Rain dancing

It’s raining cats, dogs and a few cows and goats in Mumbai right now, and has been since Saturday some time. It is, after all, the monsoon and, during the monsoon, it does rain. But our wild and wonderful city never gets used to the downpour, reacting with startlement each season, when the first week of warm drenchings throws the roads, people and the vehicles they drive into complete discombobulation, digging into the asphalt to create lunarscapes with potholes and dirt, washing away streets, trees and lives and stalls trains, cars and work schedules. People wade through feet of water determined to get to work and then, once there, safe and dry and bolstered by cups of steaming hot cuttingi chai, they open hot-packed tiffins for that sustaining bite of lunch long before lunch is mandated, all so that they have the strength and the reduced weight during the long and sloshy trek back home.

It hasn’t taken much this year to alarm the Mumbaikar, usually such a stoic and dauntless survivor of all seasons. Of course, last monsoon’s deluge of July 26 did much to change that. So it was a pleasant surprise, though not completely surprising, to find the roads this morning dotted with policemen, each man neatly swathed in bright yellow waterproof slickers and pants, waving cars to the right, trucks to the left and pedestrians off the roads. It took not much longer than my usual span of time to get to work from home, but will probably take somewhat longer to get home again, even if I leave now, as my father and friends suggest.

For months now, the Bombay (it has not yet been changed to Mumbai, it seems, from the short form, which still reads BMC) Municipal Corporation has been digging, dredging and otherwise disturbing the normal state of our city’s various surfaces, reportedly to minimise problems when the downpour hit. It helped, of course, that the rain gods knew that the BMC has much work left to do; the rains came to our burb 25 days later than normal, leaving the taps dry and the inhabitants of the metropolis complaining long and loud about the heat and excessive humidity. Now that the rain in finally here, Mumbai’s denizens are complaining as long and loud about the non-stop rain, how it leaves washing undried, trains stranded and children at risk from flooded streets, open manholes and waterborne disease. All this, while they throw plastic bags out of their windows, steal manhole covers, and eat bhelpuri and chaat from the road-corner cart, made by a man who rinses the plates in the same water he spits into even as he scratches himself with the hand that he assembles the food with.

On that delightful note….the rainy season is a time of new life, when the seas are teeming with spawning fish, the plants are storing up for a fresh growing season and the average Mumbaikar replenishes a body starved for cool moisture. The rain brings with it disease, disaster and death, but also showers the earth with cleansing wetness, washing away acids from the atmosphere, dirt from smog-caked buildings and exhaustion from the skins of tired workers. The air is cool and scented with wet earth and coolth, spirits are higher than during the endless pre-monsoon time, when the humidity bogged down the mood and, in spite of the perils of living on the coast and being deluged without respite, we in Mumbai welcome every drop of heavenly moisture. Even when we have to catch trains that stop mid-way between two stations because of flooded tracks; even if washing doesn’t dry and mould becomes an intimate member of the family; even if cars cannot get past the nearest intersection and vegetables are more expensive than your diamond suite.

It lasts three months, on and off, this rain. And we love it.