Rain at Rainbow Resort

I’m at Kasar Rainbow Resort, savouring a deliciously warm mint tea, sitting apart from the group of hippies at the café. Why do I sit alone? Maybe because I’m an Indian girl, being eyed curiously by the dreadlocked white people who haven’t seen a brown girl in shorts in the mountains.

Outside, the rain beats down on the tin roof, the roads stacked with pine needles, a riot of dull colours—grey, orange brown, green and a sheer blue. I’m listening to music that my brother Jennie liked; that he spent hours installing on my computer. Memories of more than a year ago, and I “Faithfully Remain” loyal to those tales. Somethings are lost on the way, some are found and the rest just wait. I lost Jennie to death, I found poetry on the way to acceptance of memories of my brother as my only choice and the rest, well the rest just has to wait.

I find myself wondering how I will explain this life to my own future past. You can tell, can’t you of how lyrics, movies, people and a specific culture are colouring this rambling? Do poets imagine stories from and of the people/things they experience? Or do they add the magic of words to memories otherwise laughed over a pint of beer?

I find myself remaining faithful to the passage of time; perhaps this, right now, is what “feeling alive” is meant to give to you. Perhaps the end of a song, ends the rambling of a solitary city girl, challenging herself in the mountains.

They are inaudible melodies in my head; people who I loved and lost and found; memories that once were life, and now are mere tales. It’s strange, is it not that rain makes one ponder, euphorically or with regret. I find myself having conversations in my head with Jennie. More conversations in my head than we ever had while he lived.

All that comes now to mind is what he’d hum in his soulful voice, a voice that experienced more in life than it could ever keep up to offer to him. And when the highs and lows became one straight road, Jennie walked on, leaving me with this:

 “Slow down everyone you’re moving too fast

Frames can’t catch you when you’re moving like that”.