My eyes went blank, and I stared off, and the music started. It was raining, and the sun was shining at the same time, and there were these big bay windows, and there was the blue in the sky, and the sun on the trees, and it was drizzling.
A blight had fallen on the trees and shrubs; and the wind, at length beginning to break the unnatural stillness that had prevailed all day, sighed heavily from time to time, as though foretelling in grief the ravages of the coming storm. The bat skimmed in fantastic flights through the heavy air, and the ground was alive with crawling things, whose instinct brought them forth to swell and fatten in the rain.
Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.
Your seed has been covered with so many layers of culture, etiquitte, education, religion, country, that you have completely forgotten that you are here to grow, that you have become a lush green bush full of flowers, fragrance, dancing in the wind and in the rain and in the sun.
The rain and hail pattered against the glass; the chimneys quaked and rocked; the crazy casement rattled with the wind, as though an impatient hand inside were striving to burst it open. But no hand was there, and it opened no more.
I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain - and back in rain. I have out walked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet. When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly light, One luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.
In our Mechanics' Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenter's planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander.
One day people will touch and talk perhaps easily, and loving be natural as breathing and warm as sunlight, and people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted, unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers, unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea, and work will be simple and swift as a seagull flying, and play will be casual and quiet as a seagull settling, and the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder or care or notice, and people will smile without reason, even in winter, even in the rain.
The monsoon is such a dominant part of Indian life that it is hard to overstate its importance. One's life completely changes based on the rain. After the monsoon, because the dust settles, one can see further and so it feels like one's eyesight has improved or that one is living in a different country where there is more light.