When It Rains Heavily

Monsoon brings to my passion, the passion for different shades. If emotions could be given colours then, I feel rainbow, when it rains ...like a beautiful peacock my mind raises and it just comes out with such beautiful colours and makes me dance to the megmalhar...the raga of rain.

When it rains heavily ...I love to look at the heaving trees and I felt each droplet fervently and so amiably touches each leaflet like a lover, tending to the minute aspects of aesthetics..such an exotic art of love making ...such an extravagant display of affection...is the monsoons!

I often see myself as the four-year-old, that is my first memory of the monsoon, sitting by the window staring through the Chikoo tree into the pyre of my mother, I felt the sky was weeping with me, the fire had almost taken her body and into the ashes left, it rained ...was that rain a comfort, a pain of an irreversible loss.

I and my brother used to do her yearly memorial rituals the shraddam and in the monsoon, I stood with a rice ball, curd, and sesame seed and we waited for the Ravens. Until today Ravens are my best friends ..although they have a bad reputation connecting them to black magic. To me, they were messengers of my ancestors.

I lost my grandpa and grandma both in the heavy monsoon.

But when he came into my life during a monsoon at my 18 years, the monsoon had strange beauty associated with it. Those were days when life was not as free for youngsters, people had healthy distances and morality was woven into the mental matrix.

But he and me sat by the sea shore and in that light touch of monsoon, our lips yearned for each other. It rained and rained and still the heart beat so fast and body and mind were on fire...the rain in the sea became his memory ...

It was a rainy season we decided to live together, when nothing like living together existed, ours was marriage of souls and still we parted in another monsoon , parted to find each other, several times and then to get parted..

Several monsoons taught me it is a strange sort of thing me and him and like monsoon it came and went. It was nature and natural. I never regretted it but was it not a pain, I never told it hurt me, to friends nor to him, not even to Krishna..

My God and guide.

It was the monsoon after the tsunami that made a deep wound in me. I was part of the rehabilitation team and it brought to me a vivid reality that how life can be ruthless. and how dirty human beings can get 

When I was a pg scholar, I used to visit the beaches where I used to spend time with two little children, A boy of ten and a girl of 5 years, they were children from a fisherman household who lived near the shores. They sold peanuts and sea shells, a father , mother and these kids, their mother was pregnant 

I used to feel the warmth in that family.

But after the tsunami, when Raj met me he didn't speak, I had to run behind him to the temporary refugee shelter. The tsunami took their parents, mother died a little later. When I got inside that room was almost damp and made of rags. I could feel the stench ...Raj took my hand and I was shocked and shattered to see the sores on his lips ..and I saw in the corner a little sister of his, who had a cloth bundle in her hand and I saw a little emaciated structure of a baby in it ..she too had sores on her head ...face and no one needed to tell me it was a syphilitic chancer and they were the results of the cursed sex tourism that attack our children...and is just existing and needed to nibbed from roots.

It was raining and I prayed the raindrops to wash away all that from those rain kids, oh that was what I called them...

I wrote letters to authorities to bring a change ..but life took me to different shores of existence, 

Monsoon still left so many marks on my life and another one was Henry ...I just knew it rained heavily, thundered and stormed when my eyes met his mesmerizing crystal eyes...and it rained ...

Monsoon makes me be artist, author, and human being who is bound to nature and responded to the seasons of the life cycle, the eternal wheel of sustenance.

When it rains heavily. I know my husband has once told ..we are bothered by cattle, the rice, the clothes ..to dry ...the kids.

I smiled...and still smile, in Monsoon we my cousins and me and my brother ran for mangoes that would fall from high mango trees of our ancestral home.

Monsoon flows through me, I am the earth and the sky in its kindness is overflowing ...I drench and quench my soul..when it rains heavily ...