Love, loss, loneliness and nostalgia
The advent of the monsoons
Year: late 1998
Sometime between the end of August and the beginning of the sweet pre-monsoon rains of September a storm was gathering across the western sky over the city.
Walking to the frame of tinted glass that lined a straight line on the lower side of the great hall, Arinvan saw that the skies ached his belly from the rain. It was a great joy for him to see the gloomy sky rumbling with the potential possibility of torrential rain. White, fluffy clouds turned menacingly dark and heavenly sparks flew everywhere. The entire expanse of beautiful Hussain Sagar Lake was shrouded in a cold mist. Tesser Towers appeared several shades darker due to the complete absence of sunlight in the sky. It started to drizzle at first and in the next instant the rain clouds became angry, very angry, and tore down their celestial contents all over the desperate land like a great typhoon. The ink-dark lake was no longer there; a swirling mass of white mist has taken its place now and how. And before you know it, the skies were throwing down layers of rain again, beating fast and furious on window panes just before breaking them. It was poured and poured for an hour and then some more.
Arinvan struggled to locate the monolithic statue of Buddha standing upright amid the beastly dark gray waters of the lake from where he stood in the corridor on the east flank of the fifth floor of his office building. It was invisible. From where he stood, it offered a panoramic view of the entire D-shaped lake, the collar road in the foreground and the Tank Bund road stretching out somewhere far away in the deepening haze of dark and sinister monsoons.
Soon it will be a flood everywhere. The rain gods hadn’t finished yet. They wanted more. But for Arinvan it was a welcome change; never mind facing a bit of difficulty on the streets, driving on the flooded roads and all. The promise of rain and cold, windy winds far outweighs any difficulties that almost always entail. So welcome home, dear rain. Please don’t leave soon!
I slid the slatted window back onto its ledge. The splattered rain and howling winds soaked much of my shirt and top of my pants. Realizing my mistake of opening the window to look out, I ran to the bathroom to use the hot air hand blower to dry my wet shirt first. Then, walking back to my cabin, I waited for my colleague Manpreet Singh to arrive. I started to feel a little apprehensive about how I’m going to drive (my red Honda) home when my schedule ended at 3pm. I was already starving; lunch was high on my schedule. I wanted so badly to do it. Today, I had arrived early at 7am and by 3pm I was expecting Manpreet to open the glass door to the hallway and enter and begin his stretch of the cemetery until 11pm according to our scheduled time.
Think of him and he is right there, dripping rainwater, wet to skin and bones, his thick boots slip a little; her shoes looked unusually jet black that day probably due to the rain and even gleaming like stainless steel. He trudged toward our much-loved promenade: our watering hole. His tightly woven maroon Pagdi wrapped around his head giving him an anonymous conqueror look was also dampened by the monsoon rain.
“Ek mint … main abhi ayaa (I’ll be there in a moment)”, Manpreet announced suddenly and walked away from our shared cubicle.
“Thik hai …” I said and instantly craned my head to see him run to the men’s room!
Maybe you wanted to use the hot air dryer to dry your shirt and pants. One can do exactly that by standing at an embarrassing angle directly under the dryer with the waist raised up to an inch in length at the rectangular mouth of the hot air dryer. Beware! The hot air dryer is a felt appliance. You have to keep the wait up, keep it steady, without moving too much so that the damn thing keeps blowing hot air on your clothes. When done patiently, it can be very helpful to you if your pants are wet and you want them to blow dry (whatever that means!). Also, of course, you can follow it whenever you want to dry your wet hands. Caution: be careful when no one is in the bathroom, as you could scare someone with your act!
Jaadu Hai Tera Hi Jaadu
It continued to rain for just over an hour. Another hour of rain and the city roads will disappear! In fact, they could already have! Excellent! How nice! Instead of roads we will have long winding pools everywhere. That thoughtful!
Driving through the city becomes an adventure unto itself when it comes to riding through filthy knee-deep rainwater and your wheels ridiculously hitting hidden puddles. Although traffic was light on that day in September 1998, you don’t really have the benefit of not splashing the mud during monsoons, do you? Well, even that is welcome! Anything for the monsoons.
The monsoon season is one of the most anticipated seasonal changes of the year. Everyone greets him with resigned joy and amazement. One comes to experience a special kind of affinity for her brilliant fury: Mother Nature’s own, her generous grace. Monsoon rains make a big difference in the lives of all living things in this part of the world. It is a time of abundance: not only of abundant water, but also of expectations of good times for the sustenance of life that will come with the constant supply of water.
Somehow the sweet smell of rain seeped through the open windows that someone opened at the end of the great room, a few feet from where we were sitting. Revanthi Rakani was humming the newly released song from the Hindi movie Ghulam: “Jaadu hai tera hi jaadu, jo mere dil pe chaahne lagaa” and working on his computer. Working with Revanthi and Raufia Begum before they finally moved to the Satyam Technology Center in Badaourpaly was one of the best experiences of our lives.
That day I went home soaked with Monsoon showers everywhere, even my black wallet in my hip pocket was soaked and the bills inside broke. Sometimes, thanks to the monsoon rains, I like everything wet; in fact, I don’t care at all! I came home completely wet. I loved.
I love the rain, I love it.