Beating the heat

The monsoon has decided to do a bunk as far as Mumbai is concerned. Oh, no, it is not that it will not arrive…eventually…but this year it seems to be taking its own sweet time, as we Indians are wont to say. While weather is always temperamental – or iffy, in more local parlance, but of a different vintage – it is being unusually so now, leaving us in a collective lather of ruffled temper, pouring sweat and rampant speculation. “But you promised!” everyone seems to be pointing fingers at the Met Office, which declared that the rains would arrive a week earlier than normally scheduled, not a week later, as is now the forecast.

So what went wrong? Well, there are various theories. Urban legend has it that if the monsoon arrives in the city on or a day before or after June 10, life will be normal, hunky-dory, happy. If, however, it is late, there will be floods, as if the rain gods are making up for lost time and over-compensating. And if it is early, especially a week or more before time, there will be famine, prognosticators say darkly and with that cynical and almost-evil sneer on their miserable little faces as they speak words of doom and, typically monsoon-ishly, gloom. None of these apply to the rains this time, we are told by newspaper headlines, television newscasts and the Met Office alike. The culprit is a malcontent weather system in the Persian Gulf, one that sucked the storms that herald the rains into the straits of Oman and dumped so much water there that there were floods and tidal waves in a region that normally does not see water from above too often.

As a result, we are being very depressive and doomsday-ish about what Mumbai and its people are going through right now. Never mind the fact that for months, even years, farmlands in the state have been severely water-deprived, so much so that farmers are killing themselves for lack of a decent crop and thereby a subsistence livelihood. Never mind that for longer than we can remember we have been suffering the consequences of water shortages and power cuts and all sorts of associated problems, each time creating such a hullabaloo about it that the government is forced to take drastic measures to not just shut us up, but actually start working on a way to perhaps start tackling the matter in a long-term rather than just an ad hoc manner. That, by the way, is about how the government functions, with plans that are formulated over years to start dealing with the way in which to formulate plans…at some remote stage arriving at the actual matter at hand, rather than a plan to get there, one day.

But in the meantime, we are vocal about our agonies. Make gentle conversation with any Mumbaikar at this time and you will hear moans, groans and whinges about the heat and how horrible it is. We sweat if we move even a fingertip, but need to push that aforementioned digit into motion to do what we have to, to keep cool, be it turning on the fan or waving one if the electricity has been cut of at that particular time. We moan, groan and whinge about how there is no power, how the water is so hot, how the ice has not formed in the freezer and how the inverter does not cool the room enough, sweating profusely in the very effort to make our woes heard and shared. But what we forget, usually, is that someone else has a story that is as horrific if not more so, than the one we have to tell – my friends in Delhi tell me that it has hit 48 (degrees, not the toll in a hit-and-run); the cheerful upside: only eight people have died today because of the heat.

In all this heated debate, humour tends to edge on the macabre. It may be funny to some, especially those who are not direct sufferers, but to most, it is a pain we all share. And, as soon as the rain does stop holidaying in Oman and finally arrives to cool off Mumbai, we can change the focus of our moans, our groans and our whinges and whine about how the rain never stops….