first rains

The first memory of coming back is the rains. They came gushing in torrents, thick clumpish cascades rippling against the buffeting winds like billowing saris on the washline. They rushed along the sloping courtyard, washing away everything that came in their way; an eddy swirled and rippled at the corner where a granite slab lay an inch lower than the ridge dropping into the garden; the sound of them, on the tin roof shed across the garden, on the leaves, on the stone, on the flooded lawn and the drains in spate, on the sky-windows and the walls, dripping on buckets under leaking ceilings, the occasional rumble in the sky – relentless, unceasing, cathartic; filling and drowning every other sound, like the inside of a blowing conch shell. Colours burst in the gardens, the grey dust turned a deep brown, the leaves a livid green, redolent with the heavy tumescent fragrance of wet earth. I watched, fascinated and silent. It is this image – a room half-dark and lit from the outside, billowing white sheets of rain seen over a knot of fingers laced in the mesh of the rhomboid window jaali, and a steady drumming all around – that is my first memory of coming back to Lucknow. I had never seen a rain before.