The Award for Rain
In the dim hour she listens for the water,
a woman whose name is missing from her badge,
who mends the city's veins the way you knead bread:
slowly, with warm hands, by one amber light,
so Ward Nine can drink when there is no rain.
Her sensor, taped in place, ticks against the pipe.
On the roof, where tomatoes climb a plastic pipe,
the fixers meet and trade in borrowed water,
their smiles as soft and useful as the rain.
They pass her work around and stamp it with a badge,
the way a moth wears the colour of a light
it did not make. They break it up like bread.
Each pockets a slice, still warm, like stolen bread,
then taps a wrist to a wrist beside the drip pipe,
and permits pass between them in a blink of light.
Their glow is not a lamp but a mirror, catching water
someone else carried. Every borrowed badge
shines like a puddle pretending it is rain.
At dawn a drone chirps VALUED CONTRIBUTOR, and its rain
is two vouchers: one laundry hour, one day-old loaf of bread.
She does not ask whose name is on the badge.
She is already listening to a pipe
that coughs beneath the street, a throat of water
choking in the dark, far from any light.
On her walk home, the public screens throw light
across her face. There they are, taking bows for rain,
their faces blooming like weeds that drink the water
meant for wheat. The crowd applauds. Warm bread
goes up to the stage in baskets. Beneath her, the pipe
hums on, not caring who wears which badge.
She kneels. Her knees are her only badge,
the pavement cold, the stars washed out by screen light.
She lays her ear against the cracked pipe
and hears it breathe, the way a field hears rain
before it comes, the way a child smells bread
before the oven opens. She tightens it. Water
moves on, wearing no badge, falling like private rain.
The screens burn borrowed light; her unseen hands are cracked like bread.
No one will thank the pipe. Everyone drinks the water.
By Dr Padmashree RP
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