monsoon too soon

It’s raining. It’s pouring. Somewhere, some old man must be snoring.

It’s the thirty first of May and it’s already here. The days of monsoon have arrived. It’s wet and it’s cold. The roads are slippery with water and mud. Cars speed past you raising a wave of brown water on your newly ironed clothes. No matter what shoes you wear, your toes inevitably get pruned.

The day starts out sunny, so you decide not to take your umbrella. And then it rains. And suddenly you find yourself huddled under a tin roof with some other souls who had the same thought as you. And the rain doesn’t relent. The heavy drops amplified, as they lash down on the tin roof.

You wash your hair everyday because if you don’t it gets that stale wet smell that is disgusting. Your clothes get soaked through to your underwear and if you don’t have a change you might be at risk of catching a rare pelvic cold.

It’s humid. It’s sweaty. Trains are filled with partially wet passengers, all breathing the same stale air, because all the windows are tightly closed for fear that the rain water lashing in will wet them further. You become so obsessed with not getting wet, you find anything remotely wet annoying.

You hate getting out of the house, but you have to go to work. The traffic is killing because three cars in front of you, someone has driven into an open ditch and can’t move. You see people on the street with plastic bags on their heads. Everyone in your office has a nasty cold.

The street vendors wash their used dishes with rainwater collected in an old dirty green bucket. And even though you know this, you still cannot resist the urge to have a nice warm chai or a wada pav. Or a plate full of hot onion bhajyas.

Everything is flooded over. Street drains overflow because they are clogged with leaves. A municipal worker wears a bright sunny yellow hooded raincoat and tries his best to unclog them. Frogs look like moving pebbles on the street. Toads croak all night.

The sound of rain makes you want to pee. Looking at the rain makes you want to sing love songs. Taking a walk in the rain takes you back to when you were nine and you picked tadpoles from the far corner of the school field. The drops on your face make you think back to the first time you were kissed in the rain. Then you try to sing Diana Ross’ ‘Kiss me in the rain’, but your voice is gone from the cold that that colleague gave you. So you stop singing and daydream instead. About a warm bed, hot chocolate and a nice comfy someone to hug when the wet wind blows through the sheer curtains.

But inevitably there is no one you can hug. So you get a really fluffy warm blanket and wrap yourself five times in it, and like some kind of giant pupae you wait. You fall asleep, the chill clean air has that unmatched smell of fresh, wet mud – deep breath. And another.

And another.

And then you wake up, and it’s a monsoon day all over again.