Junetenth

I hated June. Primarily because it heralded the start of yet another laborious, benighted, sodden academic year. In India the academic year for all levels of education (such as it is) starts around the 10^th of June. This dystopian situation is compounded in Bombay by the onset of the monsoon season, with its grey skies, flooded rail tracks and damp, garbage strewn roads. I wasn’t particularly enthused by education at that time, and I am sure the feeling was mutual.

Bombay in my growing up years wasn’t a pleasing place at any time of the year, but the monsoon made it particularly noisome, fit for neither man nor beast (the average Bombayite falls into neither category, so he is totally fit for purpose.) As a student I was in an intermediary stage of evolution and my pleas to avoid school during this season, for fear of potential damage to my nascent psychological well-being, were fobbed off with earnest exhortations of how education was important to Get Ahead in Life!

I particularly disliked this period of the year due to the necessity of walking to school with a bag full of books – I abhor all forms of physical exertion except turning the pages of a book or raising a glass or fork to my mouth. My school was about 3 miles from home and the parent body felt the exercise would build a growing body and mind. Umbrellas of course were not an option to keep both boy and books safe and dry. The raincoats then in popular use barely reached one’s ankles and made the wearer look like a sherpa with a secret sorrow.  With the dampness seeping in through rubber shoes and making the socks wet, said boy was miserable, to put it mildly.

College years didn’t change my point of view of Junetenth, at least in Bombay. However, opportunities for travel began to show themselves and I discovered the joys of traipsing through boroughs and vales, hills and plains away from Bombay. The new-found liberty of parking oneself in a restaurant overlooking a verdant vista on a side road to somewhere and titillating the taste buds with tea and fried foods (apparently a Thing in the monsoon) helped reduce the mordant dislike that I used to feel for Junetenth.

Coming to man’s estate I found myself in Paris one grey September day, set to

rise further in the realms of academe. It was fall, it was raining that day, and it was raining heavily. But to my utter surprise, I found myself standing in the rain on the street outside the métro station and absorbing the genteel, delicate drops falling on my upturned face. The air felt fresh and clean, the roads were glistening like the lips of a beautiful woman drinking wine and the sheer profusion of colourful rainwear lifted my spirits no end. Of course, my spectacles misted up and I caught the death of a cold after that and was laid up for almost a week with fever and the shivers. But the realisation dawned on me that Junetenth was no more a problem!

The academic season in this developed and beautiful country starts in September, when the weather is fit for spoils and strategems of love, good wine and long walks (as Shakespeare would have said if he had lived in Paris as a student.)

I now look upon rain as a partner in fun and an affirmation that life is not just a four-letter word!

Hate, Love, Rain

I hated rain. 

During my growth years, the onset of the “monsoon season” in India equalled the start of the academic year. Those were dark, grey days, literally and otherwise. I did not like school. Not one bit. The education dished out was not meant for me. The soul was burdened with the weight of woe and the school bag. Umbrellas were a luxury and the raincoats were designed for Cindrella's dwarves rather than a chunky, fast growing lad. My school took “mass education” literally – 5,000 brats hummering away made it difficult to stand out in class and recognised as a budding genius. Unless you sat on the first bench and kept raising your hand all the time. All in all the combination of rain and a curriculum designed to turn the student into a drivelling, gibbering snorter made me wonder if Nietzsche actually had a point. 

The manic tremolo of raindrops on the awning over our windows at home is a sound I will never forget. It disturbed my sleep, my meals, my studies (such as they were) and was a background VFX that I can do without today.

Moving to man’s estate I finally got the chance to experience rain as a gift from the gods and not as a dam(p) nuisance. My love affair with rain was kindled in Paris, where the autumn rain helped me effortlessly dish out maudlin musings and robust food and wine pairings. London was wet through and through but the vision of huge Union Jack umbrellas, beers and scotch eggs in a cosy tavern just north of Swiss Cottage, vast swathes of rolling green fields glistening in the rain and hot tea in a village called Little Slaughter with lightning and thunder for company as the world stood still are some of my best memories of the city and the country. And West Africa is a byword for rain of course – it probably needs a separate post!

Unlike Paris and London and to an extent Amsterdam, Mumbai in the rain is not the best of places to be out of home in. The mud, the smells, the overflowing drains and on select days the tide in the affairs of (Mumbai) man, which when taken at the flood, leads to your shoes and trousers (and more) getting damaged beyond repair! Not to mention water-borne illnesses! Do not for a moment get trapped by lurid descriptions of roasted corn / spicy snacks / hot tea outside in the rain. These are mere projections of a weak mind.

The infamous Mumbai floods of 2005 convinced me it was time to move to a place where “rain” is chimeric – heard of in song and lore perhaps but rarely seen. Dubai happened fortuitously but with my usual impeccable sense of timing I landed there on its Annual Rain Day - when I believe the camels are decked up and let loose to frolic in the drops of rain while the natives roll up the windows of their Rollses – and was stuck at the airport for 3 hours.

However in the decade and a half since I have basked in sunshine through the year, with the memories of grey monsoons during school days like an old wadi in the desert - lifeless and dry. How I now crave for a flood to fill up that wadi! (for a glimpse of dubai in the rain check out my 1st ever blog post: dubai rain

I love rain. I am at my happiest when indoors with a cup of the steaming and a good thick novel (no Bookers please) at hand, while the heavens above open up. There is something about the sound of rain, pelting down on rooftops, tippering on leaves, that makes me sigh with a sense of what could have been, of unfulfilled desires and wishes (unkind folk who suggest that the sigh is really a wheeze are wet behind the ears). The occasional lightning and thunder are value additions which uplift the soul. And sometimes scare the beejezus out of me due to volume and intensity.

At these times, I like to think that the Guv’nor is up and about with a wee dram, about to tell me one of his lawyer stories.

And I am sure he would agree with the revered sage Baxicius’ advice on how to handle rain: Better to be wet inside and dry outside.