A monsoon memoir

Everything that I remember about my life seems to have occurred over the din of the rain. In Kerala, where I grew up in a township, the rains, like a paedophilic uncle from Dubai, arrived as both a saviour and a savage, laden with gifts and a threat of dangerous disappointment. After the long days of May, in a seemingly endless summer holiday spent fighting the heat and the humidity that render you lethargic and parched, all you wish for is the first sight of the dark clouds. And then on June 1, without fail it now seems to me, noon would feel like dusk and all at once, the skies would open up. June 2 was usually the first day of the school year. The new school shoes, black Mary Janes from Bata, bought after much warning that no matter what these have to last the year, and smelled, touched and carefully tried on for a fortnight, would remain in the realm of the longed, for three more months.

We lived in a corner house, where my ‘study desk’ was pushed against a partly curtained window. The street light outside was my rain gauge, in its glow I could see whether the raindrops were the nimble dancers of a drizzle or the weighty pellets of a downpour. When they changed the lamp from tubelight, encased in a black filter of long-dead insects, to a sunshine yellow halogen, my rain gauge took on the aesthetics of a fantasy. It seemed to have, like a picture of Jesus that hung in friends’ homes, a golden halo that stood up to the forces of nature.

The damp and the dank was so pervasive that it formed the very texture of my school years, marked by the spotted pyramid of mud on our calves and the moss on the walls. We didn’t play in the rain, as kids now tend to do, we played and inevitably it was raining. Even our umbrellas were firm and functional; we used them as shields, not toys. Which is why, even though I may have only been 11 or 12 and going home from somewhere, I remember thinking it strange that the man walking towards me was playfully twirling his umbrella in front of him. As he reached me, he swept it aside and I realised his pants were unzipped and his man-bits were hanging out. Years later, I read Katherine Hepburn’s memoir, Me, in which she described the first time someone flashed her. “What did you do?” a friend asks Hepburn. “I looked,” she replies. And even as my mind was conjuring up images of Los Angeles or wherever it was that Hepburn was living, I stopped with a gasp, because I could still hear that umbrella being whipped away in the township that drizzly day, and truth be told, I too had looked.

It was only when I went to college in Chennai that I began to understand a little of the romantic allure of the rain. One Diwali week, when most students had gone home leaving behind only a dozen or so of us, the rain came down with such force that trees that seemed to have been living from the start of time were uprooted. Electricity cables snapped, the road between Ethiraj College, where I studied, and Rani Meyyammai Hostel, where I lived, was a flowing brown ribbon. It must have been past midnight when we heard a noise and looked out of the window. Standing on the road, knee-deep in water from the over-run Cooum, the rain plastering his hair on his forehead, my boyfriend was waving out to me. The following morning, I called him, feeling the first stirrings of adult love — a mixture of coy gratitude and maternal reproach — and asked him about this nocturnal desperation. Alas, he was too stoned or too drunk and had no recollection of it.

A decade later, I was the one standing in knee-deep water in what started as just another July day in Mumbai. I was a reporter then, writing on stock markets and mutual funds for this paper. By 5pm, the rain was so relentless that it was evident no one would be able to go home. We stayed that night in office, nodding off at our desks, some of us sleeping in the bureau chief’s quarters upstairs. The next evening, when the rain seemed to have let up, we set off for the suburbs. Halfway through, caught in traffic that was gridlocked overnight, three of us decided there was nothing else to do but walk. There is no activity that does not involve hordes in Mumbai, and the day after the big rain was no exception. In seconds, we lost one another and, alone and afraid, I waded through muddy water, climbing endless flyovers and walking past stalled cars and their exhausted drivers well after it turned dark. Every few steps I’d clasp my stomach and tell the seven-month-old foetus in it to hang on, we’d get through this together. Hours later, I stumbled home, where the baby’s father and I clutched each other and wept. It was, I am now certain, the last time we let our vulnerabilities trump our egos.

A few days later, in a city that was now terrified of rain, I found myself once again in a stalled train, watching the water devour the tracks. People jumped off and hurried home. Except one old lady, who went to the slum nearby and rustled together three drenched young men and a rickety iron chair and brought them back to the coach to help the pregnant girl down. I knew then that when people ask me where I’m from, the only honest answer is Mumbai; it’s where I left a piece of my heart.

The rain in Delhi, like much else in the city, is a cacophony of ostentatious sound and light, with very little substance. But sometimes, when the thunder snuffles and the lightning is a weak flash in the distance, my eight-year-old girl and I go to the balcony and gaze at the sight of water falling on itself. I hold my head straight but from the corner of my eye, I can see her standing strangely still and unusually quiet, chin resting on the railing, while the rain etches the lines on which she will draw her memories. She may not speak of it thus, but even she knows that only a fool would describe it as a cycle of evaporation and condensation, when the irrefutable truth is that, it is the circle of life.

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