A girl called Monsoon

If I am allowed the luxury of picking readers for this piece, I will happily pick everyone except the members of my immediate family, because this piece doesn’t talk just about monsoon, it also holds the key to the deep sense of loss that the first rains of the season always fill me with. For me, every monsoon renews the memories of someone who liked listening to the footsteps of rain and loved talking about how it tiptoed up her alley, picked its quiet way across the garden and then fell on her windows like pebbles.

If you want to call her by name, call her Miss Monsoon. I am sure she would be deeply indebted to you if she comes to know about it. And if you ever get a chance to meet her, she is almost certain to impose on you many of her monsoon theories. Before I met her, I thought of monsoon only as the phenomenon that happened precisely on the day schools reopened after summer vacations. But she changed the way I looked at monsoon and wrote about it.

We were both in our early twenties when we met accidentally under a banyan tree at the small railway station in my hometown. Two bookworms waiting on a stone bench for an indefinitely late train. I remember with startling clarity how I looked up from the book I was reading and found her sitting at the other end of the stone bench, looking angrily at the railway tracks. A few hours later, I stumbled upon her again at the British Council Library, about 50 km from my hometown, and she shot an angry look at me as if she had caught me stalking her. Soon I found out that she did not belong to my town; her father’s job had brought her there and, to judge from the way she frowned at everything, it was evident that she felt shipwrecked in this sleepy little coastal town.

In the months that followed I ran repeatedly into her under the banyan tree at the railway station and by the bookshelves in the high-ceilinged building of the British Council Library. But it was only many train journeys and casual encounters later that we found ourselves standing next to each other, exchanging half-smiles. It had suddenly started to rain and, to prevent the neatly jacketed books of the British Council from getting wet, we had taken shelter under the awning of a closed shop just a few metres from the library. After putting away the books on a window sill, she started to collect the rain in her cupped hands as monsoon drenched the city and the winds snapped tree branches. Back then, I had this notion that a girl collecting rainwater in her cupped hands had something artificial about her; it reminded me of the soulless romantic movies of the ’80s. Leaning against a pillar, I watched her with a smirk, smoking with a flourish to appear grown-up and important.

In the company of clouds: I remembered how she described the monsoon in the hills, where the first rain fell as hard as stones, white little needles of ice that melted in her hands

We had the same train to catch and we were getting late for it. When the rains showed no signs of letting up, she walked up to me to ask if I was interested in going Dutch if she hired an auto rickshaw. We got talking in the auto and later in the train, standing near the door and watching the rain-soaked villages slide by. In the course of that hour-long journey, I discovered that she worshipped the rains so ardently that every monumental day in her life was planned around it. She willed it to rain cats and dogs on the day of her wedding (I found that extremely funny), the day she would give birth to her daughter (she could not imagine giving birth to a boy), the day she would take the child to school for the first time (which was ridiculously easy in Kerala, as it rained unfailingly on the day schools reopened) and, most importantly, the day she would be buried in the graveyard behind the only mosque in her quaint little hometown tucked away in the folds of a hill station (I pretended to be saddened by the prospect of her passing away).

In essence, in her idea of a perfect world, awnings never stopped dripping, the sun never got a chance to dry leaves, all clotheslines were strung indoors and no one ever left their house without an umbrella. The cynic in me could not help pointing out that while she imagined a world where it rained all 365 days she was not carrying an umbrella on a day it was certain to rain. She gave me a perfunctory smile, which slowly graduated into a look of mild distaste. And the next time we met under the banyan tree, she pretended to be a perfect stranger.

My question about the umbrella cost me a few weeks of her friendship, but the day we got talking again, she showed me a pocketbook scribbled with poems in elegant flowing handwriting. It was with great difficulty that I restrained myself from telling her that all her poems had the same theme: the rains. I didn’t want to risk her wrath again. The poems were beautifully written, though. Till that day I hadn’t tried writing poems, I had no penchant for them. But you know what Cupid is capable of. On my next visit to the library, I, too, was carrying a pocketbook filled with poems celebrating monsoon. She read them with forced interest but did not utter a word. After reading them with the hint of a smile on her lips she merely looked into the distance, her face betraying neither appreciation nor discontent. Undaunted, I continued to pen poems and she continued to bear them in silence, except once when she burst out laughing at the revelation that ‘every squall of rain is the earth’s way of spending her premenstrual woes’.

After reading many of my poems about ‘rain falling between trees like talcum powder’, ‘raindrops collecting on the dents of fallen leaves’ and ‘awnings dripping onto the cupped hands of a young lover’, she decided to fall in love with me, but not before handing me a set of rules, two of which were written in stone. Rule No. 1: I would keep the affair a well-guarded secret until we could get married (and I tried to imagine that happening on a rainy day). Rule No. 2: Even at the height of romance I would keep my kisses strictly above her eyebrows. I religiously adhered to the first rule as much as I passionately tried to break the second one, but she had a talent for swerving her face away and rapping me on the side of my head with a clenched fist in the nick of time. Fighting invariably followed.

Go with the flow: The girl I had watched many rains with would have happily tossed away the umbrella and collected the monsoon in her cupped hands

If you love books and aspire to be an author or a poet, there is no better place than a library to watch the rains from. But she had a slightly different take on this. She believed that the rains were best watched from dark windows. So, when it rained we shifted our rendezvous from the well-lit interiors of the British Council Library to the long and sunless aisles of the State Public Library, where, silhouetted against French windows, we stood with books in our hands and talked. We would quickly turn away from each other and pretend to pore over books the moment someone walked up the aisle.

My memories of spending monsoons with her are mostly lovely except for one which left her trembling, weeping and swearing non-stop at me. We were standing under a canopy of leaves in a deserted corner of a park — she was hugging a bunch of library books and smiling at the rain and I was standing sombre-faced beside her, very confident of finally managing to break the Rule No. 2 — when two policemen materialised in front of us, bearing umbrellas and lathis. I dropped my hand awkwardly from her shoulder and fumbled in my pocket for a cigarette. In no time, thanks chiefly to my exaggerated attempts to look normal, moral policing started. They took us for college students who had bunked classes and demanded our ID cards to be shown. Pretending to be unruffled, I produced my railway season ticket. But when her turn came she stepped out into the rain and sobbed unabashedly until the policemen took pity on her and walked away, hugely amused by the torrent of her tears.

Then abruptly, I found myself watching the rains from the French window of the Public Library all alone. She had left the town after a hurried goodbye; her father was transferred again and the family had to move back to the hill station. And long after she was gone, I continued to stroll by the house she used to live in, just to catch a glimpse of her lit window. I took a long time to heal, and every time the season of rains started I remembered how she described the monsoon in the hills, where the first rain fell as hard as stones, white little needles of ice that melted in her hands. I imagined her standing with her head turned to the sky and mouth open, tasting the rain before the drops fell to the ground. Letters written in her neat looping hand arrived from the hill station at regular intervals, the warmth in her voice dwindling by degrees until they finally stopped coming. But I continued to think of her when it rained, and imagined her standing by a window, watching ‘the rain falling between the trees like talcum powder’.

Her love of monsoon was so infectious that I found it impossible to write a book without a spell of rain in it. In my first book, The Vicks Mango Tree , the skies of Mangobagh pour on the most important journey in the collective life of its characters, while in my last book, The Small-Town Sea , the character who bears a close resemblance to me dies on a rainy night. And all the books in between have a fair share of monsoon, falling punctiliously in varying degrees of fury, charm or the ability to disrupt life. I owe all those fictitious rains to her, even though her name never found its way to the acknowledgement section of any of my books.

Years later, I had a glimpse of her on TV. By that time I had managed to get my first book published and she, who always wanted to be nothing but a poet, had become a television journalist. She stood under a big umbrella that bore the logo of the channel she worked for and she was reporting on the monsoon that had arrived late but hit the country with unprecedented fury. Her face was flushed with a big smile as the wind played with her curly hair. She held on to the umbrella with great effort as the wind tried to snatch it from her hand. But I knew she held onto the umbrella just for professional reasons. The girl I had watched many rains with would have happily tossed away the umbrella and collected the monsoon in her cupped hands.

Anees Salim is the author of five novels, including The Small-town Sea

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