How to grow mushrooms on your skin!

When it rains in Mumbai…it changes.

The whole house smells…of wet socks… or floaters that have walked under water for hours.

When I shut the windows, the wind bellows menacingly and everything reeks of the same musty smell. Everything seems to grow moist mushrooms. If you take a long nap, you will wake up scratching yourself. The same fungus grows on living, breathing things as well. Run a finger over any thing and I really doubt my sense of touch. Is it wet, is it not? Is it just cold? Want to squeeze this palpable wet-ness out of everything. Blow-dry the house.

If I open the windows, flies, moths and mosquitoes take refuge from the outside. They sit on bare arms, tickle the back of knees and appear suddenly when a wet towel is taken off the hook. The authorities turn of the electricity supply, fearing electrocution in water-logged areas. At eight am, the sky looks like it should at eight pm. All three meals of the day are candlelight dinners.

The clothes don’t dry. The flutter madly in the wind and with moist sulk, await a good dose of sunlight. Like all else.

In the building complex, only one end of the bright yellow see-saw is pokes put of the water like an incomplete example for the Pythagoras theorem.

The blue or black plastic roofs of thatched slums slide dangerously off their structures. They reveal all manner of things stored under them- utensils, brooms, polythene bags, deflated tyre tubes. Floating living-rooms of the lesser fortunate.

Chocolate colored water floods the streets. People wade through it, heads covered in plastic sheets, holding upturned umbrellas. As if they know that soon the drinking water will vanish as well and they must collect all they can in their umbrella-bowls.Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink...

They walk gingerly, and fall when they step into an open manhole or a pit on the road. Disowned shoes and slippers float beside them. Stray dogs run for cover in the stairways of buildings.   man below wades through knee-deep water to reach his motorcycle, which stands half-submerged. He feels for the stand with his foot, and tries to move it. With much effort; the bike is parked on the road divider. A woman desperately tries to start her car. The fumes from the exhaust release bubbles, like under-water farts. Other cars look like useless toys, abandoned by their owners, parked in a zig-zag, in the brown lake. When a giant truck manages to move through the flooded street, the giant wave it creates dislocates these anchorless cars.

Cell-phone networks go down. Relatives in other cities worry as they catch images of the cosmopolitan drowned, of trains that stop running, of people stranded at the airport, of wet and harrowed piece-to-cameras. Tsk, tsk, they say when they call to check if all is well. If they are lucky, they get through.

But in the rain, even though the incessant pitter-patter cannot shatter the silence, a few still frolic. Out they come with hockey sticks and footballs. A man swims in the street, teaching his kid the back stroke in the three feet deep water. (I took a picture for my mother, so she would believe me).

In one clean sweep, in one day, nature reduces all we boast off to a junk-like reef. Communication fails. Residents of the city enter a pre-modern era with quite understanding. Happens every year .There will be angry letters in the papers the following day, by eminent personalities, threatening to not pay taxes to the government which ‘does nothing’. The common man will scoff at the Shanghai ambition. But many will acquiescence.  May be this happens because the drains can’t keep pace with the number of people who feed their waste to them. May be it’s because of too many cars, and the A.C.s in them. May be the mangroves shouldn’t be chopped of for that golf-course in prime land. May be it’s because of the sea. May be…

When the low-tide arrives, the water recedes. The pavement can now be seen. In a few hours the electricity will illuminate the sky. And Marine Drive will look like New York again, (in the night).

All is well.

(* Had blogged this piece when I first moved from the plains of Delhi to the island city and confronted the monstrosity of the monsoon. Now, I love the rain, regardless. )