#Scurf125: On being fooled by Delhi's monsoons
On trying to find false friends in the Capital's frail sprinkles
This April I completed half a decade living in Delhi. It felt momentous, even worth a minor celebration. But Delhi doesn’t give you a chance to do that. April 17 was the anniversary when in 2017 I’d arrived to the city to a friend’s place for a new job assignment. It was a cloudy, pleasant day that we spent indoors, sulking about meagre pay drinking KF premier. This year’s on April 17 the city felt ablaze. The heatwave had come in early, by the end of March and by the second half of April we felt like everything around was on fire.
So in July when the rains came in it felt like a reason to solemnise. And when I say rains in Delhi what I’m really saying is drizzles, scattered here and there, spread out. It comes in spits and bursts, few bouts, and that too, far in between. A rehashed version of its former self. A ghost, a wraith, I could go on.
In this half a decade of living {and loving (lol)} in Delhi I have always lived near giant trees and massive parks. My first lodge at the friend’s place was surrounded by sparse greens, but from then on whenever I rented a place I ensured that my windows looked out to trees, leaves, even shrubs.
I believe that being able to just see trees from my windows calms me. And by extension during rains I would only see shades of green for as far as my vision stretched. The city as a discourse, besmirched in its fullness during rains. Everything looking full, potent. The trees during rains would mirror the feelings of my heart, creating mirages, false friends. A fullness the heart always ached for. A fullness that Delhi was perhaps never capable of.
I was born and brought up in these nether areas of north India and hence have been a succour for all things rain. Why you might ask? I think it’s purely because I was born to sheer deficit of it. The absence of rains in my life and their overt presence in the movies, songs, literature I consumed underlined their truancy even more. I loved how in movies rains would appear out of nowhere, often connoting a mood — be it a longing, a dull ache or a kind of hitherto unknown happiness — in a character’s life.
I, too, wanted those and they quickly became the exact expectations I brought with me to Delhi, in 2017. I had lived in the city before, and had practically grown up here in the nineties and early oughts. And somehow most of my memories from the capital have been about me being caught in the rains or running to catch an auto from the Janpath Market in the rains or waiting as my cousin played an impromptu football match in the DDA park just because it was raining.
Rains in Delhi during my childhood had meant a reprieve, a solace, a safety. They accentuated the fact that I was away from home but not actually on holiday and yet enjoying a new, different season. They meant relief from all the things that were going on at home, a kind of a mini-vacation while still being in the midst of it all.
This cache of expectations traveled with me everywhere I went and experienced rains. People in my life — friends, boyfriends, near boyfriends — knew how profusely I loved the season and would tease me about it, making me blush. Rains were, in fact, a kind of first love. A moderate consolation I didn’t know I was forging for myself far from the looming din of my inner world.
Today as I recount all these things while a silent mizzle falls outside my drawing room balcony, I remember experiencing profuse joy at the first sight, smell or even sound of rains. Experiencing them in Delhi meant I was able to witness some moments of unselfconscious joy. Back then people would stampede into their balconies, garden terraces or barsatis — making an uninhibited exhibition of their enjoyment. As my cousins and I would dance on the patio, we’d see other kids (sometimes with elders) do the same on theirs.
One such 2013 sunset lingers in my memory.
On a balmy August evening when it started pouring my cousin and her friend climbed up the duplex’s stairs to dance it off in the cascading showers. After half an hour of tiresome rains when the skies were still unrelenting, their dance picked up pace and before we knew it, the friend slipped and broke her ankle. That was the extent to which we could go to fully embrace the rains in this devilled part of the country.
We would wait for 7pm June evenings when the first of the two Rain Dance Parties would be held at the neighbouring Jahanpanah Club. Complimentary vodka martinis, extremely cute (and hairy) punjabi boys and Dil Le Gayi Kudi Gujarat Di would pack our nights with multiple emotions. The packed dance floor would be oh-so-slippery we’d have to shake off our flip-flops, breaking or losing them amid peak dancing frenzy. Dance we did — on (OG) bangers from Nikkamma Kiya to Dil Lutiya — but I also remember much happening in the moments in between. We’d be so busy, sneaking in Chicken tikkas and forgotten vodkas in tall, boring tumblers so elder’s in the vicinity could catch us. We’d relish silently stealing flushed glances at hot boys in sticky tank tops. The humidity of those moments still sparks me up on a dry summer noon.
Now, I know Delhi to be a desert. For the last two or maybe three weeks it drizzles almost every other day, exactly around sunset. The kind of rains we’d read in textbooks about desert regions. The drizzles are so curt, even obnoxious, in their timing and duration they send people back home. They end up locking themselves indoors, turning the ACs on earlier than before.
And yet I continue to fall for these rains. Like a weakling I keep giving in to their lure, despite having been cheated by numerous false alarms. Early mornings if there is even the slightest hint of rains in the air, my body automatically jolts out of bed. I sit with a cup of white tea, eyes peeled on the outdoors for when the first drops will hit the garden behind my bedroom. A wraith like beauty, these rains seem to be confiding in me that they, too, are tired. Like the parched people in north India, these rains, too, do not know now for how long they can continue this way.
I slow the speed of my room’s fan, tempting, even preempting, the rains to gather momentum, go against the inertia and power through for at least a packed thirty minutes. But nothing happens. Instead, my husband walks into the room and teases me that these cheap tricks to make the rains last longer will not work. This summer my senses are dry, whittled down version of themselves, so I won’t pay heed to anything. I will take anything it takes to make the rain pound, be it mental games or physical.
And we in Delhi really, strongly need these rains. We need them to assuage our calloused senses, our parched beings, our angered, edgy, sharpened tongues.
Truly no one in Delhi can resist a good, meaty fall of rain. For it promises intimate revelations—the assurance that there is life beyond this dryness which we can then turn into literature in the form of notes, instagram posts, hashtags, tweets, poems and the one far out essay.
And it is us Delhiites who don’t always find these rains and thus know how to best preserve them when we do. Alongside the contours of our daily lives, the rains are almost always trite, underwhelming in the face of life’s texture. But each time it rains in Delhi it is unique; each bout representing a specific set of circumstances met by this specific outburst of rains. It makes life pleasant, if only for those handful of moments. But I know that like me there are hundreds of others, who savour these pocketfuls of drizzles, stitching them together like a quilt of precious memories, only to never be lost again.
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