Drop-ped Lives!

The air picked them up on their drive. Driven across the sea were those tiny drops now.

Condensed cold in the deep Pacific dropped them into the water. Drops dropped unceremoniously, unnoticed. Thousands of miles away, or maybe close to them on the South American mass, some students were learning about the same phenomenon. One of them was him. 

The drops glided on with their family as a container ship went by. Somehow, though they got crushed under it on the open seas. Got pushed hard and down on a soft and flexible floor.

Many years later, a whale almost gulped them. But somehow it didn’t. Then stillness of the expanse followed for an indeterminable age. Lifeless as ever on water, in water.

One day they rose. Rose on being beaten by an angry Sun. They collided with their counterparts from the Indian Ocean. In the massive comingling that followed they crossed over to the latter.

There, the drops were gulped by a drowning Filipino. After twisting and turning uncomfortably in the heat of his mouth they were spit out. In desperation. Only, the relief was short-lived.

The Sun was not done with them. It was extracting a revenge for whatever they stood for, which was against him. Again, they were heaved over the Southern lands, landing close to the East African coast.

Or so they thought!

Before being let down there was a sweeping dictation given by the wind which struck them to the clouds. Mercilessly, it thrashed them about the clouds, which themselves were helpless, as they were drifted in their north-easterly march.

The 'Monsoons', that’s what the people called this dreadful chaos. The assembly headed towards a land. On seeing the coast, they thought life as they imagined was finally here!

But the air traffic control of the megalopolis pushed them onward dangerously, sending them on a crash mission into that country's Western Mountains.

Surely this has be the end!

But fate had other plans. The drops skipped the lofty heights through a dip in the ridge. They squeezed through to welcoming farmlands, leeward.

He was sitting outside in this part of the country dreading the sultry and hot day. On they came, along with their mates, heralding respite. The cloud blisters burst, revealing them to him, coming down and fast, in front of his eyes. He smiled. He was happy.

They clung to the neem tree, swaying with its leaves like an enticing lover in a Bollywood flick.

He got up, perhaps to feel them. But they were already descending, one by one onto the tiled environs of his place. They fell in a lump bubble marking the place where they landed.

He looked on. He smiled again. The bubble burst, not a surprise, because it was a bubble after all.

The drops became one with water again. But now, they’d drain. Into the dark underbelly of a human created world awaiting them. The ugly side of the landscape. Inches and upside down from the beautiful world above.

What’s beauty though?

They meet the smell of gas and creatures of the dark, in what seemed like a never-ending tunnel, guided by gravity, that silent monster of monsters, which holds on to everything above them.

They heard screams, human-ear splitting rumble and tumble ahead. A vortex which swallowed every one of them awaited.

Maybe that’s it.

As they approached the swirling, black, ferocious Kraken, they had a reflection.

Will there be a future like the past? A future past.

They thought of the Pacific, the crushing container which pushed them to unreal depths, the narrowly missed gargantuan insides of a whale, the Indian ocean, the view of Filipino’s teeth gallery, the rumble of the monsoon clouds with electric display, the urban jungle of confusion, the near-certain death stare in the mountain wall, the trickle and the gentle swing of the neem tree and the orgasmic bubble as they landed before him.

Each of these glimpses into a past were times of great upheaval, times of solace, of realization, of great conclusions, of life lessons and each of them memoir-worthy. But in hindsight, as they headed to a horrific end or maybe a chur into a new beginning, each memory's worth is only a millisecond of flash. That is what it has all amounted to; volatile, fleeting recollections. 

And they wonder why that last person, not even past enough to be called a memory, figured as such.