Last night, we slept to the soundtrack of a downpour. I have a special enthusiasm for spring rain, because the increased humidity drenches the allergy-inducing pollen, making it possible for me to be at ease without needing to sneeze as often, reducing my cumulative levels of exhaustion at day’s end. I have leaned into my new bedtime of 9 pm. It is around when our infant passes out after an hour and a half of intense cluster feeding. I’ve come to understand that this is his longest stretch of sleep. If I lie next to him, he will sleep until 1 am, which means if I ride the wave and pass out too, I get four hours of uninterrupted sleep, the bare minimum stretch a human needs to feel functional. When I woke up at 1 am to feed, I heard the raindrops pattering on the roof. I could already imagine the new tendrils shooting forth. We’d had various degrees of precipitation for the last four days and the landscape was already altered by the fact. The mountains are blushing chlorophyll green, the vineyards, too. The earth feels activated by the combination of rain and higher temperatures. It feels laden with life. The birds have returned from their southern expeditions and the day is rife with their song.

As I was waiting for our infant to finish feeding, I thought about the rhyme my mother-in-law taught our toddler in German. ‘April does what he wills,’ in English, doesn’t work so well, but you get the gist. This led me to revisit the first line of Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland. I realised I had taken the alleged cruelty of April for granted, over the years, and had stopped questioning it. Last night, I recollected that it had to do with lilacs pushing their way through dead land, ‘mixing memory and desire’ and ‘stirring dull roots with spring rain’. These opening lines of a poem that continues to haunt me since I first encountered it as a grad student in my literature classroom at St Xavier’s came gushing back. I remembered that they come soon after Eliot’s invocation of the Sibyl, a Greek character blessed with immortality without eternal youth, who says, eerily, she wants to die. The poem is nestled within this landscape of death, rebirth, regeneration and again, death. That’s why it is so ghostly, because it is an echo chamber of fictional voices, a collage of sorts.