Monday Musings -42

I must have been morose in June, I now know why. I must have missed the smell of rain, hot and hurried upon dusty earth. I must have missed the nag, the buzz, little black flies. And, I must have yearned the familiar joy come plummeting down, the first Bombay rain. Twenty-two years, not a whiff missed. Now, a whole season gone.

Chai hurriedly gulped down, outside offices and under trees. Jalebis gobbled up, and pakodas, and butta and walking into office drenched. Tell me you got caught in a storm? And, it ruined for you, an interview, and a meeting, and pretty clothes, and yellow-and-blue school uniforms. And, still you embraced it?

Then, you left behind umbrellas in trains, borrowed rain coats never to return them, splashed hapless by-standers, knowingly and unknowingly. Then, got drenched in mud and rain too.

Did you ever hang by the train door, the rain lashing your face? Did you stick your nose up at a flood, wade through one too, and smile as you watched others from your window?

You must have called in sick too, curled up with a book or to a movie, or by the window and dreamed a day away.

A day like yesterday, when the rain finally set off in Gurgaon. This rain is unfamiliar to me, the smell sweeter still. I do not know how many days it will turn, and hearts it will soar…the North seems to look upon the rain with such snobbery.

But me, it takes me back home. So I sit in my balcony, and think, what a life this is. Familiar turns far-away, what once was…no longer is. To think you could know something so well, for so long, and then not have it at all.

Have you ever wondered, and while you now do, the rain still sings to me this Monday.