Romancing the rain

(Yes, well, I do this sometimes. Today happens to be a rather hectic day at work and I just happen to have a story that I like that was published very recently in the paper I work with, and happenings all came together and did this. So here goes....)

Many years ago, Annie Lennox – who must have been a tourist in India in July when she composed the song – sang Here comes the rain again. It had a lovely haunting melody with that insistent backbeat and a gorgeous raindrop-py rhythm that I loved. If there had been mobile phones back then, that would have been my ringtone. But there weren’t and I was rather too young to want one. And, most of all, those were the days that I liked rain.

Things, like life, change. So did I. And my tastes. Once upon a time I liked getting wet in a downpour and insisted that my father come with me for a walk in the first rainstorm of the season. Dressed in short shorts and T, enveloped in water repellent rubber-coated canvas and wearing cute gumboots (if they were not cute, I didn’t wear them) and holding my father’s hand, I splashed through puddles and sang, for some mysterious reason, a funny mixture of Roop tera mastana, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall and Back to the USSR. Once we got home, soggy around the edges and ravenous, we would be banished to shower and change, then dosed with hot spiced chai and, if we were very good, onion and cashewnut pakoras that we dipped into ketchup or mayonnaise. Rain was good. I liked it.

As I grew up, rain was still a good thing. Lots of it meant a holiday from school and, a little later, no need to go to college. Living away from Mumbai for a year or two here and there in time allowed us to escape from the rigour and eventual monotony of the monsoon months, oddly enough making us want to feel the warm rain beating down on our shoulders again soon. Like homing pigeons – or congenital idiots – we often flew back through big black clouds to a tarmac slick and sometimes waterlogged, into a city that was cleaner, but smellier, soggier and mouldier. The older I got, the more I hated the rain, from the aggressively steamy heat of the summer to the heightened sweat factor of the first couple of weeks of wet to the unending dampness of a season that should never have been invented by the powers that be.

But that is not the point, people tell me. Rain is for romance, for long walks with a beloved, for snuggling under a shared umbrella, for that Pyaar hua ikraar hua scenario, for the Kaante nahin katte wet sari dance…at that point my practical bone kicks me in the love synapse and I come back to reality. I can just see my beloved developing a sinus irritation after getting a trifle damp in a gentle rain shower. I can imagine trying to get out of a wet sari. I can feel the slugs exploring my toes and the earthworms crawling up my clothes as I wade my unwieldy way holding aforementioned beloved’s hand, through ankle deep water in a side street that has not been cleared of the debris of last year’s floods. I know that the chai will be too sweet and the pakoras will have chillies waiting to ambush my unsuspecting mouth.

There is no romance in rain. Romance is all about sitting inside watching the rain, thinking fondly of dry feet, warm knees and a nice large mug of hot apple cider. Romance is the story of a mushy movie on TV, the fragrance of baking brownies and the sure knowledge that there is no need to go out and get wet. But, at this time of year, here comes that rain again. Drat.