She was a thoughtful young girl of 10.She looked silent and observant from outside. But the colours in her mind were so vivid and deep. The smells so strongly registered and the sights so distinctly lodged in her memory…she would not forget them for years to come.

She was on her way to school that day with her grandpa. They were in an auto and she was lost in her world of colours as usual. She was looking out at the rain.

She remembered her aunt say that people usually disliked the darkness before the rain….but that her aunt loved it. The vision of chitta(aunt) sitting beautifully at the dark wooden table at her in-laws house flooded her mind. Along with the vision came the memory of chitta in her white cotton saree in an apparently lazy wrap…and she remembered thinking how neat it actually was. There was that neat cotton smell about her…and her hair smelled of fresh henna. She remembered the cool black oxide floor….the big wide Russian short story book that chitta was reading out to her….a loving smile on her face…but her eyes set heavy with pain, the pain that an unhappy marriage and an obsessive husband had gifted her.

That’s what she remembered….whenever she saw the dark clouds heavy with rain. She remembered those sad and beautiful moments with her aunt.

The smell of rain was so different from anything else in the world. It was the most beautiful thing that she had ever known. It would create this deep yearning within her…a longing for something more beautiful still...The essence of the appeal that rain had for her was that the goal was somewhere far away. But it gave her the satisfaction that she owned it. She did not have to hurry…

Wrapped up in her own world that rainy morning, her attention was drawn by the girl on the road. She was dirty and dressed in rags. She had an almost insignificant face; an almost surly frown adorned her countenance. She was holding out her hand to two young men in a dark, dingy bus stop. The men giggled revoltingly and one of them caught hold of her hand… prompted by some inexplicable perversion. She drew back for a second…and then held out her hand again…albeit in fear. The men laughed again at her helplessness…knowing that she would do as she was told…she would continue holding out her hand as long as she saw that there was a chance of expecting some coins to fall in them. The girl in the auto suddenly understood the surly ex-pression in the street child’s face.

In a few seconds she was away from the scene….physically. But she never forgot it. The memory got embedded in the fabric of her mind...hidden carefully under lock and key, to be retrieved at a later date when she would decide to do something.

When she would decide to do something for the girl child who suffered on the streets…for the woman who suffered incarcerated within the four walls of her own home….for the thwarted intellect that never got to see the light of day.She could see herself clearly,years ahead,thinking about this day.The image of the future was as deep and vivid as the images of the past.

She looked away and moved on.