The Rains

Did I ever tell y'all that one of my pet peeves is about the use of the term "monsoon season"? The word monsoon is derived from "mausam" which means season so it's as redundant to talk of the "monsoon season" as it is to order a "pizza pie." Pedantic rant over for the day.

In Mysore, the tail end of the monsoon falls between Dasara, (last weekend) and Diwali (early Novemeber) but this year, its seems to be determined to go out with lots of bangs. I suppose I should say that technically, it's the tail end of the Retreating Monsoon. The more important monsoon rains -- often called the Advancing or Summer Monsoons -- occur between June and September, when there are days of torrential rainfall. By May, the land is parched and cracking; there's nothing green left on the ground and you breathe in lungfulls of dirt every time you inhale. When the rains hit Kerala (they come up the Indian coastline), there's a giant sigh of relief -- farmer and city-dweller alike is thrilled because the coming of the rain means the end of months of heat and dust, temper tantrums and water shortages. But by the time the monsoon clouds have made it up the Indian coasts and then begin to "retreat" back, everyone is tired of the rain. Where once the parched earth gulped down the moisture almost before it hit the ground, by October, there are dismal puddles everywhere. The streets never seem to be completely dry; everywhere there is the smell of wet newspaper and mold begins to creep insidiously across your clothes if you are foolhardy enough to think of drying them on clotheslines.

But I have to admit to a special fondness for the rains, with apologies to all the soggy schoolchildren I see squelching their way home after school everyday: I like the lower temperatures the rains bring, and I rather enjoy the smell of mud. I don't even mind that at least in Mysore, the Retreating Monsoon rains generally start in mid-afternoon and continue into the evening, those prime hours for running errands and visiting! It reminds me of the days when I was happiest grubbing about in piles of red mud, building cities, villages, bridges and embankments on my grandfather's farm while the adults went about adult business and ignored me. And this time around, I'm grateful that the Dasara Procession wasn't washed out by them.

I also like the look of monsoon clouds, be they Advancing or Retreating ones. Remember the opening scenes of Lagaan, where the villagers watch the rain-swollen rain clouds gather and then tragically blow away? Well, I'd never understood the pathos of that -- the shadows the black clouds cast are a potent marker of how near salvation lies and yet how far it really is -- until I came to India before the onset of the Summer Monsoon one year. And truly, monsoon clouds look just like they do in the film: they loom over the landscape, looking as though they're barely skimming the rooftops. They're black and grey and silver; and I've always thought that if you touched them, you'd find that they're as dense as bread-dough and that if you tasted them, they'd taste like rain-water flavoured cotton candy that's slightly burnt at the edges from the lightening within.

I've had two drenchings in the rains since I've been here and I'll admit to enjoying them. After the year in Halifax, when I felt as though I could never warm my bones up after even a mild soaking from a measly drizzle, there's something wonderful about being drenched in warm water that simply pours down. Lovely!