The rain fell incessantly; mercilessly…it threatened to wash away everything with it. Nothing but nothing would stand in its way as the torrents that poured from the skies rushed on their way to meet the river and then onto the sea.

The stranded car rocked slightly from time to time as it tried to keep its hold on the fast-receding ground. The driver once again came to her window to urge her to go back but seeing her determined face went back to his place under the bonnet. She almost didn’t notice him though a part of her brain did register the movement. She was lost in thought.

She remembered her mother’s wet smiling face as they had run from the fields to the house hand in hand, hurrying to collect the drying papads, pickles and other assorted masalas spread out in the courtyard before the rains spoiled them. That fun was the only memory she had of that fateful night that swept away her parents and her childish innocence with it.

She had heard her grandmother’s version though time and again. How she and her brother were found bound to a high branch faint with hunger and fatigue. Her parents had done that with the last ounce of strength they must have possessed before being swept away themselves in trying to retrieve their fast-floating away belongings.

Her grandmother who had constantly mourned the loss of her son and reluctantly taken on the duty of raising the siblings had died soon after Sujata left home. Her brother had been offered a job in some distant town and had moved away from the village with his family, selling what little they had to pay for his move. She had no family to speak off.

All she remembered of her mother, was a carefree smile on a face which was young and remarkably untouched by the hardships of life. When she thought of her father, she saw visions of Bhollu the bullock moving slowly in front and a straggly head of hair which she was clutching onto as her father walked behind the bullock guiding him, with her on his shoulder. She couldn’t bring his face into focus as much ever she tried. She had seen a picture of him when he was probably a little more than a lad taken along with many friends at some village mela but that didn’t seem like anyone she had known.

A sudden lightning and thunder woke her from her reverie and for a moment she couldn’t place where she was. Then she remembered she was on her way to her village to meet a friend she had not seen in over a decade. That Amit had agreed to let her go was a miracle that she chuckled over yet again. Though she did have to make up an elaborate story about repeatedly seeing the village deity in her dreams and her fear that something evil would befall him if she didn’t go to appease the Goddess.