Beyond beauty, beyond mystery and promise. The day the monsoon breaks in Maharashtra, when the blistered earth is finally cooled, when light, colour and scent go mad. First the heated stillness becomes more so, until tendrils of hair cling to your scalp even stickier than they have been all summer. The weight of the opaque sky is even more cruel, and you would gasp if you could.
Evening draws close.
Ribbons, boulders, mountain ranges of cumulonimbus clouds surge over the mountains and fill the sky. Blue streaks of lightning tear and claw savagely at a raging ravaged sky. The gulmohur flowers flail and struggle against their stalks, desperate to join the madness. Flocks of egrets fly up from their posts atop and beside the lean and dusty cows and buffaloes by the Kallai, and wheel about above the jamun trees, so white in this surreal light that they set your teeth on edge. The tiger roars, the leaves clatter, each pellucid drop holds in its violent jourmey the hope and threat of renewal, of the rising of the sap, of redemption, salvation.