The summer the rain disappeared from Sylhet, nobody noticed at first.
It was June, and the skies behaved oddly—more white than grey, more still than storming. The clouds hung like cloth drying on a line, heavy but unmoving, as if waiting for someone to tap them on the shoulder and remind them of their duty.
In Rajnagar, a village that sat between a sleepy river and a restless patch of forest, people went about their lives with the slight unease that comes before bad news. Women filled clay jars from the pond and frowned at the water’s new sharp smell. Farmers shaded their eyes and muttered about leaf-rot and stubborn soil. Men in lungis sat outside the tea shop discussing the weather like it was a mischievous child refusing to come home.
Only one person noticed that something impossible had happened.
A twelve-year-old boy named Kamran, who lived at the edge of the village with his grandmother, realised the rain had not merely stopped.
It had been stolen.
The Boy Who Heard What Others Missed
Kamran had always been odd in the way certain children are—quiet, sharp-eyed, soft-spoken. The kind of boy who collected secrets as easily as other children collected marbles. He often sat by the riverbank alone, listening to the chatter of birds and the sighs of old trees.
“River speaks to this boy,” his grandmother, Nuri, liked to say. “He hears things.”
People laughed, but gently. Being peculiar was acceptable in Rajnagar as long as you were polite about it.
On the third week without rain, Kamran sat barefoot on the mud path, drawing spirals with a stick. The afternoon sun pressed heavily on his shoulders. The air tasted of dust and impatience.
He heard it then.
A sound so small, so desperate, it could have been mistaken for a leaf trembling.
A sob.
The sky was crying.
But no rain fell.
He looked up sharply.
The clouds pulsed faintly, like hearts beating behind cloth. The sky’s edges shimmered.
And in that strange shimmer, he saw something move.
Something human-shaped. Small. Running.
Carrying something bright cupped in its palms.
He blinked.
The figure vanished.
That night, he told Nuri.
“A boy took the rain,” he whispered.
Nuri, peeling garlic by lantern light, didn’t laugh.
“Some boys take mangoes. Some take chickens,” she said. “Why not rain? Everything can be stolen if someone is hungry enough.”
“Shouldn’t we tell the elders?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Elders don’t listen to sky problems. They are too busy listening to themselves.”
Kamran didn’t sleep that night.
The sky kept sobbing.
The Absence That Spread
By the first week of July, the ponds were shrinking. Frogs croaked angrily, as if betrayed. Even the monsoon winds felt confused, arriving in half-hearted sighs and leaving quickly as though embarrassed.
Crops began to brown.
Fish traps grew lighter each morning.
Children kicked at dry mud, complaining that their sandals no longer made satisfying squelchy sounds.
“Where is the rain?” people asked.
At the tea shop, the men argued about blame.
“Government is hoarding clouds.”
“No—this is India’s fault.”
“Maybe China built one of their machines again.”
“Or maybe Allah is punishing us.”
Nobody considered that a child might be involved.
Only Kamran watched the sky as though it were a story he alone could read.
One evening, as dusk painted the horizon red, he saw it again.
A small figure darting along the skyline, clutching something glowing.
The glow flickered like trapped lightning. The air around it vibrated.
Kamran trembled.
Someone really had stolen the rain.
And the sky, unable to bear its emptiness, had begun to bruise.
The Visit from Across the World
Around this time, in a flat in Tower Hamlets, thousands of miles away, a British Bangladeshi woman named Amina Rahman packed her bags for her annual trip to Sylhet.
Thirty-two, single, tired of people asking why, she worked in a care home and sent money to her grandmother every month. The first time she’d visited Rajnagar as a child, she’d thought the village was alive—breathing through the trees, watching through the rivers, whispering through walls.
This year, she felt something tugging at her more urgently than usual.
Her grandmother, old Nuri, had fallen ill.
“Come soon,” the cousin on the phone had said. “She keeps asking for you.”
Amina booked the earliest flight.
She didn’t know she was flying directly into a village on the brink of something impossible.
When Amina Met the Boy
When Amina arrived, Rajnagar greeted her with dust instead of rain.
The villagers welcomed her warmly—London-return always meant gifts, photographs, and uninvited advice.
But she noticed things immediately.
The dryness.
The quiet tension.
The way people looked at the sky like they were waiting for it to apologise.
She also noticed the boy.
He stood outside her grandmother’s house, staring at her with an intensity that made her pause.
“You’re London Apu,” he said.
“Yes,” she replied. “And you are?”
“Kamran.”
“Do you need something?”
He hesitated, then asked, “In London… does it rain?”
“All the time,” she said. “Too much, sometimes.”
His face tightened with something like envy.
“Here,” he whispered, “someone took ours.”
She blinked.
“What?”
He stepped closer, voice trembling.
“A boy stole the rain. I saw him. I can show you.”
Amina stared at him, unsure.
But there was something in his eyes—fear, certainty, loneliness—that reminded her of her own reflection as a child whenever she told adults things they didn’t believe.
“Show me,” she said.
The Clue in the Forest
Kamran led her behind the rice fields, toward the forest.
The trees stood strangely still, leaves stiff, as though bracing for news.
“Here,” Kamran said, pointing to a tree trunk.
A faint mark glowed on the bark—like lightning had kissed it.
“He touched this,” Kamran said. “The boy who stole the rain.”
Amina felt the hairs on her arms rise.
“Are you sure it wasn’t… I don’t know… lightning?”
Kamran shook his head. “Lightning doesn’t run.”
She knelt, touched the mark.
Warm.
Alive.
She withdrew her hand quickly.
“What does he look like?” she asked.
Kamran thought for a moment.
“Like a shadow,” he said. “But with eyes.”
The Boy in the Sky
Days passed.
Nuri grew weaker, but she held Amina’s hand with surprising strength. “Rain will come,” she murmured, half-dreaming. “Rain always comes back. You just need to ask the right person.”
Meanwhile, Kamran continued scanning the clouds daily.
And finally, on the sixth morning, he saw him—the boy-shaped figure again, silhouetted against a pale blue sky.
He was running along the clouds, barefoot, carrying a jar filled with swirling rain.
Actual rain.
Amina saw him too this time.
Her breath caught in her throat.
She wasn’t imagining it.
The boy noticed them staring. He froze.
Then—like a startled bird—he fled, leaving a trail of trembling air behind him.
Amina grabbed Kamran’s wrist.
“We follow him.”
They ran.
Across dry rice fields.
Through dying grass.
Into the forest.
Until they reached a clearing neither of them recognised.
There, sitting on a rock, was the boy who stole the rain.
He looked about Kamran’s age, maybe a little older. His hair stuck to his forehead. His skin glowed faintly, as though reflecting a light from somewhere else.
The jar on his lap pulsed with stormlight—the rain inside sloshing angrily.
Amina stepped forward.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked gently. “Why steal rain from people who need it?”
The boy looked up.
His eyes were hollow and tired.
“I didn’t steal it,” he whispered. “I saved it.”
The Boy’s Story
“I lived in a village far away,” the boy said, staring at his hands. “Beyond the river, beyond the border. You don’t know it. No one remembers it.”
Amina and Kamran listened.
“We used to have too much rain,” he continued. “Rain that swallowed houses. Rain that chased people into boats. Rain that took my home.”
His voice cracked.
“One day, I begged the sky to stop. I prayed, ‘Please, enough.’ And the sky listened.”
He looked up then—eyes ancient, full of guilt.
“It stopped. Completely. For my village. For everywhere around it.”
He held up the jar.
“It gave me the rain… to keep safe. To learn control. But I lost my way. The jar grew heavier. I grew slower. And the rain… wanted more than I could give.”
Amina stepped closer.
“But why bring it here?”
“Because the sky told me to find someone who could help,” he said, looking at Kamran. “Someone who hears things.”
Kamran’s breath stuttered.
“You mean me?”
The boy nodded.
“You heard the sky crying. No one else did.”
The Decision
Amina knelt beside the boy.
“What happens if we open the jar?”
The boy shook his head violently. “It will flood everything. Your homes. Your fields. It is too much. Too angry. Too long held.”
Amina understood.
When you hold back something meant to be free, it returns with violence.
“So what do we do?” she asked.
The boy’s voice softened.
“You give it back slowly. Carefully. With someone who listens.”
He looked at Kamran again.
“You.”
Kamran felt his heart thudding in his chest.
“How?”
The boy placed the jar gently into his hands.
The touch made Kamran tremble—the jar vibrated, alive with restless rain.
“You talk to it,” the boy said. “Rain listens.”
The Rain That Returned
That evening, Kamran climbed the tallest hill in Rajnagar. Amina stood a few steps behind him. The boy who stole the rain faded slowly into the trees, his task done, his outline dissolving into the dusk.
Kamran held the jar up to the sky.
It pulsed.
He took a deep breath.
Then whispered:
“You can come home now.
But gently.”
The jar cracked.
A single drop escaped.
It fell onto the ground with a sound that echoed like a sigh of relief.
Then another.
And another.
It didn’t flood.
It caressed.
It softened the air.
It kissed the earth.
By dawn, the village woke to rain returning in the gentlest way possible—soft, steady, grateful.
People stepped outside, letting the drops touch their faces.
Women held out pots.
Children danced barefoot.
Old men cried openly.
Nuri woke from sleep long enough to smile.
Everything felt alive again.
The pond filled.
The river breathed.
The frogs sang with manic joy.
And Kamran?
He listened.
To the sky no longer sobbing.
To the rain no longer imprisoned.
To the world balancing itself again.
The Letter from London
When Amina returned to Tower Hamlets, she brought back more than memories.
She brought back a letter written by Nuri before she died.
Inside, it said:
“Beta, the world you come from
and the world you live in
are not separate.
They only pretend to be.
Rain travels.
Stories travel.
People like you
are bridges.”
Amina folded the letter and placed it in her coat pocket.
On her first day back at work, it rained in London—a soft, warm rain.
Different from usual.
Almost familiar.
She tilted her face upward and let it fall across her eyelids.
Somewhere across the world, she imagined Kamran listening too.
Rain learning its way home.
The Boy Who Stayed Listening
In Rajnagar, Kamran still walks through the fields at dusk, barefoot, listening.
People think he is just a strange boy who likes clouds.
Only he knows the truth.
Rain remembers him.
And sometimes—just sometimes—
he hears a whisper in the sky:
“Thank you.”
Disclaimer
This story, published on mujiburrahman.com is a purely fictional work. All characters, places, communities, and events described are products of imagination or used in a fictional context. Any resemblance to actual individuals or real-world events is entirely coincidental. The purpose of this content is storytelling and entertainment only and should not be taken as factual or representative of any real person or community.
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