Few poems about desire begin with a wet towel, and that choice is the first clue to what Ram Krishna Singh is doing in "Rain Drops". The speaker stands in a bathroom where the smell of dampness cannot be covered up. Perfume has been tried and has failed. From this small, unglamorous detail the poem builds a picture of romance giving way to something flatter and lonelier. Its central idea is that atmosphere cannot be manufactured. A scented, moonlit mood is fragile, and ordinary physical reality, a mildewy smell or a cold feeling in the body, can switch it off.
The first stanza is built around a plain, almost clinical sentence: "No perfume reduces / the damp watery smell." The verb "reduces" is a surprising choice. We would expect "hides" or "masks", but "reduces" sounds like chemistry or housekeeping, and it takes the sensuality out of the scene. The sounds back this up. "Damp watery smell" is slow and heavy, full of soft, wet consonants, so the line seems to sag like the towel itself. The line break after "hanging" leaves the towel suspended for a moment before "in bathroom" lets it drop. Even the missing "the" before "bathroom" gives the phrase a bare, notebook-like feel.
In the second stanza the poem turns from smell to sight, and a quiet pattern of unreliable seeing begins. The fungi are "invisible", the image in the mirror is "see-through", and by the end the reflections are "lost". Everything the speaker might hold on to is either unseen or too thin to trust. The phrase "turn off the scented mood" is also clever. A mood is treated like a lamp or a radio, something with a switch, and the fungi are the invisible hand that flips it. Giving a mood a smell is a small piece of synaesthesia, and it explains why a bad smell can wreck it so completely.
The most striking move is "the mirror is no moon." The moon is the oldest prop of love poetry, and the speaker checks it against the pale, misty face in a bathroom mirror and finds it missing. The word "no" is the poem's quiet engine, appearing in "No perfume", "no moon" and "no trick". Each time it removes something that might have rescued the situation. By the time we reach "allergic to sex", the list of failures has moved from objects to the body. The word "allergic" connects back to the fungi, since allergies are bodily reactions to things we cannot see. Judging by the imagery, the line suggests an aversion that is physical, involuntary and perhaps shameful, a refusal that no technique ("no trick works") can talk away. The poem does not say whose allergy this is, and that vagueness lets the line carry both a literal and a figurative meaning.
Structurally the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no fixed metre. Its short lines follow the rhythm of speech, and it uses no full stops and no capital letters except at the very start. Without that punctuation the sentences slide into one another, as if the thoughts cannot be stopped. The one exception is the colon after "sex", which works like a drawn breath. It sends us into the final stanza, a single line set apart from the rest: "the unwed reflections lost / in the stringy rain drops". After the cramped middle stanza this isolated line feels like an emptying-out.
"Unwed" is the most open word here. It could point to single people, to a couple who never joined, or simply to reflections that do not pair up. The poem leaves the question unsettled. "Stringy" is just as unflattering as "damp", suggesting thin threads that blur and break up the images instead of washing them clean. Only here does the title appear, and rain, so often a romantic backdrop in love poetry, becomes one more thing that dissolves the picture.
The poem matters because it is honest about the gap between how romance is imagined and how it is lived. In fourteen or so short lines it replaces candlelight and moonlight with a towel, a mirror and a faint fungal smell, and the result is oddly moving. The speaker's loneliness comes from what the objects in the room refuse to do, which is a quieter and more believable thing than a grand lament.