Written By Riva Agarwal (Grade 10)
Rain is like a two-faced coin. When honeyed rain appears before the golden sun, it promises new rainbows to the day. It fills us with hope, and tranquillity for a better today. It invites a street of colourful umbrellas to blossom on the gloomy congested roads. Every single drop kisses our skin and siphons off the pain, like two lovers, romanticizing the rain.
A few years ago, it symbolized purity and preciousness, like pearls hanging off flower stems. Now it brings pain and destruction to the very same plants it once bejewelled. Remember the drops of rain touching your tongue? Pure joy, wasn’t it? Those drops can now burn your tongue. God’s own poetry, formed after eons of musing, now seems like an angry awakening call. “Bring back the beauty or face the fall.”
The rain can ignite joy in a farmer’s heart while inundating the very crops it gave life to. It can sing a privileged girl to sleep, who staring out of the window, may be lured into feeling like the main character of a movie. That very rain can destroy huts and villages of the poor as if it was made of straw, and the rain was the big bad wolf.
If rainy days are the skies crying, poetic as it is, its tears can cleanse the earth – seeping through every crack on the earth quenching its unceasing thirst.
But what about those, trapped in floods? Filling waters in all sideways and byways, leaking through alleys and subways, driving the pain-bearers into a crazy frenzy. Homes destroyed, lives lost, horror and terror prevalent in the air. Does it look beautiful to them?
If the rain can kiss you, it can also burn you. Funny isn’t it, water burning you? Water, meant to extinguish fire is now tearing through the pores of plants and humans alike. Tired, dirty, vengeful. The rain is not poetic, it’s crying out for help.
Featured Image Courtesy – Women’s era
