A (very) Merry (soggy) Christmas!

A dream, a tin box in the dream. A tin box that looks so beautiful and useful. A tin box, creaked at its hinges. A tin box that's rusted, but that rust only adds to its mote beauty. A tin box as if it conceals all the lovely hidden secrets of this world in it.

A tin box, unassuming and simple looking from outside, but inside containing a childhood's worth of memories. Memories of the rain, of a paper-boat folded and stacked neatly inside it, saved for the next rains. A tin box with a small pencil and a shriveled up piece of paper where you doodled the face of your first crush.

A tin box within which you'd saved the wrapping paper of the toffee that your father had gotten for you on that particular weekend, and where you've neatly folded up the foil cover of the milk chocolate your mother got you after she had hit you too hard one morning.

A tin box where you'd stored a favourite perfumed eraser.

A tin box where you'd hidden your brother's favourite stolen pen. You had stolen it, you nut. A tin box where you’d cornered a dog-eared flip-book with Shahrukh Khan’s face. A tin box with a deck of playing cards, half of which had been lost to careful stacking and reveled sets of games played with your roadside friends in the mohalla.

A tin box with wilted, fallen flowers picked up from the sidewalks. A tin box with the extraordinary fake pearls that fell from your frock. A tin box where you sweetly kept the extra length of ribbon you'd used to tie your hair with. A tin box with one lay tic-tac and a pair of double plastic sunglasses you found in the park with your first cousin.

A tin box you'd hidden inside your school bag's outside zipper, because it was the thinnest and flattest and no bag-checker would even reach out to that zip, that's what you'd thought.

You had flinched open your bag, and the tin box had rang. It's contents tuning against the rusted cover, a sweet chiming like the soda bottle seller ringing a bottle opener against the glass bottles during the interval at the cinemas.

One noon when you walked home from school, the skies had suddenly gone purple-orange. And in the anticipation of rain you had forgotten to put the tin box inside the other waterproof zipper of the bag. Instead, you had stomped into the fresh water puddles and looked into the skies trying to keep your eyes open.

You had opened your mouth, your gap-toothed smile, exposed to the heavens and had smiled a full, luxurious smile, a smile you can’t afford now. The pig tails your father had made in the morning, carefully oiled, soaked within seconds. Your jet black hair, sprouting in thin small veins from the bottom over your nape had suddenly weighed a lot.

And you had whirled. Your skirt drenched. Carefree of wearing a white school shirt that you might have to wear again the next day, you had spread your tiny arms and stretched out to contain multiple rain drops within your fists. You had motioned to and fro, forgetting the heaviness of the school bag.

No one had watched you. You forgot about the impeding homework, about getting your school uniform soiled. The deluge had unleashed itself on the earth and you had let yourself go with the downpour.

Splashing your polished black Bata school shoes into the brown puddles, you had crowed in and looked inside one puddle. A frog leaping using its tiny limbs, from one end of his personal mud water pool to another.

The cantankerous rain had splattered itself, all over your thin legs. And you had watched water veins compete— who will reach her socks first. You had laughed when a passing by car had splashed the road water on you, leaving your shirt soiled.

The tin box had danced with you and greedily accepted the rust that came with it. You had been reckless with it, in your motions of joy.

The corrosion seemed to have added a more beatific cover to the tin box, when you opened it at home. And then you had taken your Lunchbox out too. Put it with the empty water-bottle along with the other to-be-washed dishes and had went on to scurry in the house, your drenched hair let loose.

You wanted to enjoy more and pocket more alone moments in the rain before mum got home from work. And in the middle of this joy you had forgotten that your body was cover less. And that your first cousin had been staring at you from the first floor of the house.

He had waved a Hi, you had smiled. He had come over and told your six year old self that you had a beautiful body. And there he had lain you on the bed you used to sleep with your mother on. And you had felt another kind of wetness and a novel manner of satisfaction had dawned upon you while his eyes met you from somewhere between your legs.