On the monsoon trail
Grand play of elements
JERRY PINTO
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The arrival of the rains in Mumbai is best viewed from a position of privilege.
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The light has changed radically, from the relentless flattening tropical yellow to an ashes-of-peaches colour, a light that you see only when the sun battles rain clouds and gets only a few straggling rays through, those that are refracted madly by d
ust motes and raindrops.
You’d think Mumbai would be warned but the city goes about its work, uncaring. Light we always have with us, through the day. And in the night, sharp pools of it under the streetlamps and diffused psychedelic patterns from the neon signs. We take no notice of monsoon light.
The arrival of the rains in Mumbai, like so much else, is best viewed from a position of privilege. This memory of it comes from the moment when my friend who lives on the 17th floor, turned to the balcony and said, “It’s here.” I remember the clouds rolling in, dark grey and light grey and even, what are you doing amid that bunch of moving water bodies, one scudding white cloud. It was theatre played out in the tiny proscenium of the human eye, against the mightiest largest super-duper never-before-never-again screen of the world: the sky.
Sweeping the city clean
Then it hit and it turned the humans, the busy ant pile we were watching was suddenly hit by panic. Like an aardvark’s questing tongue, the rain swept the city clean, drove the workers and shirkers and lurkers off the street.
After the grand passion play of the elements, the rain had given us a moment of farcical comedy.
But we laughed and laughed.
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“Where were you on July 26?” For a while, that was a conversational gambit.
My answer was, “I walked home.”
I try to walk home as often as possible because this is my city and I don’t even begin to know or understand how it works after 40 years of poking around in its orifices. But this is how it works when the city floods.
The rich get stuck in cars. The rich get out of their cars and abandon them in the middle of the road to cause worse traffic jams. Or they leave their drivers to manage somehow. Then they check into hotels and watch the drama on television, while screaming at room service because their margaritas were not salty enough.
The middle-class gets stuck in buses and trains. They use each other’s mobile phones. They dig out the remains of lunch boxes and break out boxes of mints that they have secreted in their handbags against moments of nausea. They play antakshari for a little while. They exchange seats so that some people stand and some people sit. They make place for the pregnant mother who needs to lie down because her feet are swelling up.
When they get home, they send their sons down with bottles of water for the people stuck in the bus and they send their daughters down to ask young women if they want to come and use the toilet and then proceed on their way.
The worst hit
The poor are the worst hit. They live where the tongue of the aardvark comes, hungry for flesh and blood and the lares and penates built up over years of labour in the homes of the rich.
They pile up their belongings, perch the children on the top and drape granny in a blue sheet of waterproof plastic. Then the women start baling. The men are out there. They are standing guard on open manholes and redirecting the slow-moving caterpillar of humanity away from them. They are hoisting school children on to their backs and walking them through the places where they would be in over their heads.
They are forming human chains to lead people off stranded buses. They are pushing planks into the water to help a stray cat find its way to a dry spot.
You go figure who are Mumbai’s real citizens: the ones who want to sell off the mill land, the ones who want to turn the race course into a parking lot or a hotel complex, the ones who speak English in accents fine-tuned in Bufmuck, America; or the ones who will pitch in during an emergency.
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The rains officially end in Mumbai when Narali Poornima is celebrated.
Indra laughs up his sleeve as the Koli fisher folk dress up in their finest and go down to the sea, to their Annadaata and their Annapurna, their giver of good things, their Sea Mother, to offer coconuts in propitiation.
Hanging on
Kuber laughs too. He knows that the Kolis are finished. They hang on to the edge of the city by their fingertips as trawlers tap dance on their knuckles.
As soon as they have finished their offerings, it rains again.
The fisher folk know this will happen. They dance in the rain, the flowers and leaves bright in their hair. They abuse cheerfully the weather gods who have ruined the cycle by which they lived.
The real criminals, the ones who actually changed the weather by buying cars, filling mangroves, dumping waste, they sip margaritas.
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