Monsoon hits Mumbai

Hey folks, its the wet time again. Time to get rid of inhibitions and get the cleansing of the spirit that a bathroom can’t manage. Time to head out in the rain, feel it drenching the world around, go to some roadside tapri and have tea in small glasses and hot pakodas – its a tradition.

A tradition that takes me straight back to my childhood, where my family had this firm belief that getting wet in the first monsoon of the year is good for health and gets rid of prickly heat and other nasties. Don’t know about the prickly heat, but the sheer enjoyment of doing it probably adds a few years to my life.

I remember this time, before schools began, buying new school books, uniforms, preparing for the coming year, enjoying the last of the summer holidays…… and the rain. The mood changed to celebration. Of families heading out of their homes to drench themselves, of paper boats, the grandmother waiting with a towel and hot cocoa…….

Those days may be gone. The friends are grown up and scattered, the grandmother is dead (I miss her), families are more reserved about kids running around muddy if they can prevent it…… but the passion that rises in my blood with the energy of the monsoon endures….

Just realized how many kid songs in Marathi are devoted to rain. I think every child grows up loving rain (at least when I grew up). Popular belief thinks its cleansing and most parents send their kids out easily, though not every time. And of course, temperatures are such, that most of the time, no one falls ill unless its cold from raining for days, we’re just wet and happy and drying off harmlessly.

One particular song is one I’m humming everyday these days.

It is of a child cajoling his mom to let him out to play in the rain….. “just once, let me get wet and drenched through…..” flock of ducks, frogs…. let me chase them through the rain……. find a drip to stand another and splash water with my feet….. let me get a cough, cold or fever…. just let me go to get wet in the rain.

Brings alive every nerve in me with the remembered joy of doing exactly that. That soul deep thirst to see rain outside the window and want to be IN it, getting drenched. That wonderful wet feeling, dripping, scent of wet earth….. friends, fun, splashing, carefree….. the essence of childhood for me.

This song is so incredibly alively sensual for me, and what hit me, is sensuality is so often in an adult context – gender related, enjoyment related, or plain discovered as an adult. Yet, it is something alive in us at our most innocent.