The Fat Lady's Swansong

They say that is not over till the fat lady sings. Summer's fat lady's aria has plumped the mangoes sweetened the litchis like dew drops of nectar and enveloped us in her rather warm swansong of heat and beads of sweat. We sweat, we hope, we sigh, we chafe, and breathe the heavy stupor pushed at us by the swirling ceiling fans. We walk the dingy Mumbai sea line and thrust our necks like dogs from a car window at few the gusts across the blackish brackish swill as the city curls its lips and curves a halogen orange twinkle at the corners at the end of the Queen's Necklace. ATMs for free and Cafes in exchange of money offer air-conditioned moments of futile weekend relief. The weekend, the summer, and the land's end are all slipping away in time while we honk and nudge like lemmings to check out the waves through darkness.

Monsoon is waiting in the wings and has sent a sprinkle of little initial relief and and her Midsummer-esque fairy seems to say

'I must go seek some dewdrops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.
Farewell, thou lob of spirits; I'll be gone. 

Our Queen and all her elves come here anon.'

The waves await the high-tide and expectantly slap and gurgle with a fishy smell at some random rock and bits of concrete in at the Bandra promenade. Countless nameless couples get all affectionate at the turn of season and nuzzle and get selfies in place waiting to make it to the newsrags on a new day, ignoring the BMC exhortations warning against being idiots and tempting the sea to sweep them into its bosom at a surge, in exchange for some random indestructible plastic flotsam and jetsam they must've offered to the waves a while ago with the multitudes that eat and drink and litter like it's a basic excretory function.

It's a good time to be at Candies. It's past the discount hour and dark outside and smells of heat and not enough drizzle. The food is cheap. Cyril's generosity fills our bellies with more cookies, and chips and diced up cake bits than we have bought in our last couple of visits. 

(This was written as monsoon clouds were embracing Mumbai... Somehow, feelings granulated to words agreeing together are like a sigh that seeks conclusion ... Often not requited. Lying in the draft box, a revisitation evokes something within akin to a hint of wistful fragrance. 

Uncaged it is now, to be all without...)

Towards tranquility...

The monsoon rains serve but to sizzle and calm the dosa griddle that is Mumbai. The vapour from the quenching still hangs around the bustle and vigour of the mornings waiting for the glowering heat to return in a big sweaty odorous embrace. Travelling towards Pune is not unlike scuba diving from the depths of the ocean. The pressure of existence and survival eases as one travels without. Both the road and train journeys have their own kinaesthetic zephyrs of their own ready for discovery along the travel.
Travelling on a train to Pune is enamouring. Doubly so when the monsoons are at the fag end of dispensing their succour and perhaps rest and look with a maker-like contentment at their own handiwork on the seventh day. The journey is an imploding dive into a gradient but like a fractual. The more one dives through it the patterns are resplendant with myriad curiosities. The metronomic clackity-clack of the Deccan Queen blurrs away the city of bustle and concrete greys towards the browns of the suburbia rapidly. Blacker sewer flows fuse in a blur of motion to browner little streams.
A compressed look at the journey is like the childhood wonder of glimpsing and running a finger along the neatly arranged colour gradients in a large box of pastels.
The dark skies blur into the grey black concrete of a hurrying city. The girders and strum-throbbing heart-strings of ever growing construction fuse as one moves towards the movement blurred unending billions of granite shards of the rail-track bosom. The grease streaked sleepers kreee-rup rattle like running comb teeth over dentures, while the glittering streak of rails lead towards the warmer rust and the browns of soil. The specks of green have started already like the ilshay-guri rain mist as one rides into impending rain. The greens of moving landscape soon start soothing like a chamomile tea kicking in. The foliage gradients take off towards the already calming verdant blur. Bright uniform rainfed swatches of the farmers' toil rush to meet the natural darker greens of nature's spontaneity towards the horizon.
Enter the Western Ghats in a crescendo lofting the experience towards the clouds covers. The olfactory senses lessening sweat grime soot and more of the seas little wild flowers dotting the greens with pinks and yellow, the moss clasping the mountainside, and the spray of the cataracts cascading like hundreds of rivulets of milk tumbling past. It's like swirling slowly into the clouds. The clouds around the mountains are drift closer and swirl as cotton candy mists softly wisping the dense flora covered gentle undulations. Through the mists glimpses of ant-like vehicles tendril and stream on ribbons of tarmac past Khandala, Lonavala and beyond.
The speed too eases soporified by the mountainous gradient towards a brief halt triggered by an unseen signal. Enough to show signs at Malavli beckoning at the forts and Buddhist caves of Karla. The sleepy eyed doggy on the plaform cranes to look briefly before quickly resuming slumber as we move towards a soporific Pune.

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...

The silence between the drops...

As the rain clouds gathered I remembered the days in Pune when almost the entire floor rushed up to the terrace to get drenched (or at least feel the spray on themselves). Memories of smiles and the happiness writ on those faces light up brighter and more vivid than the brightest LED screens on display in the TV shops.


The met department is allegedly terming the rain that we experienced for the last few days "pre-monsoon" showers but yesterday when I experienced the rain at Bandra Bandstand I saw the people greeting the monsoon. I saw glimpses of the past in their smiles, the energy, and the happiness.


I have been itching to write this for the last few days. Ever since I saw the first rains. Technically I heard about the rain and then saw it like a TV on mute across a glass pane. Perhaps that is why it failed to trigger something emotive like the past few experiences. 


I cannot explain why I have this urge to write everytime it rains for the first time in a season. Perhaps it opens some flood gate of the soul as well. It is a sudden explosion of a whole lot of  sensory triggers—the absence of heat after a summer, the earthy petrichor smell of the first rain as the actinomycetes aerosol their spores into our noses, just the sight of the rain clouds, the feel of the rain drops on your skin, the verdant foliage and whole lot of things that are best experienced and never expressed. 


Mumbai has stoked a certain fire in the furnace of my being. With the clangour of the furnace, it has brought a certain numbness of my being. 

The first rains of monsoon...

For the last three years I’ve been party to a ritual.

It begins like another day, trapped in a ‘air-conditioned’ box moving through the day like zombies. A shiver of excitement runs through the people and many get drawn to the windows. Gasps of excitement and dilated pupils indicate of the general adrenalin rush.
A gush of people run out and most run up to greet the torrents. The thunder crashes and the gusts of wind threaten to blow people off the terrace. People rush to the nearest shaded area and get drenched anyways since the strong gusts of wind don’t really care about the people (who it must think are idiots) not getting wet.
The plate glass windows frost up and the rivulets start dripping inside our hastily and badly made office. The chai-wala does fabulous business for the day, pouring out endless cups of hot tea to drenched revelers who would not normally even contemplate a sweetened quaff.

It happens on the first day of every monsoon I have spent in Maximize Learning (still cannot reconcile to calling it Aptara). It still arouses a special feeling of excitement every time it happens. A predictable magic that never has lost its charm.

After this one moment of magic it is all about trudging through a wet rainy three months. About braving the slush. About wet clothes. About the front brake constantly caked and clogged with mud on the Royal Enfield. About the longings in the heart to not go to office when I wake up and stare wistfully at skies which prompted Meghadutam. About all such things which one can crib about monsoon.

But the first rains are ALWAYS magic undiluted.

Summer. Rain.

Lactocalamine on parched skin cannot compete with untimely rain in the middle of an unusually early and aggressive summer.

Riding through the undecided rain is hell. The still born slush makes the bike slip like drunk catfish. But then ... everything has a price.

I got out of the room and walked out to the terrace to experience the bliss of the sapping moments of night, melting into a coldish Pune morning.
The puddles on the quenched concrete, the shivering leaves of the almond tree, and the eucalyptus swirled in unison with the aroma of fresh rain.

A zephyr swishes the unseen mist-coldness around ankles. I can't seen the stars like a summer's night but a moon glowing bright behind some still cloud fluffs.

Such a joy. Rain.

It just rained...

A stream of people crowded around the open window. Watching the yellow earth moving monsters getting drenched and yet hammering away. A sudden thought struck me. Why stay behind the glass windows and peer out like some convict enviously looking at freedom from within. So I went out and up and got drenched.

Brilliant.