RAIN

You will hear it waking to the roar of a ceiling fan,

in the rustling of dry palm leaves, in pebbles pouring

from a lorry onto the dusty street. The lips of the warm

wind, trapped between scaffolding and terrace, will

whisper soundless words of memory through

the window’s grating. You will hear it in the last aeroplane

of the night (whose sound you will mistake for thunder),

in the alphabets of the birds, in indignant pressure

cookers. Your thirst will be vast as the sky. You will look

for it in the evening, searching for one cloud among

tremendous shadows, and at night when it might come

from a great distance and touch the city with a new light.

You won’t find it in the few grey leaves of March

or behind the thin red crescent burning itself out

on a fevered patch of sky. Your hair will grow electric

with the dry heat of the day, your dreams shot with

the silver lightning of monsoon nights, the blue green

violet nights celebrated by crickets, the mountain nights

where fate is linked to umbrellas, and feeling to the

violent hours that clatter on those heights.

But Venus’ eye is clear here. You will look for it

in refrigerators at night, slice water-melons with

its taste on your tongue—unfeeling, red-hearted fruit—

and buy cucumbers in despair. You will almost forget

the sadness of mist, but remember how quickly mirrors

darkened and streets turned grim, and wait for the same

blanket to be fastened over the sky and change

the quality of this harsh, unvarying light.

Always the ‘where’ of where you are is a place in the

head, established through skin, and you recognise

the address not in numbers or names but through familiar

patterns of bird-song; traffic, shadows, lanes.

And when you go away only envelopes bear the name

of that tiny dot of geographical space where everyone

knows you now stay. For the memory of each of the

body’s ancient senses remains the same, for years

remains the same: bewildered by dry winds in

April, aching for rain.