ice-cream with irani chai

She looked out from the big window at her hotel room. Dark mirthless clouds, raining and pouring their soul out. Hitting swift and mercilessly at the big glass pane she was looking out of. So much so, the tall sleak and upright buildings on the horizon that usually shone smartly beaming in all their glory in the Sun everyday, now seemed to melt away insignificantly and unnoticed into the dull dreary silvery steel grayness that enveloped the sky and the dampened Earth that it had become one with.

The roads lined with the malls below were desolate, bare of all the shoppers, college students and tourists that usually thronged the sidewalks. And, what was also always swarmed and teeming with children, men and women, the swimming pool and the lounge below were isolated too. Almost rejected.

"The rain has no boundaries. It is the same everywhere. It doesn't decide where to fall or not based on these boundaries. These borders are what we have created ourselves. We are the ones limiting ourselves. These fetters are all our own imposed. It is all our doing," she thought. Almost aloud.

She was visiting the island nation as a tourist. A few weeks into the holiday, and she was enjoying it all. But, the incessant rain today brought back memories. Of back home. It was not just the country boundaries she was thinking about. But, of all the people she had left behind. The people she had tried to build borders against. The people she had tried to get away from.

"So, why do we build fences? Why fetter my heart, mind and spirit?" she asked. The rushed rain had no answers. It simply looked blank and vacantly into her eyes and then with a loud roaring laughter of a thunder, just disappeared!