By Rex Catubig

 

AUGUST is when monsoon brings copious rain, and usually intensifies into tropical typhoon. In my boyhood, at the start of a heavy downpour, we would run out into the yard and cheerily drench our fragile bodies with heaven’s libation. But as thunder rolls and lightning menacingly flashes across the darkened sky, we would scurry back, dry ourselves, and seek sanctuary in our home. And as the rain rages outside and patters on the roof, our imagination would roam and conjure another world.

This is how I remember it:

The rain used to bring with it magic. As a child, a drizzle sent splintering by a dark, thunder-cracked sky, would be enough to pierce the gossamer curtain of reality and allow us passage into nowhere land. Equipped with our set of wonder props consisting of blankets turned into cavernous capes, a flashlight stuck into a perforated condensed milk tin can that radiates a thousand stars, we retreat into a corner room of our old house, and in conspiracy with our spellbound blood family, there enact the mystical rituals of our bewitched childhood–summoning from their mythical realm the awesome presence of Ari-ari, Bokut, Alan, and Engkanto. And the rattan bed, otherwise the setting of a divine antique rite and whose board groans with countless dormant dreams, becomes the fecundating matrix wherein our rain creatures are born, heralded by booming thunder and a wild ticker tape of lightning.

Soon this noble womb turns savage arena: an Olympic struggle begins. The rain creatures pit themselves against each other in the eternal quest for supremacy. And the heavens would weep with such anguish–relentlessly and copiously.

 

(Taken from European Space Agency)

 

It is such a fascinating experience, though brief and fleeting, lasting only for the duration of the monsoon– before the vigilant Baga-Baga and its sibling Sapi-sapi join forces with the harvest winds to spirit all those fragile illusions away, bearing them skyward to offer back to the heavens to whose bountiful bosom they belong.

The cycle of rain and harvest wind still come. But it’s no longer the same. Now, when it rains, one is caught in the grip of fear and apprehension. Gone since then is the romantic aura that enshrouds its being. Like most everything else as one grows old and weary, rain has lost its wonder and ceased to fascinate. As it becomes the harbinger of peril and destruction,  rain inspires no more than grim feelings and even bleaker thoughts. Even the heraldic thunder of yore, the winds that raged like a thousand violins, the rain that fell like trillion notes from a symphony of harps–all these are reduced to a threnody of woe.

Our rain games are no more. Gone forever. Swept away by the ravages of time and clime.

Share your Comments or Reactions

comments

Powered by Facebook Comments