Of a cyclone and a comic book

It was late October 1999. The ground beneath my feet was wetter than water. Bhubaneswar’s clear skies had turned into a swimming pool. And I learned that the clouds that I thought were made of cotton were actually made of waterfalls. All around us, trees were collapsing, as if scrambling to find their way to the womb of the earth. The air was howling, like a hungry infant whose mother’s attention had wavered for a second.

Our lives were like a watercolor painting – except that the painter’s hands were shaking almost as violently as the walls of my room, as violently as the beat in my heart. The windowpane in the living room has broken, as if giving in to the insistent and impatient knock of raindrops. Angry cyclonic water had poured in, and our villainous Onida stood by meekly. Water was the only antidote to its satanic tendencies. Water, water everywhere…

I was eight years old, and old enough to pray that if we died, we must all die together. I prayed: let me not be the only survivor.

I was sitting in my room, on my twin bed, when my father walked in and asked me to help him fill some bottles of water. The kind of water that we could drink. A few years later, I would smile at the rime of an ancient mariner. He looked exhausted, grim. We filled eight Pearlpet bottles. 8 litres of water. As I was filling the ninth bottle, the river of clear water from the mouth of the tap turned into intermittent drops as its effort to quenching our thirst fizzled out in metallic gasps and pathetic croaks. I could hear my mother’s worry reach her temples. Soon, I knew, she would have to slather her narrow forehead with Amrutanjan; her nemesis, the migraine, would come to recover his dues. She had filled every vessel in the house with water for us to survive on. Water outside, water inside. Water, water everywhere…

I walked back to my room to resume reading my Archie Comic. I needed the clean lines of Riverdale to counter the chaotic slush that life had turned into this morning. I had finally persuaded my mother into letting me spend all my pocket money into buying one when we went to the railway station last week. My heart soared in anticipation of the jokes, the romances, the many milkshakes!

The barely read comic lay lifeless on my bed. It was sodden. Archie Andrews…Where Are You? The pages had turned to pulp. Each page had been soaked through, as if someone had taken this book and left it in a bucket of water for several days. What a pertinent question, I thought: Archie Andrews, indeed, where are you?

I looked around for the culprit.

The window was wide open, as if inviting the torrential rainfall to come and live with us. I remembered my father’s stern voice the night before, “Sneha, fasten the window. Shut it tight using the bolt. No shortcuts”. I had rolled my eyes and, as always, had not bolted the window shut. Priding myself on my ability to hoodwink my fastidious father, I slept in peace.

Little did I know then that the unfinished story would haunt me forever and rob me of many a night’s sleep. Even today, I wonder what happened in the story that I was reading. Archie Andrews had married Veronica – but that had turned out to be a dream. But then, he had told Betty he wanted to marry her. Am I even getting the sequence right? Did all of that – any of that – even happen? Do I even have the memory of the story that I half-read? Or is that, too, gone along with my beloved comic book.