Idle Moments

  ONE FINE AFTERNOON

So there I was standing at my window, looking out at the vast vegetation in front of me. It constitutes one out of the two advantages that moving to this awful place has offered me. The first advantage as mentioned above comes for free; as it is a part of the place I live in. Actually, I wasn’t planning on being near my window in the first place, it just sort of happened. I was fidgeting with my cell phone when I heard a noise outside. It was the sound of water gushing down from somewhere. Curious, I rushed to the window to find out the cause. It was simple enough. The water from my building’s water storage tank was overflowing. The watchman, careless as he is, had forgotten to turn off the valve. If you or someone else had been there to look at it, you would have cursed the watchman for wasting so much water and would have resumed what you were doing before. I thought of the same thing myself but that thought soon swept away and then a new one replaced it. I saw something else.

To understand what I saw, I’ll first have to explain the geography of my house to you. My house has two sets of windows that open on the north as well as the south. The window on the north opens to show you the common playground of the society (how shabbily it is maintained actually) and the window on the south side gives you a beautiful view of luscious greenery that forms a part of the place where I reside. The many and various trees have thankfully not been chopped down by the Municipal Corporation to build another boring and humungous structure for more people to crowd in. It is really a breathtaking view from here. Guests that come at my place often marvel at the sight of it and envy me for having such a soothing piece of nature right in front of my eyes.

I didn’t see the wastage of water due to the irresponsibility of one man. I saw this: millions of droplets of water entwined in one another forming strings of coolness gushing down from a great height of four floors, in one singular motion, together, to quench the thirst of the blazing-in-the-afternoon-sun hot earth. The drops fell on the ground, slowly at first, then gradually increasing with speed, forming a large pool of water in which more and more drops of freshness kept gushing. As they did, the new droplets first collided with the surface of the pool and then bounced off it, finally assimilating in the amorphous liquid nirvana. The sun was its fiery self as always and the water, being enveloped by its intensity, was glistening. The huge and scorching ball of fire made the tiny droplets look like diamonds-uncut, shining, polished, sublime diamonds of nature. They made little ripples here and there in the water. I don’t know what it was but I just felt really happy as I stood there gazing at it. The wind suddenly whooshed past me and the trees, the leaves, the wild shrubs, the grass, the whole wide expanse of green in front of me started swaying. I don’t know, maybe I am crazy, but I really thought that these little traces of nature around me were communicating with each other. The water continued to overflow. The droplets chimed into the temporary river beneath them. Then I noticed that these were the only sounds around me. No cars honking, no speakers blaring, no neighbors yelling. It was just the sound of nature. The atmosphere was calm, peaceful and serene. It was perfect. It was just one of those rare moments when you are in commune with His Creation. I was lost in the tranquility of the moment.

I was so engrossed in my own little world that I almost didn’t hear the man walking his two dogs on the building grounds below yell at the watchman, "Turn it off! The water’s overflowing!" and then he resumed his dog-walking. A few minutes later I saw that the water flow had started reducing. Little by little, the droplets reduced, first in intensity and then in number. Its amazing pattering sound on the ground was beginning to vanish. The trees had long stopped whooshing with the wind. And finally the mad gushing of the water too stopped and the sound fainted and then ultimately disappeared altogether leaving the stagnant and once lively body of droplets alone.