Benediction

 The river was in spate.
Women wore frilly, blinged dresses, with flowing silk, colourful, perfumed dupattas; men wore cowboy hats with that string forever dangling beneath their chins.
It was a recipe for disaster.
Women squealed, shrieked, and ‘omg’ ed their way across. Someone’s raw leather shoes were ruined , someone else dropped her Faux -hide bag into the stream , and one lost her dupatta to the fury of monsoon Gods, billowing away into the gray skies.Another sacrificed the gold embroidered hem of her ornate kurta, as it emerged dripping wet, all its golden glory muddied.
A cowherd, sitting on a mound of green , some distance away , found it really funny.He just kept pointing and slipping into paroxysms of uncontrolled mirth.

The men followed, their footwear and cameras, held aloft like a torch, whooping gleefully,while the trouser legs had been rolled up to reveal manly hirsuteness.

There is a vicarious pleasure to be derived from peeling caked mud from one's carefully depilated limbs. Almost like an impromptu mud-spa for free. Except that you are doing this in the middle of a rice -field , balancing on slippery"Pugdandi"while goodness-knows-what-insect has just crawled up your lycra leggings, making one emit howls of most un-civil nature, every twenty steps or so. 

All were miserable , except for one.

He was in his elements. Jeans rolled upto thighs("Sheesh,such shamelessness!! almost revealing his balls , as it were")  shoes tidily dangling from his neck (" wasn't the shoelace biting into his neck omg. dont even look at his mud splattered vest")he clicked snaps of everything, the muddy stream , the gray sky, the rolling-with-laughter cowherd, the flowering reeds on the bank, the injured-bug-that-a lady-almost-squashed-as-it-emerged from her undies.

 It was as if he was in heaven , and he didn't want to miss any moment of this trek.

It was an amazing and pathetic / hilarious sight to witness. There was this group of wet stragglers, grumbling and dragging themselves, and there was this man totally oblivious to his wet and muddied state, soaking up every sight, hungrily.

Once they reached the top of the green mound,the sun broke out.

Out of nowhere, the gray clouds parted, and heat and light poured forth. A gorgeous sight welcomed them. A green and gold carpet rolled out at their feet, in every direction, as far as they could see.

Even the most wet and complaining matriarch was silenced.They shook themselves dry , as dogs, and kept looking on , in awe-filled silence.