When I was younger and it rained in Kerala

Back in my childhood the only pirates I had read about were the ones in Asterix & Obelix and the ones called so by Captain Haddock in his adventures with Tintin.

Even then it never occurred to me that I could see myself as a pirate like Captain Jack Sparrow on a ship 100 times the size of what you see in this one.

My brother, our cousins and I were more than content in building these small paper boats and paper house boats and watch them drift away in the tiny rivulets near my grand parents’ home in Trivandrum. We’d watch them get stuck on tiny pebbles and other such things in the water and then see the gentle current unhinge them and take them away some more distance before we lost sight of them and went back to building some more of them without any attachment or sadness in our hearts of having lost our boat.

We’d build small dams on these rivulets using rocks, mud, dirt, leaves and whatever else we could find around us.

We’d then watch these boats twirl around the small pool that would build up behind the dam wall and then get stuck on the dam. We’d take them back up stream a couple of more times and leave them again till the water would have worn the paper down enough.

Back in 2016 I watched a huge freight ship - the orange coloured SS Dwarka leave the Cochi port and that day I added an item to my bucket list: sail on a freight ship for at least one trip across the seas and do all the odd jobs that exist on such a ship and get a first hand experience of what a rolling ship feels like.

Be that as it may till forces of time and destiny reveal their cards for me; as I look at the photo of this paper boat and the countless many my brother and I made and set down that rivulet near my grand parents’ home in the 1980s and early 1990s, I remember these lines from the late Jagjit Singh’s famous song:

Mujhe Lauta do wo bachpan ka Sawan, wo kagaz ki kashti, wo Barish ka pani...

Nostalgic.