The Rain Dance

Bushra Altaf Chowdhury

Beneath a heaven of dark, cumulonimbus, floating clouds, when the moon never shone itself even for a hairbreadth’s time, while downpour it had been that drenched the earth in profusion, she awaited him.
“You appear just like a dream to me ..,” heartbreakingly beautiful, her voice sang along –while with each pronounced note- she sounded lucidly melodious than before, “Don’t you know, you’re beautiful!”
It was one evening, ‘full of the linnet’s wings’, as Yeats had long ago put it. While the pouring sky shook thunderously, a lustrously youthful girl, striding across a sandy, pearl-white shore, had watched with dreamy eyes the fluttering of small, grey wings of those linnets –as they were flying home. In grave melancholia, beyond her mind, she played with her curly hair locks – twirling and unwinding- with dripping raindrops; she was visibly sodden. What took him so long? His thought, her cheeks a suffused scarlet, rendered timid but acute heartbreaks in her and she wondered if her flawed mechanism would make it t his arrival.
The eastern sky by then had ordained a grandiose shade of diffused blue! Tow curiously deep, green eyes looked up in wordless speculation; the heavenly water forming tender beads on her ravishing eyelashes –suddenly she knew she felt something. The rainwater was falling rhythmically in drops, all of them seeming frenzied when hitting the soft sand, then erupted into uncountable, cascading raindrops! Hick, white foams imbued the relentless waves, and as the rapturously sonorous sound of the rain filled her ears, she could tell what it was: a rain dance!
The rain danced sprightly, the waves breaking in an oceanic tempo, and indifferent was the swaying costal breeze; yet she was the only lone, human existence frozen in a standing posture. He hadn’t come yet; she could not decipher why, and as if creeping a feverish temperature set her delicately fragile body on flames. The “nightly” fever had regained its scorching degree as if keeping up its routinely work, nevertheless with the rain bestowing a flaccid cool all over her silky skin, it created a soporific effect on the victim, but her “undying yet untold” love for him kept her awake. She was emaciated, but she begged to God to spare her the night; she was dying to tell him, he was bewilderingly yet to come!
Lying spread-eagled among fine, cozy grains of sand, her fingers fondled the edges of an exquisite shell –the rain soothingly trickling down her visage- when far away, she caught a glimpse of an ocean-deep blue fabric and a bunch of red “something”. Could it be that he was coming?
“Huh! I better not daydream like some loser…!” she mocked at her sub-conscious ,dreamy state ;knowing life played cosmic jokes best on her. Being the ill-fated she was, he would never come.
She longed to lie forever, awaiting his presence in silent tears, yet on he brink of macabre, rain had sang her to a “Final Sleep” for her fate, he thought, read:
“In seclusion, empty-handed, you would die
Angels should look away, yet over your corpse, Cry!
He would not , nor could our death make him sigh!”