Childhood days are the best days with worries about how do I get more choclates than the other siblings, how to avoid eating vegetables, how to get quarter mark more ( that was typically me..), how to get an extra turn for cycling and many more.
We were three siblings, me in the middle with an elder sister and younger brother. Apart from regular school days , homework and routine chores we had a schedule or more like a rule in our house. Every year May vacation and Diwali vacation were strictly for village stay and visit to my grandmother.
Most of our monsoons were in Mumbai, Getting soaking wet while wearing raincoats and holding umbrellas is a norm. No weapon can defeat the monsoons here.
Rains remind me of the "Gara" as we call it in Marathi. The ready made cubes of ice that fall all over just like a dream come true for any kid. But that happens only in few places, non-Monsoon time and it definitely happened in my village, Gokak, District Belgaum and state Karnataka.
It was the month of october. October as we all know is very hot, extremely hot. We were in our village at Grandmothers place customary for every holidays. It was steaming hot at 1:30 PM. The ringing of the bell indicated the entry of The ice cream wala in our galli . He passed all the houses from one corner and finally reached in front of our house. All the kids ran, making loud noise and gathered around his small wooden container to select the flavour of our choice since it might not last long. The most famous were mango and orange.There were some other like pista,tooty-fruity and so on. But most kids prefered the lip and tongue coloring mango and orangs. All ice creams were candy sticks, no cups. After buying them for a meagre 15 paise we ran to our so called terrace / roof of our house silently without waking our elders. Above we had a store room and open terrace where my granny and aunt used to put awla , mirchi for drying and cow-dung too in one corner. We took our ice gola and were enjoying every drop of it in the scorching heat. Not bothered about the melting sticky fluid running down a marathon from our palms to elbow. Our mouth were just smudged orange/yellow in an attempt to win the race against the melting colored ice!! Sun burning hot but nothing mattered for us.
Sometimes in that heat suddenly it used to start thundering and pouring.. with small cubes of ice falling from the sky.
That day too it started thundering. We peeped thru the window on roof to see whats happening downstairs and saw our elders enjoying their evening tea and discussing the snack menu ; which after a couple of Ifs and Buts cornered to Batata wada. Our happiness had no limits. Wada and in a weather like this where it was about to rain.. we rushed below and confirmed the fact . Wada it was !!!!
The ice rollies started pouring ,looked like the sky couldnt bear their weight and finally paved way for them to fall onto the ground.We rushed toward the crackling sounds of the cubes and thrilled as we were , rushed outside to enjoy them. Warnings and shoutings were following us as we leapt out of the main corridor and into the heaven of chilled water and with thoughts of wada . No worries about getting cold, no worries about all the explanation we had to listen when we got back , no worries about future, we were all just enjoying the present in its whole with absolutely no thoughts about whats going to happen next.
Life seems to stand still there .Lots of such tiny moments get engraved in deepest of our memories and make a special place in our heart. These tiny moments give us a gist of life, Enjoy the time in present, stop worrying about future and crying over past.
