Raindrops on my eyelashes

It was one of those usual sultry evenings . The sweat on my neck had soaked the back of my T shirt as I sat cursing the CESC ( for the power cuts), the weather, Kolkata, my decision to leave Mumbai and above all my luck. The temperature soared high dragging the humidity level along with it and the leaves in my terrace had petulantly taken a still poise.

A sudden hush... a cool draught and then everthing became dark as if the dusk had decided to descend earlier than usual on the city to give us respite.

A few cracks of thunder and then it came down in its age old rythm... pitter patter. Its strange how we keep looking at and discussing about change. how we keep getting worried about global warming, changing relations and changing nature, yet it seems that the nature chortling at our folly keeps reminding us of the age old rythms in its myriad expressions.

Coming back to what i sat down to write...Raindrops...a strange phenomena... a poet's muse, a lover's destiny , a traveller's disappointment... it has alwas given me a thrill that has sent shivers down my spine... inspiring me to dance to its tuneless tune.
Charlie Chaplin had once said somewhere that he loved walking in the rains because nobody can see his tears.
It is the essence of washing away the existing realities that opens a new page of hope, a new hope of reality.
As i had walked down the roads in the slums of Mumbai, i always could fathom the immense trouble the slum dewellers must be going through in the monsoons, yet everytime the thrill on the children's face with the first drops of rain left me pondering ... "What a great leveller nature is."
Last year around this time was one of the worst monsoons of my life. A close friend fighting for life in the ICU, my only shelter in Mumbai -the 15th floor appartment embellished with a couple of matresses at stake, the wailing sound at 5 o clock in the morning from the seas creeping in through the windows, the uncertainties of a halted railway service and knee deep water awaiting me as soon as i step out of the house, the restaurants refusing to deliver food, and to garnish it all a power cut to stop the lifts from working which had compelled me to climb up and down the 15 storey in darkness for every little thing. A lonely miserable soul...i hated the rains from the core of my heart... it seemed inauspicious. My foul luck was accompanied by nothing less than a flood, a small riot and a bomb blast.... and of course my screaming landlord threatening to throw me out. A morbid picture as it seems i pledged never to fall in love with rains or monsoons again.
Yet defying all laws of the " beautiful mind" this year i found myself waiting earnestly and beseechingly for the monsoons to arrive. The first drops of the rain sent the same shivers down my spine which i was familiar with for the last 24 years.....and guess this brings me to jibe with the age old quote " With all thy faults i love thee".