Rain sends smoke signals before it ravages  towns.

 

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The fragrant scent however, is not from the water, it's from the ground. Red laterite infuses with the air and the scent proliferates like seeds dispersed by the wind; small miracles of life or science, let your mood decide. 

 

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The pungent river Cooum makes its appearance, lest one dares to forget man's violence. I remember, how my chemistry teacher in school showed us how to artificially orchestrate the rotten smell in the lab. It's all chemicals, she'd say. "Everyday life is chemistry."

 

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I wonder if the systems we live and operate within orchestrate the shacks that line the Cooum river, which charts a stagnated path through my city of Chennai, or if they are the anomalies of a system that failed to reach its ideal.

 

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Distance helps ignorance; being a bystander helps me forget these thoughts as I leave behind the Cooum, with cattle and crows and children on its banks, and the hydrogen sulfide ( H2S) gas.

 

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The rain pours and now, I smell petrichor.

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