Rain

Before leaving Maine, I found a masterful drawing I had created as a four-year-old in Ishurdi. It's a picture of a girl in the Bangladesh rain.... with a nice big smile... and a crown, of course.
Last weekend Alyssa and I found ourselves caught in one of the beautiful, cleansing downpours of the Bangladesh monsoon season. I suppose sometimes they're not so cleansing - namely when they overflow the sewage gutters along the roads' edges. But on this particular Saturday, after a week when the heat had rested heavily on our Chittagong days, everyone seemed to welcome the downpour. Seeing these kids splash joyfully down the street brought a flood of sweet memories from days on Iqbal Road in Dhaka, where my brothers and neighbors and I used to take to the outdoors with the fall of the first fat drop on the cement roof.
The rain certainly hadn't discouraged Alyssa and I from proceeding with the day's plan to find our way to the Chittagong War Cemetery. I had been hearing for weeks that this spot was one of the few neat public "green spaces" in the city, and this fact alone cancelled out the potential morbidity of visiting a graveyard. Still, we found the clouds and thunder appropriate to the occasion. The burial ground honors the memories of a several hundred Bideshi (including Brits, Americans, Nigerians, Japanese, etc) and Bangladeshi World War II soldiers, sailors and engineers.

We walked the rows in the rain, reading the epithets of beloved fathers, sons, brothers, friends, and the Biblical or Quranic verses sending them onward.

Soon the sun came out again, and the neatly planted flora seemed to appear out of nowhere - their colors suddenly vivid under the brightened sky.

How lovely are the rains when they gently summon these coveted colors, but kindly desist from flooding the homes of those on the river banks...