It was the thunder that woke Gobardhan.

The rains were finally here, he thought, stepping sleepily out of his hut. The sky was misted over with grey, and the clouds frowned darkly at him from the southwest corner. Today there would be no dawn. Only a grim greyness and the ceaseless, merciless rain. Perhaps the sun would struggle through once in a while.

He sighed and stepped back inside. Indubala, propped up on her elbow, was watching him with sleep-tinted eyes. Gobardhan gazed at his wife as he did every morning, seeing her anew. Slanting eyes drawn in beauty; the mud brown colour that would soon glisten with sweat. The rumpled skeins of hair that wound their way over and around her bare shoulders and the short stubby fingers that lay protectively on her son’s forehead.

“It’s going to rain,” he said.

“Yes,” she replied, rising from the mat in one swift movement. “At least the rains have come, the yard was cracking in the heat. I…”

The low, deep-throated growl of the skies interrupted and the pit-pit-pit of the first drops.

“Help me bring in the water,” she urged her husband, “before it starts.”

Gobardhan lifted his hand in acquiescence. As she moved past, he bent his head and pressed an unexpected kiss on her shoulder. Only a fleeting caress but it lit up her face. Then the rumbling sounded again, and she turned away, “Come on!”

The pond behind the hut had been his grandfather’s idea. Small and precise, a square drop of water behind the house. All his life he had heard how his grandfather had sweated and toiled to dig the pond with his own hands and how his father, though only a little boy, had worked alongside his father. And how his sons and his sons’ sons would be grateful for generations to come for their very own pond.

They carried the water into the house in great big earthenware pots that Gobardhan had fashioned himself and covered them with large clay platters, fluted at the edges. Indu then directed her husband’s attention to the firewood. He grinned as she set him to these ordinary housewifely tasks. But he helped her gather the kindling.

Perhaps they had decided it was not to be an ordinary day. The rain was coming, the thunderstorm was here already. With the crackling thunder and the first sprays came a madness that infected them both. Today was to be a day of relief. Relief from the heat of the sweltering summer, from the daily drudgery that never left them. Once the clouds burst and the rain came down in blinding sheets there would be no opportunity to sweep the yard or collect clay for the potting shed or light the fire and stoke it. So, a quick sweep indoors, deft straightenings, and little shakes here and there – a frenzied self-imposed urgency to complete the day’s work.

He caught her hand and stayed her, watching the raindrops as they chased each other down her face, over the long lashes and down her cheeks to the pulse that beat in her neck. And one that zig-zagged invitingly down her ear and hung from the lobe like an iridescent pearl before it melted into her glowing skin.

“Wait,” he said. His hand tightened on her shoulder.

“And who will do the work?” Up came her lips in smiling retort and he bent to meet them.

“Ma!”

A peremptory summons. High-pitched, urgent, demanding immediate obedience.

She turned on a sigh of regret and he watched her go. The child bride that had been, now all a mother.

Jadu was sitting up, his tousled curls framing dark eyes open wide with apprehension. Indubala had borne many children over the years but only two had survived. The eldest daughter with a family of her own. And this boy of 12 is the very last, therefore most precious.

“Has it started raining, Ma?” he cried, all fear disappearing seeing his mother, “has it?”

“No,” she shook her head, “not properly yet.”

“But you’re wet,” he retorted; he had caught the fever from his parents.

“Quick!” Gobardhan hurried in, “Get up! It’s begun!”

Jadu leapt up from the tangle of sheets and rushed off only as a 12-year-old could. Large drops were pelting the yard, harder and harder with every moment. His supple naked body welcomed the rain, arms outstretched, mouth wide open, feet matching its frenzy, churning up the mud that spattered over him like a live thing.

Indubala laughed aloud, reclaiming in a brief moment all the tenderness and insanity of their early years. The mad summer nights below the stars. The many monsoons like this one.

Excerpted with permission from Job Charnock and The Potter’s Boy, Madhurima Vidyarthi, Olive Turtle/Niyogi Books.