Life in Lightning Part I

Rain trickled down the hut of the shack, each drop magnified, and loud in the howling of the night. As drops pattered down onto the thin steel sheets, the sheets, clunky, unwieldy, joined together with nothing but gravity and thin ropes, those steel sheets, rusted and browned, clanked upon one another. The sound inside was deafening. Almost enough to block out the sounds from within.

The neighborhood was flooding with rain, rivulets, and their larger cousins, streams flowing down, knocking on doors, seeing if they could enter warm houses, it smelled of freshly unearthed mud, and the fear of parents, and of responsibilities left untethered, and of excited children. The few steps after the front door of nearly every shack, hut, and run down building in the neighborhood were covered with puddles. Children who had been sent out to bring the now dripping backs and rickshaws back in. children who had been outside when the rain began, and made their way inside as the slow start belied the deluge it turned into. 

It smelled of water. It felt of water. It sounded of water. It tasted of water. It was dark.

A few lights had twinkled here and there, most other people conserving electricity, but the shoddily set up electricity connection had gone off with a shudder as it did nearly any rainy night or day. The singular candles people had lit as they huddled with one another for warmth were not bright enough to penetrate the windows or big enough to fight the darkness outside.

Back at the hut that the postman lived in, there was a different sort of storm approaching. His wife was in labor. He rushed from one room to the next, just as he had rushed from one house to the next in the pouring rain, knocking on doors, and finally found someone to be the midwife. The puddles around the house told that story. He was aimlessly lost right now, so he chose to check on his son in the other room, and then his wife, and then his son, and then his wife.

Saad knew what was going on. He might have been only four, but his parents had been preparing him. He was a little scared, the thunder always scared him, the rain, not so much, but he could feel the thunder coming. His skin prickled, and stood up, hair that would grow on his forearms not there yet, but standing up anyways. The postman saw Saad peeking out from under the covers, as his wife screamed in the other room. He closed the door gently, and rushed to it. 

Aafia, the wife of the canteen owner down the road, Jamil, Aafia was massaging his wife’s legs. This was her first midwifing, but no one else came, and all the women knew enough about it, talking to one another, exchanging stories, that Aafia knew, at least in words what to do. His wife, screamed in pain. The thunder growled a weary growl.