“Everything’s gone, my son. What shall we do now?” My mom was crying over on the other side of the phone. Was it 8 o’ clock in the morning when I got her call? I was still asleep then. Listening to her crying voice, I suddenly woke up.
“What happened, mom?” I asked her.
“Hail. There was hailstorm whole night.”
“Hail?” ‘Oh yeah, hail’. It was about 1 am when my eyes widened to find myself shivering with cold. I saw that my blanket was sleeping comfortably on the floor. I picked it up and covered myself with it. But still, I couldn’t sleep. Then I realized that it was not only because of the fallen blanket but also of the showering of the hailstones outside that I was feeling cold. The showering had stopped by then but our hostel’s ground was covered with the hail. I looked at my friends who were sleeping at peace but there was one mate who was groaning in his sleep. Then I thought of a plan to disturb him. I opened the door to balcony and came up with few hailstones on my hands. I placed them slowly on the body of that groaning mate.
“Momi” he screamed like hell and all of my hostel mates woke up to find what was happening. Seeing the hailstone showering outside all of them left their beds and started wearing thick jackets. And then all of us rushed outside to play with the hailstones like children. Had we been at homes, we would have been not allowed to get outside and play, but today there were no restrictions at all.
We started throwing hailstones at each other. “Ouch! it hurts.” One of my friends shouted. It was not snowballs, we were playing with, it was hailstones. So of course, it would hurt. But also, we played as if we were playing with the snow. Even running on the slippery hailstones was fun for us. We played for an hour or so. Then we came back to the room to sleep, but our feet and body were so cold that we struggled to sleep.
It was the greatest hailstone shower in my village since 2005 and we played like we would never get the chance to play again. Maybe because of that, my head was burning with fever. I tried to wake up suddenly hearing my mother’s cry. But to my dismay, I couldn’t do so. My head was pushed back to the bed. I realized I was suffering from common cold and my voice has changed because of the Rhinovirus.
“What happened, son? Are you fine?” my mom asked. Maybe she heard the noise of my head falling back.
“Yeah, I am fine, mom. What would happen to me?”
“But why is your voice sounding as if you are suffering from common cold.” Oh, she had noticed the change in my voice. Besides the urge to cough had increased so much in me that I ended the call and coughed to my heart's content.
“It’s really hard to lie about the common cold.” I took a deep breath and called her again.
“Yes, mom. The call got disconnected. You were talking about hailstorm, is something wrong?”
“My son, this year’s crop has been destroyed by the hailstorm. What should we do now? Our whole field is covered with the hailstones. “
Our main source of income is agriculture. And this year’s harvest, and effort all went to waste. I became angry at myself then. My village, my family were in chaos and I was playing with the hailstones here, trying to discover my youth. And my mom, she called me to deliver the sad news, and I made her worry more about the sickness due to playing with those hailstones.
(My Facebook newsfeed was covered with the pictures of my friends, playing with the hailstones. And there was another news of the destruction of crops in the whole country by the same hail.)
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