Glass Boys, the book I am currently reading, was picked up for its resemblance to family feuds I’ve grown up with. Until the first time I heard about this book, in my head faraway places like Newfoundland, Canada could not possibly have family feuds.
I’m barely 20 pages into the book and each page with its bleak yet hopeful imagery, seemingly simple language and dextrously written dialogues makes me want to write. Write about how the wind blows outside my window-playful- how the elderly fans talk to themselves- loudly-how a certain philanthropist barber in my neighbourhood spouts English when drunk-friendly- how electricity hides in the dark when lightning plays hide and seek with thunder in the sky above my house-coward. But I’m out of adhesive; what will glue my lines together to form a cohesive chronicle?
Lines, strangely, brings me to rain. Where I come from, rain is a celebration. A yearly purging of the land, necessary to offer a clean welcome to a new generation of Spring.
It’s now the dying vengeance of summer; it’s blistering, parching and scorching, the heat. Even in the middle of the day, when sunlight blinds your eyes, bakes you wrapped in your own skin and that last litre of water you drank seems to have died in your mouth leaving your innards stuck together, I am sure of rain. I know rain will find me in a week or I will find rain. Then for months there will be a humbling of everything other than that immense downpour; a rather literal dampening of spirits so as to bounce back resplendent with the first new leaves of spring.
In the pop culture of my constitution, rain is a miracle, a symbol of hope and new beginnings. It is open-throated singing, the song of the gods and unapologetic pleasure. It is also nature’s fury, a purifier or a dramatic interlude. Most importantly, it is prosperity, a way of a life and always welcome in any measure granted. By contrast on the other side of the equator, I have found that rain is often described as being morose and despondent, poking fun at miseries, falling in icy sheets or adding insult to injury. I often wonder how my jubilant rain could do something so out of character.
I wish story ideas would come to me with the certainty of monsoon, easy and natural, unending and prosperous, like a habitual season, providing for all my needs.
The only idea I play catch with is family. Their eyes, their words, their hands, told through my eyes, my words, my hands. In writing about them, I stand to lose my only idea; becoming a one hit wonder who will never outwrite that lived narrative.