Like the Rain, Like the Rainbow

When Anvitha first met Rithin, it was in the hum of fluorescent lights and the fragrance of jasmine garlands at a small temple on the outskirts of Alappuzha. Their parents spoke in excited overlaps about horoscopes and train timings; the young pair spoke scarcely at all. She stole a single curious look at him; enough to see the mild confusion behind his polite smile-then lowered her long lashes and turned the look into silence. In that instant, Rithin felt as if a cloud had crossed the sun; the world dimmed yet became mysteriously more vivid.

Anvitha was unlike anyone he had seen in the cafés of Koramangala or the glassed-in meeting rooms of his software firm. Her beauty was quiet, almost secretive; A heart-shaped face, all soft angles and sudden mischief, is framed by a river of black hair that never quite behaves; some days it pours straight past her waist, some days it loops into loose waves, and often two rebellious curls slip forward to kiss her cheeks. Wide almond eyes edged with the gentlest kohl, a small straight nose rustic as unglazed clay, lips that curved more easily toward thought than talk. Thick, raven-black hair, never fully disciplined, slipped from her braid in wisps that kissed the high sweep of her cheekbones. Whether she draped a pale cotton saree or vanished into an oversized cardigan, she carried herself as though music moved somewhere beneath her skin.

They married under a saffron morning sky. He remembered nothing of the Vedic chants, only the moment she adjusted her earring-half nervous, half habitual-and a sliver of sunlight caught in the curl escaping her temple. When she bent to touch her parents' feet, her braid swung like a licorice ribbon against the soft beige of her saree. In that sway he sensed the first tremor of a story neither of them knew they were about to write.

They moved into a modest apartment in Kochi, its windows facing the Arabian Sea winds and a lone hibiscus that clung bravely to the balcony rail. The first weeks passed in delicate courtesies; stainless-steel tiffin labelled with his name, polite offers of tea, library-whisper conversations about groceries and laundry schedules. Love, it seemed, had not been included in the dowry.

Rithin, groomed by corporate calendars, rose each dawn, gym bag in hand, earbuds pumping algorithmic playlists. Anvitha wandered behind the curtains of daybreak, fingers stained with watercolours, humming old Malayalam lullabies while rice steamed on the stove. She made art the way others breathed; tiny sketches in the margins of delivery receipts, thumbnail watercolours on the backs of shopping lists; never announcing them, merely leaving them around as if colour were a private dialect.

For a long while they orbited each other like shy moons. Yet it took only a single monsoon shower to dislodge the distance. One Friday evening the clouds fractured without warning, drenching the street and severing power in their block. Trapped on the balcony beneath the tin awning, they watched water bead on the lone hibiscus. Anvitha, sensing his lingering unease, reached inside to fetch an extra raincoat. He tried to refuse; she slipped it over his shoulders anyway, the brush of her fingers surprisingly electric. In the warm hush of rain they shared ginger tea, shoulders grazing in accidental rhythm, and an invisible door cracked open.

After that, intimacy crept in on the paws of stray cats; a Post-it on the fridge reminding him of lunch, a mug of black coffee she learned he secretly preferred, the discovery that she talked to the hibiscus when she thought no one listened. He began shooting candid photographs of her on an old Pentax he had forgotten in college; capturing the way morning light made her bangs glimmer honey-brown, how evening shadows turned her eyes into polished obsidian.

But love, once invited, does not guarantee fluency. When a prestigious art residency in Berlin offered Anvitha six precious months, excitement lit her face like fireworks. Rithin, drowned in a looming product release, could barely imagine abandoning Kochi's fibre-optic cables for European cobblestones. In a careless moment he dismissed the program as "a hobby trip." She heard him laugh along with a colleague's offhand joke - Why send your wife abroad to paint sunsets? -and something delicate inside her cracked.

Three weeks later, before even the sun could rub sleep from its eyes, she left for Berlin with a single duffel, her grandmother's cream pashmina, and a handwritten note tucked beneath his coffee tin; I need to find the colours of my own heart so I can return and paint us properly. Rithin raced to the airport on a borrowed scooter, but the only glimpse he caught was her silhouette behind frosted glass, already vanishing into departures.

In the months that followed, their lives ran in awkward parallels. Kochi nights tasted of over-steeped loneliness. Rithin talked to the hibiscus, terrified it might wilt the way their marriage seemed to. He learned to brew the exact strength of coffee she loved, only to pour it down the sink untouched. He filled out an internal transfer request to the company's Hamburg office, only to delete it at midnight.

Anvitha, meanwhile, settled into a tiny moss-green studio near the Spree, its walls perfumed with turpentine and winter. She wrapped herself in cardigans two sizes too large, streaked her fingers in Prussian blue, and painted a series she called Unwritten Letters-twelve canvases, each a moment she would have shared with Rithin; the first flutter of snow against streetlamps, the metallic screech of the S-Bahn, a sunset that turned the river into molten gold. She mailed each canvas home, unsigned, one per fortnight, like fragile messages bottled in time.

And then, one skidding night in Kochi's ceaseless rain, Rithin's bike collided with a delivery van. A fractured collarbone, a scrambled phone display, his name appearing on hospital admission boards. News travelled clumsily across continents; a mutual friend posted a cryptic prayer request on social media, tagging Anvitha. The moment she saw it, Berlin's midwinter chill turned sub-zero inside her. She booked the first seat on a flight that stitched Berlin to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Bengaluru, Bengaluru to Kochi-a map of panic.

She carried with her a thirteenth canvas, unfinished; a rain-soaked street in burnt umber, waiting for a figure she could not yet paint. Jetlag blurred the transit lounges into fever dreams-she kept seeing Rithin on their balcony, damp hair curling at his forehead, offering his silent hand. Somewhere over the Black Sea she understood that her silence in Berlin had never equalled distance; it had only amplified the echo of what they already shared.

When she reached Lakeshore Hospital, she was wearing yesterday's cardigan and the ghost of yesterday's kajal. Rithin lay half-awake, skin pale against the antiseptic sheets. The pulse monitor beeped in a rhythm that felt heartbreakingly mortal. She did not know what to say, so she placed the unfinished canvas against the wall and slipped her fingers through his. He stirred, recognising the jasmine in her hair before his eyes even opened.

"Is that your painting?" he whispered, voice gravelly. Each word a pebble scraped by rough water.

"It is us," she said, and for the first time she tucked that unruly curl behind her ear without thinking. "I didn’t know how to finish it until now."

He looked at the blur of rain and empty street and imagined standing there beside her, umbrella forgotten, finally ready not to stay dry. And in the soft green of those vast, almond eyes, he realised that every unfinished page of their story could yet be written.

Recovery was slow. She read to him from her sketchbook margins, painted quick watercolours of the hibiscus and taped them above his bed. When he could finally sit, she finished the canvas at his side, adding a lone figure in the rain facing another who had just arrived; two silhouettes finally occupying the same frame.

Weeks later they rode the ferry across Vembanad Lake, discharge papers folded like spare lyrics in his pocket. Clouds, shy as children after scolding, parted just enough for a sliver of sun. A timid rainbow arched over the backwaters. He produced two plane tickets-Kochi to Berlin, six months hence-and she laughed, the sound round and whole and happier than any note he had yet coaxed from her.

"Six months," he said, eyes softly defiant. "You spent that long painting letters to me. Let me spend that long reading them beside you."

A breeze lifted the edge of her pale kurta; her hair brushed the stubble at his jaw. She leaned against the shoulder that would forever carry the memory of rain-slick asphalt and second chances.

Love had arrived late, through locked doors and detours, but its timing was precise; as precise as monsoon rain that waits until you have stopped running for cover. And like a rainbow after the severest storm, its colours were clearer for every dark sky it had travelled through.

Their story, now fully theirs, floated onward-light as jasmine on evening wind, certain as tides, iridescent as the Mazhavillu.