Rain Rain, Come Again?
|By Sanika Ghag|
What do monsoons bring to you? Like a sense of relief to a farmer whose land has been quenched of its thirst or a kid who has just drenched himself with joy and admiration in the first pour of the season or the nature that has just absorbed itself in a blanket of viridity. To thousands of people that just experienced a whoosh of monsoon after the dreadful heat that dried their soul, it definitely felt like life was breathed back into them.
A great writer once said, “People wouldn’t appreciate the sunshine without facing some rainy days.” But what happens when rain brings distress and discordance in your life? As Mumbai faces warnings against an impending cyclone in the Arabian Sea, here’s what the city has experienced over its wetting days. Mumbai has one of the largest amounts of rainfall that sometimes can range up to a 300m or more. This has caused the ‘City of Dreams’ to flood several times and partially turn into the ‘Lost City of Atlantis’. In 2005, which recorded the highest rainfall across Mumbai, the city estimated and recorded as close as 1000 deaths and more than 500 people lost their homes to the treacherous floods. Flood water managed to enter buildings that rose to a height of three-storey and the whole city was under shackles of mud, dirt, grief and wallowing. And let’s not forget that Mumbai also houses the greatest number of slums in any country. The largest, in fact, make Mumbai it’s home.
With that in mind, imagine this. The rain has held you by its beauty and capability to take the city by joy. But just as you feel a sense of relief wash over yourself (literally and figuratively), you feel wetness pool by your feet. Just as you’re looking down, a drop falls by your head. You look up at the ceiling and another drop falls on your nose. That’s when you actually realise that monsoon has truly seeped in and not just in your city, but in your house as well. You rush to the washroom to get an empty bucket to place it under the leaking ceiling and another bucket to try and throw out some of the water that has recently penetrated in your house. The monsoon intensifies and half of your house is a floating mess. The mattresses are wet, the walls have cracks, the ceiling is still leaking, there are algae growing around the house, mites have made your furniture their homes and every time you step home you feel like stepping inside a swimming pool.
And if this imagination itself was enough to gross you out, that’s the feeling every slum-dwelling person has in Mumbai. That’s pretty much half the life of a Mumbaikar. The amount of joy rains brings is overcompensated by the amount of dissonance it causes. Every year thousands of people living in Mumbai have to shift their houses because of the rain, millions have to spend time, effort and money into renovating their houses by the damage caused, and another few of them have lost their loved ones in incidents like an open manhole or a sorry infrastructure. One would not be wrong to think that despite the joy rains bring, Mumbai would hate this season.
Every year when Monsoons arrive in Mumbai there are thousands of people at the Marine Drive that want to take that splash of the ginormous wave that hits the shore, thousands plan a long drive to the nearest hill station and many others seemingly stand in the rain to simply enjoy the feeling of it. Every year when the first monsoon shower hits Mumbai, radios blast with praises of the weather, television sets have a blaring warning of a possible hurricane and the internet is filled with tweets from people about their first experience in the shower. Maybe it’s the over romanticising of monsoons in Bollywood films, the thought of your first kiss in the rains or dancing with your partner in the rain or maybe, just maybe it’s a flashback to your childhood days of “worry less, enjoy more” and the thought of chasing a paper boat drown a gutter or maybe it’s the fact the rains provider a breather in the fast spaced struggle-some life of a Mumbaikar.
So, when the Mumbai Monsoon hit and the trains slow down or the roads fall open or all hell breaks loose on the city, it gives Mumbaikars the opportunity to come together as a city. To develop together as a city. To take a breath and see what’s going around us. To stand across the CST station and watch the moving traffic. To sit in a local train and hear aunties complain about the train schedule and their lives. To realise what we missed and to carry it forward. Monsoons bring nostalgia and hope and reverence and belief. That no matter what, the gloomy days will pass and the sunshine will peek through.
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