When it rained...

I flipped through the calendar again. It was still 12th of the month. All my money was gone. My wallet had just a coin and my savings account stated I had only five hundred rupees.

Last night, he asked me for money. His said that a friend needed help and as always I believed it. I know he doesn’t need that money for a friend, he will go buy alcohol. But he is my younger brother, when he asks for anything I cannot say no. He is the only family I have.

I try to push the thoughts away and get up to arrange things and tidy my house. I often become nostalgic when I do this; I turn old things up and down. Go through the letters that my father sent us during his army days. I often end up spending hours staring at them and leave my chores in middle.

Those days were so perfect. I was nine or ten and my brother still a toddler. My mother was most beautiful and loving woman I remember. She took up the responsibility of the house perfectly while dad was away. We loved changing cities, packing and unpacking when my father was posted to a new location. This time my father was posted near the border and therefore we had to remain in the city and my father made it a point to write letters to us each week. He would write separate letters to mom and me. These were my treasures. For last two weeks, there were no letters, so we eagerly waited for the postman. Postal services often delayed the arrival of the letters. It was late in the afternoon when the postman arrived. This time the handwriting on the postcard looked different. There were no letters for me, just one addressed to my mother. It explained that my father was missing for fifteen days and army believed he was dead. His belongings would be sent to us soon. It rained heavily all night that day.

The weather today was wild too. It seemed to rain in memory of that night. A silent prayer escaped my mouth. I promised myself to talk to him to give up drinking and put him to the rehabilitation.

The doorbell rang. It must be him. Determined to talk to him I got up and opened the door. It wasn’t him. It was an older version of my brother instead. It was my father. After being in prison under false case and false identity for over fifteen years, he had now returned home. A moment later a police jeep stopped. They wanted me to identify a body of a drunken person who died in a road accident just around the corner.