Stormy Nights!

How does the tangibility of a storm influence the darkest core of your being?

Can you feel the steep flashes of current tearing your bones apart?

Or, the lucrative nectar of water wiping away the dust from your grave?

Rain has always been like a throbbing sponge to me. I never understood why people need to run away from it. Can you possibly escape the magic when it brushes its sloppy, moist lips against your delicacy like a gentle lover? But storm and its inarticulate whispering! You can taste the meticulous uncertainty when it serves tonight’s specials, maybe a mix of sweet peas, favas and snow peas. Tedious soup and sensuous red wine. The massive influx of lightening goes about bouncing off the decayed walls of the dilapidated structure, gearing up to bounce back a thousand times the sore eyes desire. Dusty blessings on the newlyweds. For the Bengalis, Kalbaishakhi (the storm) is the fair line between sky and shore where Rabindranath mingles with the blood counts; where beauty serves as an emotion.

Didn’t your senses perceive the inception of the storm when John Lennon assured that there’d be no heaven or hell someday?

Didn’t you believe that the storm would sabotage the shreds of that subdued flame when Tennessee Williams lulled you to sleep with ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’?

Didn’t the dancing heads of those drunken trees deliver the message of its creator when your blazing eyes were trying to expound on ‘The Shape of Water?’

Finally, I look through my window. I look at the Satan eyes of the storm sparkling with the lustre of an angel’s wand. He is firing the imagination of the exponential variants of nature in the most cunning way magically possible. The uproar of the demon takes away the breath of the guarded streetlamp blinking to the rhyme of every blunt drumbeat. Another fusion of beauty and the beast. Somewhere on the mean streets of Kolkata, another solitary figure is peeping out of her make-believe tent with wrinkly patched skin and flickering gaze. Could she be a poet too?

Dear storm, I’m a wandering vagabond in this mundane world. You’re the rodeo clown to my vagrant soul. Give me something to live for! Why did you have to come out of the yellow-framed picture hanging in my living room? Why did you burden the poets with the responsibility of making you immortal? Speak for yourself and liberate the writers from the downfall.

Lyrical nights! Come back later. Paint the canvas with opaque black and faded grey conundrums. I’ll twin your wildness with a seductive cup of coffee.