A Short Report on Weather
13/05/26
8:52 PM
The weather has become unpredictable. It was blazing hot in the afternoon but moments ago there was a thunderstorm and 5 minute rain that has left my clothes on the terrace in disarray and the roads drenched in a shiny liquid. The rickshaw scoots over the road and its tiny tires leave a slurpy sound; and so does the scooter that comes after it but not that bike on its side since it is much slower or maybe its tires are fresh.
Walking on the road, my body feels the chill in the air that has suddenly taken hold of the environment as if it was always there. But I know that it was not the case. Only half an hour ago this street and my room had a warmth that was hardly bearable. The cool air and my muddy slippers have transferred me to monsoon. The feeling is so intense that I start listening to a KK song that I only listen during monsoons. A group of six friends passes on the other side of the road. They are walking in pairs of two; the person on the right extending his arm over the other friend’s left shoulder. The first pair is not following this rule.
Most likely that earlier heat will return by morning and my sense of weather would be restored to summer; or at least that has been the pattern for the last few days - scorching heat in the morning, a windstorm or rain by night, summer again in the morning when you wake up. The resulting disarray has become commonplace in life. In Delhi, my days belong to the summer of May and by evening I have arrived in the receding monsoon of September. The sense of weather has been disturbed. There is frequent rain in summer & the cold days during winter are discontinuous. And monsoon? Is that even a season now?
It has been years since I experienced consistent monsoons. Ukai, where I come from, used to have such incessant rains that for days and weeks the only view from the door of my house would be of the fast dripping rain water from our tin roof. (Musaladhar Barish, a phrase I often heard on TV, would be the right one to describe those rains.) For weeks the makeshift gutters outside our houses would be overflowing with liquid that looked like the Milo chocolate milkshake that I saw in advertisements.
Every time I saw those overflowing gutters while going to or returning from school, I would have the strong desire to taste a mouthful or, even better, drown myself in it so that I could have endless sips of Milo milkshake. But now that monsoon season is nowhere to be found, nor those gutters of never ending shake.
Reminds me of Doon, good dilli