It had been raining every day for
the past one month. The smell of wet clothes, damp shoes and closed windows had
started giving the house a dungeon like smell.
I started thinking of the chorus
of the frogs. The nonstop song I used to listen in my childhood, on those
nights when fever throbbed through the nerves in my head, and the salty taste
of the rice water lingered on my tongue.
On rainy days, the chorus of the
frogs started by dusk in the nearby pond. It grew louder by night. Incessant
rains would cut off power and then we had an old Japanese Transistor for
entertainment. It had a thick leather cover which gave it a very distinctive look.
Years later, when the leather was torn and discarded, the ivory white
transistor looked as if it had been stripped off its only coat and made to look
ashamed of its penury.
Those days, we regularly used to
listen to a horror drama on the radio at eight thirty in the night, twice in a
week, sponsored by Modi Continental Tyres. The title song of the soap itself
used to give me the shivers. Sleep would evade me as I lay on the bed listening
to the relentless chorus of the frogs thinking of the flying hands and evil
spirits that the voices in the transistor so proficiently articulated. The chorus
would go louder by midnight as I slowly slipped into some distant dream.
The frogs lived in the pond; the
pond was their territory. Long ago, it belonged to a small temple. There was a
poor priest who lived on the meager contributions from the devotees who came to
worship there. One night the idol of the temple was stolen. The devotees who
came to the temple blamed the priest of stealing the idol. The unfortunate
priest threw all the utensils in the temple into the pond in anguish and then
jumped into it himself. After the loss of the idol and the death of the priest,
the temple was deserted and ended up in ruins. The pond survived and so did the
hundreds of frogs who continued their only business; procreate and croak loudly
on rainy nights.
As I lie awake I would think how
the poor priest, who was dragged down into the swamp as he jumped into the pond,
would be bearing with the ruthless chorus of the frogs.
As the chorus grew louder my
fever dimmed eyes would see him surface from the pond. In the darkness, the
sacred thread across his chest and the white dhoti around his hip would stand
out. With his long hair tied behind his head he would wade slowly out of the
water. I would blink my eyes and wipe out the image before he came out of the
pond to the road. I would then pull the bed sheet over my head before I slithered
into a slumber.