the anyone's heart. All classics were tragedies. People reserve their tears for the best works of art and "All that's well ends well" wasn't even half as famous as Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet. Even if he forced himself to write something gay and funny - it was slapstick, cheap and often disgusting and decayed.

The settings and surroundings weren't inspiring either - His was one of the old fashioned south indian houses with a porch right in the middle of the house with all doors facing the void in the center. During festivals, the whole family gathered there singing, dancing, playing petty games, cutting hens for lunch and running from one pillar to another playing a very indianized version of baseball with a coconut bark as a bat. But now, not a single fly moved - his niece had come down for vacation from the US. The "Agni nakshatram" (fourteen days of may when the summer's at its peak) had sapped her of all enthusiasm and she wasn't too keen on embarking on the trip with her parents to "get the blessings" of all distant relatives. His mom sat in the corner complaining incessantly about the lack of water in the well and the prices of vegetables, while his dad was in the middle of his afternoon nap, "kumudham"'s centerfold spread across his chest. "what happiness does one get out of this monotony!" - he threw his pen in a fit of anger at the wall and suddenly realising that he doesn't have another spare one, cussed himself and started searching for it again.

Just as he searching between the cracks of the walls, the sun disappeared behind the clouds and a mild wind entered his room flipping the pages on his table (old stories of sorrow that he cherished as masterpieces). He stood up catching the scent of earth, closing his eyes imagining rain drops drizzling into his porch from the red tiles. His clothes! His clothes were out in the porch! Just as he rushed to the porch, the torrent started without a prologue or a pause. The clouds suddenly came to life and were warring with earth left, right and center. He hopped into the porch, careful not to slip and fall, and tried to remove his shirts from the clothline. His niece who was sleeping till then opened her eyes in wide amazement, smiled with glee and ran into the porch. She wouldn't listen to her grandmom warning her of catching a cold and started dancing for all her kinder garden rhymes. Soon, his mom stopped shouting and started smiling at her antics while he was still caught with a clip and a tangled piece of cloth. A few rain drops hit the porch and splashed so high that his dad woke up surprised. Sitting there he started clapping to his granddaughter's antics and she obviously thrilled at the attention she was getting started doing raunchier britney spears numbers and Geri Halliwell's "It's raining men" and his parents, oblivious to what the words meant cheered her even loudly.

Out in the streets, it was a picture of joy as farmers rushed out with huge pumpkins and threw them on the road leaving the whole street look like a pumpkin garden ran over by a wild herd. Old women sat in corridors, chewing betel leaves and singing songs of rain and prosperity. Children were out already with fleets of paper boats that were sailing through canals that connected one household to the other. Dry gobar cakes fixed on the walls turned soggy with rain water and dripped onto faces of superstars and sex sirens below and inspired street urchins, armed with sticks, drew moustaches for pretty damsels in the film posters. Adoloscent girls, who weren't aloud to play in the rain, reached out of their windows trying to catch a few drops of rain in their palms. And the peasant with the cart smiled as his sweat merged with rain water and slid through his bare chest into the earth below. Crying babies, surprised seeing so much water around them, stopped whining and started pointing their fingers at the drops of water telling their moms stories of rain in their own languages, while the relieved mothers finally managed to catch some sleep.

Inside the porch - visibly irritated with the ordeal, he finally managed to collect all his clothes not before getting drenched from head to toe. He dropped them before his mom asking her to dry it inside and walked back to his room, picking a towel on his way to dry his hair. He watched in horror as his much cherished classics were making their way into the vast fields outside through an open window into the bliss of rain and the mess of mud puddles. Too tired to be angry, he collected a few remaining sheets, placed a paper-weight on them and started tapping it with his pen trying to come up with a happy piece of prose.