Commentary/Dilip D'souza
It's June, and I wanna be wet!
They called it a pre-monsoon shower, the one that deluged Bombay on the
first day of June. Maybe it was, by some complex meteorological definition.
To me -- as I sat on a little parapet that morning, watching the clouds
grow swiftly darker, the wind whip up little dust devils, the first few
drops thump heavily around me and then turn into a serious downpour that
lasted till lunch -- to me, it was certainly the monsoon come again.
As every year, I felt the familiar, warm tingle flooding upwards from my
toes. I breathed deeply of that brown, intoxicating earth-smell, marvelled
in the sudden coolness, quaked as the thunder boomed massively overhead.
And all over again, I thanked somebody that I was right here, right now, to
enjoy the start of the monsoon. Oh sure, by the time September rolls around
I'll be thoroughly sick of it: the rain, the dirt, umbrellas that break,
the floods, the feeling of being slightly damp all day. By July, come to
think of it.
But it's only June, and there's nothing on earth quite like that first rain
of the season. Pity the numberless hordes across the globe who will live
out their lives without knowing it!
Last year, it blew in on the back of a cyclone. That night, the wind howled
through the trees, slamming our windows and doors shut with a shuddering
force. The rain wasn't very heavy when it began, though it would become
heavier as the night went on. The thought, when it came, was simply
irresistible. How enthralling it would be to walk along the nearby
seashore! The rain in our faces, the wind in our hair... Very soon, we were
there. It was a startlingly dark night, I remember. Some bright lights out
at sea were the only blemishes in the blackness. But we had little energy
for curiosity about odd lights. It was hard to think of anything but the
immediate experience of the rain. The wind was so strong we had to
lean far forward into it just to make a few steps of progress. It was
sending raindrops stinging into us, as if hundreds of very wet thorns were
singing through the air.
Stinging or not, it was an exhilarating, energizing 15 minutes that we
spent there. I returned home with adrenalin flowing, charged up like I
hadn't been in weeks. That was the effect the season's first rain had on
me.
In fact, that night it was even stronger than we knew. The next morning we
woke to an astonishing sight. A huge ship had run aground on the rocks just
off the shore, no more than 150 yards away. Ah yes, those lights at night!
Now we knew what they had been. The freighter lay there like some rusting
sea beast, silent and enormous. Already, people were thronging to see it,
Bombay's newest tourist attraction. A shipwreck, of all things! In
thousands they came, for weeks afterwards. Today, a year later, the
tourists have found other attractions. But the ship lies there still, a
reminder of that wild, beautiful June night when on that stretch of shore,
it was just the wind, the new monsoon, a ship heading for disaster on the
rocks, and us.
The monsoon comes every year, I know. In that banal sense, it is routine
and predictable, I know. But that doesn't explain why that first cloudburst
never fails to delight. Why does it always pack that breathtaking punch?
Why is it such a decisive answer to long days of draining, wearying May
heat?
Not that the May heat does not have its compensations. When the
two gulmohur trees outside burst into flowering flame, I can't help the
indulgent thought that our balcony is, bar none, the most spectacular spot
in the city. Almost overnight, the trees go from a nondescript green to
that vivid, livid, orange-red. Within days, the flowers drift down, turning
our drab compound into a carpet of lush colour.
Summer's here again: I know that when the gulmohur blooms so abundantly. In
Bombay, that can only mean mangos. This year the orchards must have been
particularly fecund. We are overrun with carts and baskets full of the
luscious, voluptuous yellow fruit, bursting with ripe flesh and sweet
juice. They're here in opulent variety, though you can tell a true
Bombayite by the way he dismisses all but the exquisitely-shaped Alphonso,
the King of fruits. "Those are not mangos!" he'll say derisively of any
others.
In May, I think: so what if it's hot as hell and I'm never quite free of
sweat? There are mangos to be eaten! I guzzle them down almost sinfully,
all month long. My fingers and face remain in a near-permanent state of
stickiness. Then June arrives, and I think: so what if it's going to be a
long twelve months till I have mangos again? The rains are here! And in a
flash, they have washed away the sweat and stickiness of May.
That's why the mangos, the gulmohurs, are just the advance notice, only a
reminder that summer must give way to the rains. They point the way towards
that release from the heat we all long for, the magnificent climax of that
first rain that always seems to know when May has turned to June.
In his scrumptious Chasing The Monsoon, Alexander Frater writes of
watching the monsoon break on Kovalam beach in Kerala. "Everyone shrieked
and grabbed at each other," Frater says. In his case, that meant the
dark-eyed woman to his right. "Her streaming pink sari left her smooth
brown tummy bare. We held hands much more tightly than was necessary and,
for a fleeting moment, I understood why Indians traditionally regard the
monsoon as a period of torrid sexuality."
Then, as the deluge really begins, she is gone.
A momentary romance, that quick magic, the wisp of a mystery -- this is the
stuff of the monsoon. Ask me only weeks hence, I'll be cursing it. But for
now, it's an entirely different emotion I feel. I felt it on the seashore
last June; I felt it again on the parapet a few days ago.
Without a doubt, it is at this time of the year that I feel most Indian of all.
That I feel most glad to be Indian. Make of that what you will. Me? I'm
going to get wet.
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