taste the thunder...

That's the slogan for the soda Thumbs Up, but it has a whole different meaning when you are awoken at night by the sounds of Indian thunder.
It's unlike anything I have experienced before; the thunder rattles your insides and takes your breath away from the fierce vibrations. Last night wasn't any different. The thunder lashed out and it confused my brain so greatly that for a whole minute I believed the noise somehow jolted me upside-down on our bed. In the same instant I awoke, I grabbed Collin and gasped aloud in my startled state. He barely flinched.
Looking back at last night's stormy episode, the explanation our Telugu teacher gave us during a rainstorm last week on Telugu words for lightning, thunder, rain, and hail all makes sense, though at the time it did not.
When we came across the word for lightning, murupu, she told us that this is the sound that accompanies the thunder. This seemed a bit backwards, so we continued to reach for clarification on the matter. We told her, no, lightning is the flash of light across the sky and thunder is the sound that accompanies it. She wouldn't accept this, and further explained to us that thunder is when the fire falls from the sky, and urumu is the sound that comes with the sound of the lightning (?). We could do nothing more than just nod our heads at her explanation, let her teach us how to make paper boats for an hour, then float them on down the road in the streaming rain.