The Girl Who Painted Rain
Rain is every color if you know how to look.
The Story
The Wettest Place
In Cherrapunji, Meghalaya — one of the wettest places on Earth — it rained so much that most people had forgotten what a dry day looked like. The roads were rivers. The gardens were ponds. And every child owned three umbrellas.
But a girl named Bansara owned none.
"Why don't you carry an umbrella?" her classmates asked.
"Because umbrellas are for people who don't want to see the rain," said Bansara. "And I want to see everything."
The Sketchbook
Bansara carried a sketchbook wrapped in a plastic bag. Every day after school, while other children ran home to stay dry, Bansara sat under the sacred grove near the living root bridge and painted the rain.
Most people thought rain was grey. Bansara knew better.
Morning rain was silver, thin and bright like needles. Afternoon rain was green, filtered through a million leaves. Evening rain was gold, lit by the last sunlight. And night rain — her favourite — was blue, so deep and quiet it felt like painting silence.
Her sketchbook filled up with rain in every colour. Sixty-four paintings. Sixty-four kinds of rain. And still she found new ones.
The Visitor
One day, a man from the city came to Cherrapunji. He was writing a book about weather and wanted to photograph the rain. He carried expensive cameras and complained constantly about getting wet.
"This is terrible," he said, wiping his lens. "How do you people live with this?"
Bansara showed him her sketchbook.
The man went quiet. He turned the pages slowly — silver rain, green rain, gold rain, blue rain. Rain on tin roofs. Rain on living bridges. Rain through spiderwebs. Rain caught in a child's cupped hands.
"I came here to photograph rain," he said, "and I've been looking at it wrong the entire time."
The Exhibition
The man helped Bansara display her paintings at the village school. People came from neighbouring villages to see them. A teacher from Shillong drove two hours in the rain to visit.
"You've done something no camera can do," the teacher told Bansara. "You've shown us what rain feels like, not just what it looks like."
Bansara smiled. "I just painted what was already there," she said. "Everyone else was too busy hiding from it to notice."
The Colours of Rain
Bansara still lives in Cherrapunji. She still doesn't own an umbrella. And her sketchbook now has over two hundred paintings of rain — each one different, each one proof that the world is never just one colour, even when the sky is grey.
If you ever visit Cherrapunji and it's raining — which it almost certainly will be — look carefully. The rain isn't grey. It's silver, green, gold, and blue. You just have to stop running from it long enough to see.
The end.
Before you start
Try It Yourself
Choose your level. Everyone starts with the story — the code gets deeper as you go.
Story Progress
0%Ready to Start Coding?
Here is a taste of what Level 1 looks like for this lesson:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# Your first data analysis with Python
data = [45, 52, 38, 67, 41, 55, 48] # measurements
mean = np.mean(data)
plt.bar(range(len(data)), data)
plt.axhline(mean, color='red', linestyle='--', label=f'Mean: {mean:.1f}')
plt.xlabel("Sample")
plt.ylabel("Value")
plt.title("Color Science & Pigments — Sample Data")
plt.legend()
plt.show()This is just the first of 6 coding exercises in Level 1. By Level 4, you will build: Build a Color Mixing Simulator.
By Level 4, enrolled students build: Build a Color Mixing Simulator
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Level 0: Listener
Stories, science concepts, diagrams, quizzes. No coding.
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Level 0 is always free. Coding levels (1-4) are part of our 12-Month Curriculum.