Once upon a rain in Mumbai...

I noticed how I end up writing something when the rains start. I remember the electric atmosphere in Pune when the people in the office ran out and greeted the first showers on the terrace. I felt the rain, bathed in the energy, and rode back  in a cooler evening.

Rain Clouds gather over #Mumbai... #Mahim

Mumbai rains have a certain 'incessant' nature to them. It pours in sheets and lulls you in the initial moments into a certain soporific and temporary feeling of niceness. For a few moment the heat recedes. There is a cool breeze on your face and suddenly the Actinomycetes break out into a spontaneous aria flooding your senses with the aroma of a wet and joyous earth.

The grime, noxious fumes, the cavernous heat and the flurry of the Mumbai you know is suddenly different. You wake up to leaves and trees washed clean and dripping droplets of glistening freshness. You actually look at the grey and muted sky instead of nervously twitching to jump at the next fleeting local train, bus, auto rickshaw or taxi.

Clean and verdant Khargar after the first rains in Mumbai...

Mumbai has been kind to me. Especially the rains. When love turned her back and frowned it wept for me without while I did within. I have fond tactile memories of the change from walking out into murky evenings to fresh rain-cleansed-pink-light-polluted-yellow-sodium-vapour-lit journeys back to a home where rain quelled catties and kitties flowed in to greet my evenings.
If I ever write fiction, I might end up starting on a rain cleansed zephyr-like pavement before a Bandra-Kurla bus stop. Feeling the aerosol rain in my nostrils before stepping out to a squelching 62 bus ride lit all spectral and fluorescent, hurtling  through the night.

#Bandra Kurla Complex... evening at Bharatnagar bus stop during a pause in the first spell of rains

This city doesn't sleep. Nor does it let you. The quivering alertness keeps the adrenalin flowing. The first rains are perchance the only (temporary) respite to keep you from teetering off. A little release. This city is like the waves washing up brown and murky white foam on black shores and listless concrete. It roars in and gives hope, baubles, a few trinkets, hope--like heroin to a junkie, and then takes away--like the receding wave till you are left staring at the grains of your soul. Hope piled on greed, greed laced with lust, lust blinded sometimes in the dazzle eyed high beams of some form of trust, to a vertiginous and Promethean turn of liver pecks. Till one regenerates like the Promethean liver and becomes one with the cycle.  

But then--don't they say one has to be cruel to be kind? When you are done feeling good, you realize that you are now going to trudge through muck for four months, get stuck in insane traffic and perhaps drown in whiplash of a cloud burst. Really? Maybe not. Travelling to Saki Naka everyday, especially through the aftermath of some rain is training enough for Spartans. As the aeroplanes scream down overhead waggling the landing gear towards the tarmac some 30 feet away, I skid through the rain-water and oil laced concrete towards my office or grid down both my clutch plates and soul precariously thwacking trucks on either side. Ever noticed how it often rains ONLY in and around JariMari. Just out of spite. To leave you no option but to splotch your feet in the gruelly brown thing that passes for water. To inhale the fumes of a million stuck vehicles rumbling noxiousness into your being. The rain pours down in sheets, the your own little space in the helmet becomes your private little sauna and then your own little hell. Water pours in sheets and torrents from the heavens and seeps like acid through pores and cracks that never existed. The heat saps sweat in your rain coat and the fetid water sogs the crotch. Limbo. Cold, uncomfortable, resignation inducing and repeated till you submit.

The drains overflow. Brown becomes black. Black ooze becomes oil slick and chemical. The monsoon starts and continues with ferocity. The city media dusts off their standard fare of roads disintegrating and visuals of people wading through water. You are the disintegration and the wading through water. You are part of the entire Mumbai rains phenomenon now...