Obeisances to the Rain Gods

I am writing this, sitting on my table, overlooking a lawn that bears the beautiful floral offerings of the magnificent gulmohars towering above. The rains have released the delicate blossoms from their captivity and have brought them to embrace the earth, to whom they always looked at in admiration from their airy domains.
I still remember the day it first rained, last year. June 19th, and my blog read,

Change is good, especially when it's with respect to the weather. The weather for the last few days has been extremely unbearable, and the absence of the rains didn't make things any better. But, now there are no complaints. The life-giving waters have arrived, and the world, at least Mumbai, has plenty reasons to rejoice.

Even today, on the third day of the monsoons, I feel the same. Even if there has been some damage due to the thunderstorms, even if there has been water-logging in some areas. Because blaming the rains for all this is meaningless beyond a point. Because the system is flawed, and incapable of dealing with the ravages of Nature, the very Nature it believes itself to be in control of. Because the damage was destined to happen, it just came today.

I happened to be reading this poem by Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

• Sara Teasdale (1920)

And in that brief moment after I read it, I realized that Nature is always oblivious to the shenanigans of the human race, and for the better maybe.

The rains always would bring me joy. The freshness of the leaves, the sweet scent of the wet ground, the tipper-tapper sound of the raindrops falling on dry leaves, the soft whish of the breeze, the coolness of the air as it brushes past your face, all this would bring me joy. And it does so even today.
But now, these rains also bring the saltiness of tears as they flow down pale cheeks, the fragrance of friendships wrought in similar seasons and lived in all glory and mirth, the melancholy of watching the leaves depart from the trees, like one soul-mate from another, and the eager desire to undo the workings of Time, to again go back to those innocent days. But the rains also deliver a message to such musings, and it is clear that once Time moves on, its motions assume the finality of the raindrop, once released from the heavens, nothing can ever reverse its path.