Bad day, good dream

Let me tell you about a rainy day. You know the kind when umbrellas and raincoats don’t work, and the water gets into your waterproof boots. The kind of rainy day that hits you just when you think the sun’s not going to go down on you, no matter what kind of cloud hangs over you. I am talking about those leaky times when all you need is a hot cup (or glass) of something before you curl up like a dog and lick your wounds, hopefully with a rosy dream about tomorrow.
Cecil had seen such a day. When she started out that morning, her heel broke the moment she stepped out of the rickshaw to get into her office. She walked up to her cabin like an old sea dog with a wooden leg. In her cabin, while she was looking for a pencil, her elbow connived with the table and knocked over a cup of coffee. It flowed like an irresistible mountain stream over only those files which were most important to her. It nearly drowned a design of a multi-million rupees kennel she had made for the firm’s most important client – a dumb bulldog who looked for an opportunity to bark because he was too much into ‘value for money’…as if there is any such thing. It had taken a week to complete.
When her boss saw the design through a film of dull coffee stain, he liked it but found it unprofessionally done. So, she had to spend two hectic hours copying the stuff into another file as the hour when the bulldog was supposed to arrive hung over her like a guillotine. Just when she was done, she got the news that bulldog would arrive the next day because his better half had just got a rabid bargain from some olive-eating fashion designer. To add to her tired knuckles, Cecil was told that the design would be approved by none other than the classy she-bulldog. The she-bulldog never liked anything she hadn’t tinkered with.
Cecil didn’t usually think the god of small things could pile her plate up with little irritants to make a huge hill of crass issues that always come to the world without solutions. But so he did on leaky days. And that’s why people like Cecil are asked to solve them just so that the lord can see if his creations still swear by his grace. God is a mean thing on leaky days. At least, that’s what Cecil told me.
Last thing Cecil needed that evening was poetry of the subtle variety – where you have to stretch the edges of your brain to figure out what the poet is saying. And the metaphors of a ‘forced’ poet are twice more terrible than the garbage man’s. She was forced to go through his performances because she was the better half and had to encourage her husband’s passions. That evening he had composed a free verse called ‘Silver lining’. She found it grossly predictable but went through with the pain of seeing him enunciate every word like an old woman taking speech therapy after a heart attack. His poem ended with the proclamation that ‘God knows he deals us with bolts of lightening sometimes/ And sometimes with rain/ But he only holds up his sword so we can see the brilliant streaks of hope’. That was the problem with poets who took God and the paraphernalia that follows him without a pinch of salt. As expected, Cecil did not see any climax there even as her husband throbbed with his ordinariness.
Earlier that evening when she got home her grandfather, who was around for the weekend told her that a mistake in some government paper had resulted in her name’s tail being chopped off – from Cecilia to Cecili. She hated her name and called herself Cecil. In school, the name had made her life very difficult. The boys called her Italy. However, for almost 26 years it had stuck and you know how complex government labyrinths are. She hoped to have it legally changed someday. Till then Cecili slept dreaming about a great romance with a man who did not write predictable three-minute poems and shot bulldogs in the buttocks.
When I met Cecili Rogers the next morning, I was going through a leaky day of my own. I didn’t know what to say to her. So we smiled at each other, drank our coffee without spilling it, went through the design and hoped the tough would get going. Later in the afternoon, after haggling with the she-bulldog and pushing the design through, we spent a quiet moment in the corridor. “Bad days are as good as the good days. Easy days are rare,” Cecil told me. I agreed with her and called her Cecili for fun. We had a laugh. Half the day was left and anything could go wrong. But we were not looking for silver linings anymore.