The Rain That Stayed Too Long

It began with a drizzle—innocent, almost welcome. The dusty leaves of the neem tree outside my window trembled as droplets danced upon them. The sky was painted in strokes of ash and pearl, and I remember thinking, Finally, the heat has surrendered.

The first rain of the monsoon in my village always brought celebration. Children splashed barefoot in the puddles, women rolled up their sleeves and scrubbed verandas with soap and laughter, and the elderly sipped tea while recounting the storms of years past. There was a rhythm to it, like the earth itself was breathing again.

But that year, the rain didn’t stop.

What was supposed to be a season of renewal turned into something unrelenting. Day after day, the sky refused to clear. The village well overflowed. Chickens disappeared into the mud, goats bleated from roofs they’d never climbed before, and the once-laughing children now cried from fever and flooded homes.

Our house, built by my grandfather’s hands, stood at the edge of a gentle slope. We had always felt safe, watching water trickle past us and into the fields. But safety is a fragile illusion. On the twelfth night, I heard the cracking sound—deep and slow like the earth groaning.

My father jolted awake, lantern in hand, shouting for us to get out.

We didn’t have time to gather anything.

The slope had become a river. A current of thick, brown water had torn through our backyard, dragging with it the latrine, the chicken coop, and half the mango tree. I held my younger sister's hand as tightly as I could, her tiny fingers cold and wet in mine.

We made it to the school building, the highest point in the village. Families huddled together under soaked blankets, coughing, waiting. There was no electricity, no mobile signal, and very little food. What the flood hadn’t taken, the rot had claimed. Even the smell of the wet earth had turned sour.

For the first time in my seventeen years, I saw my father cry.

He had always been the man who fixed things—broken fences, broken radios, broken hearts. But here, among other fathers with the same cracked faces, he was just another man who had lost everything.

A week passed before the rain stopped. Just like that, the sun peeked through like a stranger arriving late to a funeral. But we didn’t cheer. We were too tired, too wet, too broken.

When the waters finally receded, our house was unrecognizable. Walls had collapsed. Furniture had vanished. The old photo of my grandmother that hung above the hearth was gone.

But amid the destruction, something stirred.

We began to rebuild. Not just houses, but stories. People shared food, tools, tears. The village carpenter, who had lost both sons to the fever, started crafting wooden beds for anyone who needed one. My mother taught children in the school shelter while the real school was repaired. And my father—he planted a new mango sapling right where the old one had fallen.

“You can’t fight the rain,” he said, patting the soil gently. “But you can decide what grows after it.”

It’s been three years now. The rains come, but they don’t frighten us like they used to. We’ve built stronger homes, learned to store food better, learned to listen to the earth when it starts to speak.

And every year, the new mango tree grows a little taller, its roots a little deeper.

Sometimes, when I pass by it on my way to the fields, I stop and touch its trunk. It reminds me of that night—not as a nightmare, but as the beginning of who we became.

Because the rain stayed too long.
But we stayed longer.

Because the rain stayed too long. But we stayed longer—stronger, wiser, braver, rooted like the tree we planted together.