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.
