The rain fell with a thud, a thousand clashing gongs; drops like dense sacks falling heavily to the ground at once, the symphony in motion, the program commenced, the audience enthralled, locked in their seats.
The air condensed with invisible water, a damp blanket moistening her skin without wetting it.
Just as you were getting used to the tempo a loud clang broke the repose with a fresh shattering of glass water. She had closed her eyes but now opened them. She sat in a wicker chair in her small balcony. Black grills shaped like symmetrically patterned tie dye motifs caged her in. The slant of the rain stopped a few inches from her feet, an invisible Lakshman-Rekha.
Photo by Charl Folscher on Unsplash
If she squinted a certain way she didn’t see the rain. It looked like there was nothing, the collective shards of rain melding into one transparent sheet, the white noise merging into silence. But she could see it, the lightning pauses between the dashed lines like a kid would draw on a blank piece of paper. It thrashed the tall palms about. Everything smelled like mud and water mingling to form a paste that appealed to our senses. Like sandalwood, only milder, more earthy and scrumptious even. She used to try to eat it as a child with no onlookers until she was admonished. The rain had a cleansing quality to it, literally and symbolically. It could wash the soul and leave it refreshed and unburdened again, if at least for a little while.
