Foul Weather

It rained all night. It was still raining in the morning when we arrived at the Garden. And it continued to rain as we did our exercises inside the China Hut. Only after we were done did the rain stop… just briefly, to start all over again with a vengeance.
Nobody expected anybody to turn up in this foul weather. But Santosh Tyagi, Sunita Jajodia, Nahid Khan and Shekhawat were already there, ahead of time. A cat gave them company. Soon Lakshmi arrived with a tiny dead mouse dangling in her hand. She had brought it in her car to offer the cat as its breakfast.
Shekhawat warned her that it was a vegetarian cat and would refuse to eat the mouse. He was clearly mistaken. Seeing Lakshmi, the cat dived from its perch on the wall, leapt over Shekhawat’s head and landed flat on the wet ground to devour the dead mouse.
The good thing about the monsoon this year was that there was no water-logging inside the Garden. Nor was there any slush near the Gate – a veritable ‘danger zone’ where countless men and women have skidded and lost their pride. Also, the interiors of the China Hut were unusually clean and dry without the regular caterpillars, centipedes and earthworms crawling all over the place. Or who knows, the cat had already made a meal of them, long before we showed up!
Watching the cat’s antics, Santosh and Sunita quietly left for home. The carnivores – Shekhawat and Nahid – stayed on for the exercises, making small talk about setting out on a picnic to Lonavala during the monsoon. Soon Arora arrived, dripping wet, having walked the distance from home with a dry umbrella folded neatly in the pocket of his shorts. Then Grover arrived, late for the first time. He was followed by Papneja, Teja Singh, Angad Singh, Kiran Makharia, Monthi Serrao… In the end, we were only eight today to wrap up the day’s routine.
Jagmohan Papneja:
At present Angel Xpress Foundation, an NGO is providing free education to about 60 under-privileged children of the locality inside the China Hut from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday to Friday. They get the China Hut cleaned twice a day. As a result the floor remains neat and clean even as a lot of people use this place in the evening too. The cat's role has added to the cleanliness of the area.