Memories of Rain

Memories of Rain

The rains also licensed short skirts hitched high above the knees as we walked the dog or ran errands in our gumboots. I really looked forward to rainy schooldays when our white shirts would become transparent and clinging when wet [the nuns' despair but our delight as our schoolgirl imaginations drew parallels with the wet and writhing heroines of Bollywood].

Last evening as I was returning from a harrowing day at work, I got caught in the sudden downpour as the heavens unleashed their fury. The events that followed were in perfect accordance with the Universal Law: that if anything has to go wrong, it probably will. I was doused in water by some jerk while I negotiated the waterlogged lane in rolled up jeans. I returned home to a black out. The maid never turned up and the At the end of it all, I was like a snappy, ill-tempered Pomeranian, [also drenched and ballistic]. My behaviour that day and on numerous other rainy occasions, reminds me of my dog's behaviour at the mention of the word "bath": fangs bared, resisting.

But I was not always so resentful of the rains. In the distant days of Peter Pan and Chacha Chaudhry, I was always part of the dancing melee of the colony kids welcoming the first showers, [even " My Fair Lady" or "Sound of Music" proved futile as bribes to stay indoors]. The rains promised us hours of splashing in puddles, and bhuttas and hot jalebis [which always followed the inevitable remonstrance as we got our rub-downs]. We never associated the monsoons with the house- bound claustrophobia of the Little Johnny nursery rhyme because Scrabble, Lego, books, and plastescine always kept us occupied whenever our friends were in bed with fever or at home, grounded.

Adolescence too never dimmed the pleasures of the monsoons for us. They gave us the perfect excuse for lengthy telephone conversations and lazy siestas from which we'd surface to steaming coffee or Baba home from office. The rains also licensed short skirts hitched high above the knees as we walked the dog or ran errands in our gumboots. I really looked forward to rainy schooldays when our white shirts would become transparent and clinging when wet [the nuns' despair but our delight as our schoolgirl imaginations drew parallels with the wet and writhing heroines of Bollywood].

But somewhere along my journey into adulthood, the monsoons have lost their magic. My adult mind has forged new associations: the complete disruption of public transport, neglected garbage dumps, floating filth in waterlogged streets, and perennial water and power problems. To minds harried with such problems, it seems impossible that this is the same season that inspired Kalidasa's Meghdoot, and which has been immortalised in the famous Raj Kapoor- Nargis song under the black umbrella. And as the rains seem to bring only havoc, destruction and nuisances, [very unlike the "gentle rain" which Portia drew parallels with while pleading with Shylock], we are only too eager to blame the monsoons for problems caused primarily by the negligence of the civic authorities.

Now on a rain- drenched Sunday afternoon, when I watch the world washed anew over a cup of coffee, memories of monsoons collect around me. But they are unlike Wordsworth' s dancing daffodils. Instead of offering the bliss of solitude, they reinforce the irrevocable loss of simple pleasures, the na’ve enthusiasm of childhood.