As it started to drizzle, I hurried towards the terrace to fetch the clothes left out to dry. It was a typical mid-July afternoon, and the dark clouds had obscured the sky. I climbed down the stairs with my arms around the heap of clothes, piled them on the couch and stood by the window. In no time, the drizzle metamorphosed into a heavy downpour. Within minutes, I could see a large puddle coming to life on a nearby road. Oh how I wished I could go back in time.

“Stop running around or you’ll hurt yourselves,” my mother used to shout at us. We had holidays during the monsoon. Whenever it rained, we had a favourite pastime activity: sailing paper boats. We would remain prepared all the time but on one particular day we only had as many as five of them. So we hurried into my room and tore apart an old notebook. We folded as many papers as we could into tiny little boats. She was better than me at making them—almost twice as fast.

“Will these be enough?” Anjali had asked. She was my best childhood friend and my neighbour. As far as I can recollect, she had a small scar on her chin and a missing front tooth. Her mother did her hair into bunches. She could never pronounce my name correctly.

“Maybe,” I replied, smiling.

We set off like sailors carrying the paper boats to search for a puddle nearby. Upon finding one, we distributed the paper boats equally among ourselves. One of us would go to the other end of the puddle and mark a long stick as the finishing line. She always carried a yellow umbrella with her; otherwise, her mother wouldn’t allow her to go out in the rain.

The sound of raindrops has always been a perfect lullaby for me. And sometimes they also stir up my vessel of bitter-sweet memories as it did that time around. I opened my cupboard where I had kept my photo albums. One of them had a photograph of us, smiling at the camera. I got it out of the album and gave a pretty good gaze to it. Life is like a million photographs: you can remember it but you can never recapture it. We were two eight-year olds in the photo without a worry in the world, oblivious of what future had in store for us.

I remember, before we started the race, we wrote our names on those paper boats. She didn’t have a very good handwriting. A-N-J-A-L-I. All the letters would be of different sizes when she wrote them. We played the game in rounds. We gently put our boats on the puddle, one for each round. We, then, had a countdown 5 4 3 2 1 before we blew warm air from our mouths. The paper boats sailed together under the soft drizzle for a while and came to a halt.

“See. Mine has drifted farther than yours,” she would say and roll out her tongue, fixing her gaze right into me. I smiled. I could easily outrun her in every single round but seeing her happy when she won felt way better than winning. So mostly I used to blow softly and let her win.

“Not again!” I would exclaim and clutch my hair.

“Don’t worry. We have plenty of rounds remaining,” she would console me.

Our boats never made it to the finish line in a single blow. Some of them would sink as they bumped over little mounds and rocks, and the raindrops from the overcast heavens up there weakening their structure.

I put the photograph back into the album. I knew I was smiling. I don’t know if she has one of these. I looked out through the window. It had stopped raining outside. You can’t have a rainbow without a little rain they say. But rainbows don’t just magically appear after every single rainfall. Life is certainly not a fairy tale sugar-coated with a cherry on the top.

After the game was over, we picked up the ones which made it to the finish line after multiple blows. Most of the time, the water would have already washed away our names on them. We also had an open drain in front of our houses which connected our doorways. Anjali lived a couple of blocks away from my house. She rushed to her home waiting for me to sail those paper boats. I set them free and so did she. The current carried the fragile boats along with them. Mine were a little heavier than hers. For: I had loaded them with love.

Hope is like a paper boat. Only currents of water and wind can keep them going. Else, it is just going to sink sooner or later. It’s just a matter of time before they come across their ultimate fate. Hope is a beautiful thing but not always.

She waved at me from her doorway; I smiled and waved back. The paper boats were already on their way. Many sank half way through. A few collided. I saw one coming towards me which had her name on it. I stooped over to pick it up but I missed it. My boats rarely reached her. Even when they did, they were empty and light.

Anjali is one of my paper boats, drifted away from me. Her parents moved when we were 10. I remember that day she bade me goodbye. We had exchanged paper boats with our names on them, which I lost after a few years. I haven’t seen her since then. I remember her sometimes when it rains. All I am left with is one photograph of us and some blurred childhood memories. I loved her back then. And maybe sometimes she loved me too. I will never know. I kept the hope of seeing her again afloat with just a few folds of paper for the next few months. Our love was meant to drown because we sailed our hearts on paper boats.