Rains

(Some more excerpts from my debut novel)



June rains in Kerala—the monsoon—and Farook cannot but turn nostalgic. The raindrops are still the same—its colour, passion and vigour—even after so many years.

Farook has seen rains in Europe: he and Ruth have walked hand-in-hand along the quaint, cobbled streets in the medieval Ghent, letting the raindrops run down their body—Ruth clutching a bunch of begonias from an elderly vendor down the street, and the last layer of the vanilla-topped sweet melon ice cream still melting in their mouth.

He has walked the streets of Madrid—without Ruth this time—and watched how raindrops smudged the water-colours on an art student’s canvas. Sitting in the upper layer of a bullring, he has watched how rain sprinkled down from a column of dark clouds that hovered above the matador, the bull and the frenzied fans.

He has walked around the vineyards in Cyprus, and had a Mediterranean lunch under a canopy of vine branches when, out of nowhere, raindrops pattered on the leaves. In the distance, the sun still brightened up the mountaintops.

He has seen ferocious storms bring in fierce rains across America. He has seen the disheveling patterns of rains in Florida. He has shut himself up in his bureau office in New Orleans when a storm needled through the town, lifting roofs, ripping apart stores, kicking down booths and rolling away vehicles.

He has skied down the slalom in the Alps, clumsily, trusting the strength of the skis more than his skill. Ruth and he have heaped snowballs on snowballs and made an oversized snowman, with a sketch pen as nose, cola lids as eyes and a paper cone as hat.

But the tropical rains in Kerala—the original home—are something special to him. They sing in his soul. They fill the chambers of his heart.