Summer Shower

A corner of my garden

Finally the summer shower came as a relief. The temperature had risen to a record high. The earth was scorched. The heat singed the soul. Plants withered and flowers wilted. Only the plastic flowers on the drawing room chest remained as fresh as ever.

One good shower is enough for the earth to revitalise itself. Give her one more and she returns the colours and tangs. There was just one zinnia in my garden which Maggie had plucked from the roadside during one of her walks and I planted in a little corner of the crowded garden. “Garden?” My friend raised his eyebrows when I mentioned the word once. “Call it forest, if you prefer,” I said.

My garden looks more like a patch of jungle where there nature creates its own mess, beautiful mess. Beauty is subjective.

A couple of summer showers brought alive the seeds that lay buried in the parched soil. And the zinnias bloomed. They bloomed in red and white and yellow and pink. That’s another miracle of nature. In the place of the one red zinnia we planted, now there are so many little zinnias of different colours. Nature gives back so much more than what we give her.

The weeds grow faster and stronger than any zinnia. The summer showers are accompanied by lightning and thunder too. When the summer showers kissed my zinnias with new life, the lightning of a god struck Sri Lanka and killed people who were praying to another god.

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, the Everlasting Refuge, people are killed all over the world. I pity the God and turn to my zinnias. “I’ll do the weeding this evening,” I tell them. I cannot weed out god’s defenders from the earth, can I?

Perfect, no weeds, but they're plastic: my drawing room

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