Before the Rain

A bead of sweat emerged from the tiny pores of his skin and slithered along the length of his nose until it reached its tip, where it stopped.

Everytime a pellet of sweat dared to trickle on his face it would meet with itsinstant death by the back of Akshay's hand. He hated sweat. Infact he hated anything that threatened to caress his face-apart from the cold touch of the fingers of his wife.

But today he didn't do it. He let it linger for a while, on the tip of his nose, before it decided to fall on its own.He jammed his foot on the accelerator and the engine roared as the car surged into the empty highway.

White scar of lightening flickered in the sky illuminating the darkness and sketching the clouds. Akshay narrowed his eyes so that his forehead creased into a couple of folds, while he held the steering wheel straight and his foot still glued on the accelerator.The dial of the steed-o-meter of the car glided along the digitswhile the car screamed through the starless night like a drunkard.

"Akshay, am getting scared. Please slow down", a voice so melodious, that it almost felt like a heavenly song, sang from the passenger seat.

But Akshay didn't hear it. He was entangled with thoughts.

"Akshay, slow down", the voice sang again, butthis time with a streak of authiority.

Akshay, still, was lost in his world.

Infuriated, the voice shouted, "Akshay, stop. Stop the damned car."

The car screeched to a halt.

Like a crashed CPU of a computer, memories twirled and swirled and rearranged themselves in Akshay's mind. He spun around in his seat and looked, devoid of any emotion, at the figure sitting next to him. He must have stared at her for a long time, before she finally broke the ice.

"Aaliya. Your wife. And been stuck with the same designation for 6 years now", she explained to her bewildered husband in the same way she would teach her 4 year daughter nursery rhymes.

He blinked twice and then a smile touched the corners of his lips.

"Oh! Aaliya...I...I am so sorry. Ididn't realise that you were here with me...", he stammered as he wiped a volley of sweat that flooded his neck.

She studied him with her customery stern expression mingled with a sarcastic smile.

"By the way...where were we going?", she asked to test her husband who was staring, stupified, at the steering as if he had never seen on before.

Akshay turned his face to her, and with the innocence of a newborn child, shook his head.

"I...I don't know...I forgot...where were we going?"

Aaliya let a heavy sigh.

"Once upon a time, there lived a sweet little girl called Mary. And there was this little lamb who would follow her wherever she went. In the end Mary decided to keep it forever, so she married it. And now, it has been 6 long years since they've started to live together."

Hearing the acid tongued humour, Akshay's face lit up.

"Ah! Our Wedding anniversary! Today is our bloody wedding anniversary!"he cried with joy. Then he stopped and thought aloud "But where were we going...? Oh! Harshmey's for dinner. I almost forgot about that bit. Man, I love the chineese they serve there."

She stared at him. "Wierdo", she smiled.

Akshay started the engine springing the car into life and cruised through the empty Mumbai highway.

"Do you remember the first time we met", she asked after travelling for some distance in silence.

"No", he replied curtly and then quickly glanced at her, just to check her expression. When he found her sitting with her arms crossed, eyes narrowed, head slightly tilted to one side and looking straight at him with a playful smoulder in her eyes, just like the way she used to do when she was a teenager, he let out a hearty laughter.

He threw his left hand and cuddled her, but adamant as she was, she ddin't slacken her tight frame. Aaliya still looked at him with the same sterness mingled with the innocence on her face, until she finally decided to vent off her fake anger-she always needed a reason to rekindle their innocent fights.

"Ofcourse you wouldn't remember anything. You are a pig afterall!"

"Aaliya, had you paid a bit of attention in your bio classes, you would know that pigs are not dumb!"

"How do you know that? Oh! Sorry. I forgot that only pigs know better about pigs", she retorted.

"A moment ago, you told me that am a lamb. And now you tell me that am a pig. Make up your mind", Akshay snapped back.

Fumbling for a good come-back she stammered, "You are a lamb that laughs like a pig."

"Pigs don't laugh."

Again she fidgeted for words, "Your laughter and pig's snort is one and the same." And then she began her session of imitating his laughter.

Some things never change at all, he realized.

Street lights and the flickering neon lamps, at the entrance of every shop that fleeted past them, blurred in Akshay's eyes as he turned the pages of his life.

He found it hard to digest that Aaliya and he have been married for 6 years and that they have a daughter, who has just learned to write her own name. It all seemed like yesterday. The temptation to tread along the beautiful path to the past was too hard to resist. So he plummeted into the abysses of his mind...just to revive the lost happiness...

They say fire prevails in the beginning of evrything-be it the creation of the Universe or the Earth, as it is today, or at the beginning of a Hindu ritual, when the devotees pray to the God of Fire, or at the beginning of a relationship.

Like all love stories, Akshay's and Aaliya's story started with a fire.

Akshay wa studying for Einstein and Newton while aaliya had adorned her world with Shelly and Wordsworth. They were, and still are, two different individuals, livivng in two different worlds. and as Akshay had studied, when two unlike charges come close to each other, they are attracted to each other. So was Akshay and Aaliya.

Their college canteen was the first place to witness this phenomenon. Clad in fulll sleeve white shirt, stiff with starch and ironed properly, Akshay was sitting silently eating his rotis alone, while reciting the mathematical formulae for a test he had, after lunch. At the same time a clumsy Aaliya, balanced her tray of lunch in one hand and a literature book in the other. Since both the individuals had to tread along the same path of destiny, Aaliya lost her balance, after entangling her left foot with the right. Fluttering her arms, like a bird about to take off, and throwing her tray and book in the air, she landed on the floor with a thud.

Groaning with pain, she got up only to look into the eyes of a fierce looking animal, whose white shirt was stained with sambhar, a fish protruding from his breast pocket and a piece of roti dangling from the side of his head.

The sight tickled her funny bone so hard that she couldn't resist laughter escape from her mouth. Soon the, then jostling crowd pow-wowing unnecessarily, joined her as it became a sea of laughing faces-all pointing at the animal. Infuriated, the animal, then, did something that welded the two worlds into one.

Clenching his fists into ball, he slashed through the air before it landed straight on Aaliya's jawbone...

Thunder roared as it metamorphed the splintering of bones. Dark clouds had gathered in the skies, blocking any form of light from the heaven above. It would rain any moment now.

"You must've suffered a lot of pain. Didn't you", Akshay asked, as he turned his face towards his wife.

Aaliya raised her eyebrow, "What?"

"Your jaw...remember I hit you?"

After thinking for a while, wondering what her immature husband was reffering to, she reflected, "Oh! The canteen issue? I used to hate you for that!"

"Thinking about it I still shudder", Aaliya's little lambadmitted sheepishly. "I dont know what came to me...I had become an animal...a wild animal. I am sorry Aaliya."

Well you should be. But you should be more sorry for following me everywhere I wentand doing nothing but stare..or to be more precise ogle."

I was too embaressed to talk to you after that. everydaywhen I wake up, I would make a resolution that I would approach you and apologize. But it never happened. Because everytime I trace your footsteps and look at you...something goes awfully wrong in me...it feels as if my mouth has run dry or that my muscles has become stiff and suddenly my head starts whirling..."

His head had already started whirling, just by thinking about it. Time, might be viewed as a fleeting deer, that darts away as you try to hunt it down, slipping from everyone's fingers or as the mind of a politician-one that changes every second. But in their story, time was a doctor. It healed both Aalya's open cut of hatred towards and Akshay's fear of approaching her. Then time quickly shed its white overcoat of a doctor and wielded a a floral arrow and bow of a cupid.

Three months after the Sun scorched the cty of Mumbai, rain had returned, giving a new lease of life to the two thirsty stumps of withered roses, that stood oddly away from the other flowers of the garden. The two roses lived for several days in full bloom, without knowing each other's existance. And the names of these two roses were Akshay and Aaliya.

And then the Cupid struck his bow. It was then that the two roses realised that they were to each other, than any other flower in te garden. Slowly, following the rhythm of the heavenly shower, one rose leaned closer to the other rose and kissed its soft petals and carassed it with its fragile tendrils. Drenched in rain and passion, the two wondors of nature looked at each other and hugged each other tightl, as their colour changed from pink to red-as if painted in blood. They buried their petals snugly into each other's neck, as they became undistinguishable, while their stems intertwined as one...

Akshay stopped the car and looked at Aaliya, who was gazing outside the window. Perplexed by the sudden halt, she looked at him and raised her eyebrow.

He moved closer to her, as far as the gears and the hand-brakes allowed him to, while his fingers skillfully selected a song from the music player.

"You are beautiful...", he sighed.

She smiled at him. Caressing the nape of his neck, she purred, "What happened to you?"

"Time is changing. And with it, things change...people change. But...but I don't want to change. I want it to freeze. I want this moment. I want it last forever. The way I look at you, the way you look at me...I don't want it to change..."

Letting his head rest on her shoulder, and patting his back like a mother to her child, who has just woken up by a nightmare, she assured him, "Don't worry. Nothing will ever change between us...nothing..."

Life After Death (A speech)

"If you would behold the spirit of death, open your heart your heart wide into the body of life. For life and death are one, even as the river and sea are one."

These are the words of Kahlil Gibran, who has beautifully described something as intriguing as death. Now I really wonder what exactly is being dead and what happens after this inevitable point of no-return...or maybe more clearly: Is there Life after Death?

To answer this complicated question, I must first explain what is meant by death. Death to us seems like a cruel absurdity that happens after enjoying the time of our lives. But to a medical examiner, it would be, in simple medical terms, the end of all biological functions of a livivng organism. all said and done, however you interpret it, one thing is for sure, death definitely comes at the end...or does it?

These interesting perspecties on death lead us to the next obvious question-what after death? If you ask this question to a person who has had a Near Death Experience(NDE), they would tell you that they no longer believe in afterlife. They know that there is afterlife. And such near death accounts has nothing to do with faith or religion, because faith simply implies the possibility of doubt and knowledge implies certainty. The near death experiences are based on the solid knowledge and facts- not faith.

If a million astronauts go to Mars and return to Earth saying, "Hey, there is Martians livivng up there." It is then I would know for sure that, yes, there is Martians livivng on Mars. In the same way, millions of people have returned from death saying that there is life after death. Can all these millions of people, who have experienced the same thing be wrong? Don't you think its easier to believe that they are right. For this reason, the only rational conclusion is that there is life after death. Faith and scepticism then becomes irrational.

Pam Reynolds, perhaps could be the best case of person survivng death. Her extraordinary NDE occured when undergoing a rare srgical operation. For this, she was put unconscious using an anaesthetic. But halfway through the operation something went terribly wrong and her heart ceased to beat, her breathing became sparse until it stopped altogether. And soon blood got drained from her head and her body temperature lowered to 60 degrees. While in this condition, she remembes floating out of her body and watching the doctors operate on her lifeless body. Later when she regained consciousness, she was able to describe the surgical instuments, the conversation held b the doctors themselves and the procedures performed during the surgery.

Does that sound like a cock and bull story to you? Well then near death experiences like Howard Storm, David Oakford, George Ritchie and my own grandfather would have similar stories to tell you. But to digest them you might want to have an experimental analysis of this information, and this is where a smart young parapsychologist walks in and puts forth his plan:

"Imagine that your are hospitalised and that a major surgery is being performed on you. You ae sound asleep. During the operation, something strange happens to you- you find yourself floating near the ceiling and staring at your body on which doctors are still working on. Then you notice a strange sign hanging from the ceiling that says: 'You are dead.'

"You have a bissfull state of mind that you have never experienced before. Suddenly you feel a pull and before you know what is happening you are back in the omfort of your body, sound asleep again.

"On waking up, you tell your doctor about your óut-of-body'experience and about the sign you saw, to which your doctor would simply smile and tel you tat the sign can only be read by someone who is hanging near the ceiling. And by doing this you have proven scientifically that mind can function outside the body-that consciousness can transcend our bodies."

Think about it, we were taught to believe that we can think because of our brain. So ideally, a person who has been declared 'brain dead'by the medical professionals shouldn't experience any sort of feeling. But such people, not only can they see everything, but also feel more alive!

As a matter of fact, all of us unknowingly do experience a similar state of mind-when we see dreams. It has been claimed, by the quantum physicists in the Thoery of Strings, that here are eleven dimensions in this universe. And one such dimension is the Astral Plane or the Spirit World-as we know it. Its into this dimension that we fall into subconsciously, when we are asleep...

Unfortunately, all these paranormal phenomenon and the proposed test environment will be butchered mercilessly in the hands of science, as such evidence do not qualify to to be called 'scientific evidence.' The reason is that scientific evidence involves replication of the experiment. And replication of a near-death-experience is irrational. And even if such experiences were to be believed, do we have proof that life exists beyond death?

Well that's when reincarnation comes in. There is a general misconception that many people ave about reincarnation Some assume that after death, people are immediately reincarnated. But NDE accounts affirm that this is not true because in this state-in the so called astral state time doesn't exist.

In the beginning of my speech I had stated that if our experience as a human is analogous to a river, then our experience as a spirit is analogous to the entire water cucle. Each of us is like a rain drop which fell from a cloud and ultimately entered into a river where we would meander through obstacles, splash on rocks, pick up dirt from the river banks and finally disappear into the vast sea only to return back...only to be reincarnated.

The reason why we are born or reborn is not because someone is forcing us to but because our souls crave for knowledge-the same reason why you and I are here in this university. After all whcih is the best school if not life? But then again all these concepts and explanations that weave life, death and afterlife together seem to be a very thing fabric that would be severed even with the blunt edge of a rational question.

Again we would find ourselves intrigued by the same topic. Again we would find asking each other the same question. Again we would end where it had all begun- "Is there Life After Death?" But, then, let me ask you a qustion, "Do we really die?"

Let's say today, after finishing my speech I collapse here on this podium, dead. But do I really die?

I don't think so. I'll find myself a space in one of the corners of your heart. Even though I as a person-a nam- is dead, you'll remember me at some point of your life, and that's what it all takes me to make me immortal.

So, lets forget about afterlife and even about death. Rather let's lead a good life like humans-not a pre programmed robot devoid of any emoion, because finally: "Life is a great surprise. And I don't see why death shouldn't be an even greater one."