The Other Aspect of Rain

“Lighting every face, healing every pain;

To felicitate every heart, here comes rain!”

The above lines define the beauty of rains with immeasurable ease. The rainy season, or Monsoon, as it’s called in India, is hardly disliked by anyone. The word ‘rain’ is enough to light any face up with a smile. We associate rains with fun, frolic, love and a lot of other sugar-coated, cream-topped stuff. But is this assumption the same for everyone? Like every coin has two sides, rains too have another face- another, not-so pleasurable face. While rains bring indefinable joy to people like us, there are people for whom, rains are more of Satanic. The people who live in makeshift houses or roadside tents may not have the same opinion towards the rains as us. For them, the rains are only a season of botheration and suffering. Rains destroy their houses (if they can be called so), and leave them unsheltered. They have nowhere to go, nothing to feed on, and their life is turned into more of the hell that it already is. They are left helpless and destitute, and thus, possess hatred for the very same rain, that we are so deeply in love with. There are many other people, for whom rains spell misery. The rag pickers, who earn their daily bread by picking up useful, recyclable trash from the streets, fail in doing so, as this trash has been soiled and has turned useless due to the rains. The potter, who moulds clay into fine specimens of art, does his molding everyday and waits for the sun to shine and dry his creations. But, can the sun shine on a rainy day? Does the rain leave any scope for these people to thrive? People say, “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.” But do they realise that It takes both sunshine and rain to form a rainbow?!