Friday, 21 September 2012

Monsoons in Puné



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It has been raining for days, now. Since last Friday. The ground has turned into a vast oil-pastel-brown bucking snake, a water-mattress of chocolate Jell-O. The birds are quiet – their soggy songs crouch sulkily in their muddy, twiggy nests. The children are playing way past their bedtime. The house is fading in the dimming light. It begins.

The wind gusts in transparent tendrils through the wire-mesh of the bathroom exhaust, tickles. The wind. He knocks on the front-door windows, but his vibrating fingers bear rings carved out of cold metal, and it would not do for this impetuous stranger to enter and defile the muted, golden warmth of the leather-lined drawing room. He screams in frustration. Bangs on the doors and windows. Incites the dogs of the house to rebel against inculcated silence, and scares the children into their vanilla beds. Jeweled raindrops scratch against the glass of my bedroom window; shrapnel of the explosions in the sky. Friends of the wind have arrived finally, to help him in his assault on the house. Emboldened, he howls, and the sea-sky is torn apart. Milky electricity spills through the jagged rents in the blue-green fabric, splays shadows across our patchwork quilt – underneath which you hide on my chest, and I nuzzle yours. The thundering storm is the background score of our love. The wind is an old voyeur, and his moans mask ours. The creaking of the stairway conceals the rhythms of our bedroom. Outside, everything is making violent, desperate love, in a massive orgy of light and sound and movement, and inside, our love is gasping its final, heaving sighs. 

Tomorrow, our bed shall split down the middle, and the rains shall subside.

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