from the parchment of rains...
I heard it rained in Mumbai last night.. write to me about the monsoons? I want to read your words slowly to absolve myself of the pain of the arid pollution addled, dusty, raspy summer here.. write a postcard about how the rains last night washed the leaves of the tree near your house.. write to me about the streetside dog's lament.. the wistful blooming of frangipanis, please tell me how the washed down leaves on the road feel about being stepped on.. when you step outside your one room set, and stride on the road, gallantly marking observations from under the polite frame of your ainak, will you touch the trunk of the first tree you come across, and share with me the secrets it whispers to you?
Were you sleeping last night during the rain? It is Eid today, is that a co-incidence? Are you going to enjoy the aroma of the after-rain perfume that allah has sprinkled all over your city with some biryani or upma or perhaps a dosa from the dabba-wallah near your place? How will your coffee happen today? Is the French-press still broken? How about you buy a sachet of Re.1 Nescafe and wash it down with some hot water? What book do you plan on reading? Will you write to me on paper, using a forlorn pencil you'd stuck inside the Patti Smith book i had sent you last year? How will you describe the smell of the rains without using that word they have come up with these days? Will you fill up an empty page with words on the rains that may or may not make sense? Will you go for a walk today, surrendering yourself to the cacophony of the city embracing another night of showers..?
You see, Kay, I come from an arid part of the country, not the deserts, silly, not at all. But a place of the loo winds. There we have rains for a suspended slow week, in the 365 long nights of one year. The rains follow a dust storm, which is now a monster. On my train ride from home, earlier this week, on all of 440 kilometres, I saw a paleness through the window. Like a body giving in to its decay, slowly.. allowing a disease to take over it, submitting to erasure in a painful way.
The city I keep a job in, Kay, it's people are raspy, bitter and ready to snap. They see beauty but fail to appreciate the everyday. The city was not like this when I was a visitor to it till a few years ago. I had told my mother once 'this city has enticed me, I'm gonna come back'. The people, the greens, the gardens, the parks, the ice creams, the promise of warmth—all of these seem to have been evaporated, or should I say sedimented? Slow erosion of the happinesses, and a slower transition to a city full of wrath and shoves.
Or maybe my lens changed. From being a visitor, I'm now a city-dweller, an active part-taker in the everyday calamities, a passive citizen of the encumbered invisible spaces. Anyway, it does not rain here as well Kay, just like my hometown. The dust storms showed hope till last year, but this year they have been wrathfully coarse too, more scary than promise-worthy.
I want to wake up and feel the wetness of the earth under my feet, I want to experience drops of rainwater on my closed eyes, I want to be able to drink my cuppa without sweating even a bead, touch the leaves of the plants in the porch of my house here, smile to myself when the smell of rain accidentally balms my senses. Emboldened by the shower, I want to fry the chips I brought with me from home.
Dear Kay, write to me about the rains that washed your city last night and I will do some vicarious loving and living.
The sweat on my neck is laced with the smell of missing monsoons from my life. The monsoons of Kerala, the monsoons of Maharashtra, of small erasury places, like the skin above my upper lip, the behind of my ears, the back of my knees. I want to feel a coolness available exclusively in the terrains of your monsoon, like the low-key cool of the flute on a somber March morning, write to me about the rains, will you? Write to me so I am able to erase the parchment off the small of my back and the behind of my tongue, write to me in the language of casual small glances, in the language of careless words filled with keen observations and uncanny sounds, write to me in the language of the bristly cool breeze that your city experiences in the July evenings, write to me in the anthropocene, collect the syllables of rains while I listen to a Hemant Kumar song in the vapid, ruthless dreaded June afternoon, I shall wait...
~ a parched hummer of Alaipayuthey songs
Sent from my iPhone