It was an afternoon of water, when canals encroached roads. Last night someone had told me that “it was raining cats and dogs in Kochi”. White carcasses of cats and dogs (and mice) were floating along the road as I waded home through the monsoon water. For weeks, even last night, I have been dreaming rain in Chennai, yet to release itself from the ripples of Agninakshathram, a fortnight when summer peaked in Tamil Nadu. That was in 2003 or 2004. Monsoon was always the same in Kerala. It made its debut in Kanyakumari, drowned the valleys of Thiruvananthapuram, cut off the backwater islands of Alapuzha and reminded Kochi of its origin from the sea. When the sea rose, the clogged canals took the cue, inundating the roads and the old houses dwarfed by the more recent elevated structures. Still we called rain romantic.
Clouds and classes always opened together. We were shoved off the tempting warmth of the bed on monsoon mornings. “It’s already 8’O clock and you are still sleeping?” mothers are always ahead of time (It was always 10’O clock with my grandmother, father used to say). Then we, the urban kids, launched our paper boats in the red water on the way to school and watched it drowned by a bus-inspired wave.
It’s hard to say whether we liked the plastic smell of raincoats and the damp aroma of biscuits associated with the first days in school. But the smell of coffee poured into innumerable cups as we waited in the college canteen for the rain to subside...we could spent hours after classes on the campus marooned by the rain. No one complained and no one pushed us home. On those umbrella-deficit days, rain was truly romantic.
These days, everyone is recollecting a certain nostalgia of rain. The magic of rain…it’s everywhere…movies, novels, blogs, letters…. Even newspapers, the cruel pragmatists who pour out a litany of monsoon maladies, welcome it with sweet-sounding words…respite…redemption…heavens open up…. We celebrate rains in air-conditioned bars and restaurants. Alcoholic weather, we name the evenings.
Perhaps the nostalgic celebration is an apology for the rain we miss. We crib the office hours when it rains cats and dogs outside. We envy the jobless carless couples caught in the rain. We rue the rain itself (Oh what slush and flood) with the same tongue with which we rued the sun a month ago (This heat is maddening). And if we are blessed with neither sun nor rain, still the nature is at fault (It’s a gloomy day).
When you have nowhere to go and nothing to do except daydreaming, rain is a wonderful time. It’s the best time to revisit memories of lost romances amid the newfound greenery all around you. When you have nowhere to go except offices and nothing to do except work, memories of rain is a wonderful device to keep you going. Still, if you miss the first rain, you miss a year of your life.
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