Of books and rain :)

I get home from work (I’m doing a summer internship in Pennsylvania) at around 5: 30. I am restless as usual. I guess a year away from home, and 3 months away from my friends in Maryland (My home away from home) does that to you! Well, in any case, I need something to do, exhausted as I am after 9 hours of continuous work!

And so I head towards the public Library, my one saving grace during these three months of lonely summer torture..Sigh! A delightful quaint place, so much like the rest of this sleepy town. It makes me miss the little Public Library in Simla, on the Mall. The feeling is always nostalgic, since I spent the better part of my growing years devouring that dingy little library on the Mall.

Anyways, the Paoli Library, with a little over 27,000 books, DVDs and CDs et al, is anything but big. The best place to hide form the world, and immerse myself in the delicious comfort of my favorite books. From Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie to Jude Deverdeaux and Anita Desai, this place is my safe haven, for I am the complete book worm!

After spending a luscious hour at the library, and armed with four of my favorite books, including ‘The Inheritance of Loss’, I head back home. The books will keep me going for a couple of days at least!

The sun goes down real fast, with the mercury following suit. I look up, and then I feel the rain drops, slowly at first, plop-plop, splish-splash, on my face. Then it starts to rain harder, and what hits me, is the smell of the damp earth, the most reassuring monsoon smell, the waft of which carries me all the way back to Chandigarh, the days of carefree capers in the typical Chandigarh downpour on my beloved Scooty! J J Oh, How I miss those days! The endless hours spent dancing in the rain, singing songs, jumping puddles and coming home drenched to the disproving glare of my mum! The warm cups of ginger-chai and yummy paneer pakodas that followed, with never ending gossip in the evenings.

Change they say, is the only thing that is ever constant in your life. Well, here I am- a victim of change (that is what I like to call myself, when I am wallowing in self pity at timesJ). It is not that I don’t like change; it’s just that I miss the familiarity of the old things.

I think I will leave the part of what I miss, and to what measure I miss it, for another blog post. I will end by telling you, that though the rain made me miss home, it brought with it a sense of familiarity that washed away all my restlessness. It is the feeling that assures me, that God fulfills himself in many ways and that nature is the same everywhere. For a split second, when I stood soaking myself in the rain today, I could feel home all around me, just like the old days, and that too from over a thousand miles away!!