Before The Rains: A Tale Of The Two Cities Of Anantapur

The night your lost memory
visited my heart: it was raining
as if the world was coming to
an end. I woke up from sleep
to call you. The phone rang
in a different dream.

There are two worlds in the town of Anantapur. The world-before-rains and the world-after-rains. They speak different languages, tell conflicting stories. The world-before-rains is the world of longing. Days and days of harshness turn the machinations of this world into an ominous blur. People behead goats and buffaloes to appease divinities. An old man’s rattling teeth, growls of a depressed stomach, skeletons of fish left on sandy sediments of the dead Penna river—the images of drought metastases in memories as forlorn ghosts. In that world of distant memories, melancholy is the identity on everyone’s face.

Once, as the fable goes, the rains stood up the people of Anantapur. Maybe the monsoon died in transit. People tried the age-old practices of enticing water-ridden clouds. They decapitated buffaloes, married frogs, conducted fire-rituals and so on and so forth. The monsoons paid a deaf ear. Eventually, tea stalls of the town fell silent. People made love dissipating pensive sand dunes in their chests. The ghosts of aquatic fauna swam in the nightmares of inhabitants.

Life became too monotonous in Anantapur. The tedium of the world-before-rains felt like an epic novel going nowhere, torn between boredom and death. The postman walked through the same streets to deliver letters of longing from distant lovers. The construction worker from a faraway land shouldered the same bricks every day to make identical walls, similar rooms, and indistinguishable buildings. The traffic police controlled the irresistible traffic making the same pantomimes that he made all his life. The typist in the government office typed the same official letters and documents so carefully that he wouldn’t make the mistake of spilling his own soul into typing. Likewise, everyone in town had their own insipid story.

Once, after innumerable months of drought and the spilling of hundreds of buffaloes’ blo­od, the lethargic people of the town slipped into a deep sleep. In that hour of slumber, a violent rain passed through the town, clinking her anklets. Anantapur disappeared into the layered downpour. People of the town rem­ained in their undaunted sleep, as rain rampaged it with thick sheets of water. Meanwhile, in his sleep, the postman dreamt of a land where everyone wrote letters to him. The migrant worker dreamt of building his own home. The traffic police dreamt of a road without traffic. The typist dreamt of writing poems with his typewriter. Before people of the town woke up from their fantastic sleep, the rain tiptoed out of town on her cold paws.

The people of Anantapur knew nothing about the rain. They were confronted with a dreamy spectacle of the world-after-rains by the time they opened their eyes. They were convinced that they were awake in yet another reality. And thus, for the rest of their lives thence, they lived in that dream.

Rohith is a doctor and poet from Andhra Pradesh. 

(This appeared in print edition as 'Before The Rains')