For weeks the village had waited. The pond behind Jeeva's house had
shrunk to a brown coin of mud. The mango tree dropped its leaves. Every
morning the sun climbed up white and merciless, and every evening Jeeva
scanned the sky for a single grey cloud and found none.
"The land is thirsty, Aaji," he said one afternoon, sitting in the thin
shade of the wall. His grandmother was grinding rice paste for her wall
paintings, her fingers stained chalk-white.
"It is," she agreed. "Wait."
Then, on the seventh evening, the air changed. A wind came up from the
hills, smelling of wet earth before a single drop had fallen. The sky
in the west turned the colour of a bruise. And all at once the clouds
broke open, and the rain came down in roaring silver ropes.
Jeeva ran out into it, laughing, his arms flung wide, the cool water
streaming down his face. The dry pond began to fill. The dust turned
dark. Frogs he had not heard in months suddenly started singing.
When he came back in, dripping and grinning, he asked, "Aaji, where
does the rain come from? Really?"
She wiped her hands and pulled him close. "Look," she said, pointing up.
"The clouds bring it, yes. And the wind brings the clouds. And the sea
sends up the water for the clouds, and the sun lifts it from the sea."
"But who tells the sun?" Jeeva asked.
Aaji smiled. "That is the right question. The same One who heated the
land all month, and then held the rain back, and then let it fall today
— that is the One who turns the whole wheel. The drought was not God
forgetting us. The rain is not God arriving from far away. The waiting
and the pouring are both His. He is the heat and the water, the dry
days and the wet."
Jeeva watched the rain fill the pond he had thought was dying. "So even
the hard part," he said slowly, "the part where nothing grew —"
"Was His too," said Aaji. "He does not only give the sweet things. He
is all of it. That is what makes Him God and not just a kind uncle who
visits when it is nice out."
The rain drummed on the mud roof all night, and Jeeva fell asleep to
the sound of the whole sky being given back to the earth.
