Don’t be a damp squib

Never mind what the Met Office may say about it, but the weather has changed suddenly from hot, sweaty and irritating to cool, damp and invigorating. The weather-people can call it a depression if they want to, but most of us are thrilled at finally feeling – and how! – the end of the mugginess that bogged us all down. But that euphoria rarely lasts. The joy that the first rains bring is soon dampened, literally, the rain seems endless, you long for sunshine and cabin fever wreaks deadly havoc on relationships, however close.

Now that is the problem. The monsoon has a nasty habit of making more than just clothes and floors and hair feel soggy and sticky. Romance, too, seems to be stuck, in some soggy rut, where everything is boring and mired in clouds of gloom and everything seems so much worse than it actually is. Worse still, you start fighting with your significant other for nothing, just because you are not able to go out and play, shop, eat, watch a film…whatever makes your cookie crumble. You want to eat popcorn, but it goes limp by the time it has finished popping. You want to sit on the windowsill and feed the birds, but they are all sheltering under some eave somewhere, out of the rain. You want to drive down to the mall to buy new socks, but the car is standing in four inches of water that you do not want to wade through to get in. And it’s all his fault…or hers.

But come the monsoon, when real rain pours down in thick sheets, when all you can see outside is water, when not a fly or a crow (think the Tamil proverb) is stirring, romance should be. There is love in snuggling on the couch eating hot onion pakoras, sipping tea, humming along with Raj and Nargis as they croon under an umbrella. There is romance in being warm and dry inside the house while people struggle to get to wherever they are going by train, by bus, by flooded road. There is passion in the knowledge that you really do not need to get your feet wet and your hair frizzed while you wait for the next clear patch before you dash to the store to buy milk.

There is indeed romance in the rain. So stop being a damp squib and grouching about the season of sogginess!