Rain brings happiness in life

It’s raining here in Dunedin and I’m on my bed gazing at the moon- playing hide and seek with
the clouds. I love rain and it brings fond memories of my hometown back in Nepal. When I close
my eyes, the images of my days back home come to me as in a Kaleidoscope. The pitter patter
of rain brings a childlike smile on my face. My old fantasies of making rhythmic music on these
sounds popped up in my mind. I can see the cloudy sky and a part of the moon, which used to look
exactly the same back home.

I look from my window, the raindrops fall on the leaves of a tree, and these leaves hold the drops
for a fraction of a second and finally drops down. Some drops are reflecting the moonlight and
appear like pearls in the trees. I could also see other lights through the trees somewhere in the
other corner of the city, which again takes me back to my home town and reminds me of my
villagers returning back from a paddy field with a flashlight in their hand. In Nepal, we have a
monsoon climate and rainy days are the most precious time as these mean the busiest days in
the paddy fields. The farmers often come home late night after their day in the fields. The dinner
is often served at midnight.

I, as a schoolboy, always use to wait for the monsoon. Monsoon would bring a lot of joy - school
holidays, the rain, time to visit grandparents, mangoes, baby corns and many more. My home
town, Chitwan, lies in the flatlands, which are generally referred as a “Terai”- low land region in
the southern part of Nepal. The major mode of transportation was the bicycle for senior school
students in those days. My bicycle speed towards the home would double in that last day before
school holidays and reach home with glorious face with the expression: Yes! Free for a month. I still
have a vivid memory of that joyful face of mine. The planning for the whole months mostly finished
some weeks earlier. In some years, grandparents would already be there at the home to take us
with them. The feeling of their presence at that moment cannot be explained in the words. It was
simply majestic. I would not wait for anything, go directly to the room, grab the bag and ask
grandpa to start his motorbike. My grandfather's house is in the countryside. We had to travel for two
hours in a motorbike from the town. We had to cross a jungle road in between where I have seen
several wild animals like Deer, Peacock, wildcat, monkeys and even Rhinos. I never saw tiger but
my grandfather uses to say that he had seen a tiger in that route.

There was mango and jackfruit orchard in my grandparents’ house. One of the mango trees
was so close to my heart that I did not want it to be chopped, even when it stopped yielding fruits.
This tree has my best childhood memories. I had fallen down from that tree several times trying
to reach a ripe mango at the top. I had almost broken my arm in one instance. I did not tell about that accident to my grandparents that day because of the fear that they might take me back to my home. I never wanted to go back home and always hoped those days to never end. The nearby corn farm, half harvested and half standing, used to be my playground and would follow grandmother to collect corn for the mid-day food. Those corn were our mid-day snacks. My
grandmother would grill them in the wood-fire and we savored it with a paste of salt and green
chilli. The very thought of those yummy corns makes my mouth watery.

Rice fields were somewhat far from the house, in the areas near a river or having an irrigation facility
because the rice needs much more water to grow than corn and fruits. Rice is a staple food in
Nepal was grown with the utmost care and involved different stages- seed selection, land preparation, crop establishment, water and nutrient management, and harvest. Land preparation and Crop establishment were two major stages, I used to get involved. I use to go to the rice fields with my grandfather during land preparation to help him. But, I used to spend time swimming and fishing
in the nearby river and play in the mud in the freshly prepared rice fields. We had a sharing culture
for crop establishment. One member of each household from the village come to help in crop
establishment. It would be the day of the feast for me. It would be the duty of that household to cook
food for all the people who were there in the field. My grandmother used to wake up early and prepare food with the help of some neighbor’s and I was the one to carry food to the field. The view in the rice field would be wonderful: some are carrying saplings from seedbed to wet field, some in the row in the wet field are planting the saplings into the wet field and others leveling the land with
the help of spade and a pair of oxen. The most beautiful part- all signing a song of prosperity
together.

I hear the sound next door and thought of my grandmother working in the kitchen, came for a second
but I instantly realized I am thousands of miles away from my home. I could only see a closed
door. I have left my hometown in search of worldly knowledge and explore the world through the
lens of the Kiwi lifestyle.