Recollections in the Rains

It is the season of the ‘little girl’ here in Australia. La Nina (little girl for Spanish) has brought with it moody skies and broody days, a perennial hang of gray clouds giving an unusual sense of melancholy in summer. It is different to the empty blue skies, with a 40 degree dry heat that seduces Sydneysiders to the cool of the Pacific - isn’t that what summer is all about? But then, it is also a welcome difference to the orange, cinder filled skies of a bushfire summer that was last year. After a summer that scorched the nation from coast to coast, the ‘little girl’ seems to be a welcome break, pouring its healing waters to the ash burnt lands, and soothing the acrid burns that will take a long time to heal. The grey melancholia is then a little price to pay. For the summer-seekers that is. For those like me, though - pluviophiles - it is not anything new. We have seen it every year in our homelands, in an annual ritual called the monsoons. Steaming in the Indian summer, 40 degree days were not the exception, but the rule. And for a vast land whose lifeline is the monsoon rains, the grey clouds are no signs of sorrow - they are rather a harbinger of happiness, a reason to rejoice. And such is the euphoria of waking up to an evening nor’wester after a sultry summer day, that your genes are changed for good, programmed to elate at the first sight of the nimbus clouds. Irrespective of the lands you call home.

It is nearly noon here on a peak-summer, December day by the Parramatta river - any other day, you would have felt like plunging in the redeeming waters; but today, you gulp the hot coffee and wrap your windcheater tighter. There is a cold chill, and very soon, it is joined by a light drizzle - that kind of particular, slow-motion rain that makes you feel that time is coming to cease any moment. Others nearby rush to the nearest shade, but I welcome the rains, and feel it redeeming. Yes, the genes were altered years back in a different land. Today, I cannot help celebrate the pensive skies, whatever be the month. The slow motion rains are almost meditative, and I use the surreal surrounds - mangroves, mizzle and melancholy - to recollect the past - grand days in the rain. Of late, in these strange covid days, the best I could travel has been in the past, using the filters of the mind to sieve the best I can. I personally feel we do little justice to our memories, so rich with time, yet we don’t look back and ruminate with glee. I mean, you have spent so much time in the past, shouldn’t you look back more often and smile at those joyful days? I do, more often in these stay-indoor-and-what-do-you-mean-’travel’ days, and lovingly flip through the albums of the past, gleaning whatever suits my mood. I take another sip of my rich chocolate coffee, and smile. After all, today’s theme is ‘rain’....

I go back to Calcutta - the cradle of my nor’wester memories, that taught me, among many other lessons, the wisdom of enjoying the rains even in the hustle and bustle of a citylife. It is a hot July day, I have just finished my CAT tutorials and the skies have burst forth in torrents. Crazy work pressure, unending lessons and a steep ask to the toughest exam in the world in a few months; and the temporary solution - simple, just walk out in the downpour and wait for the deluge to dissolve your woes. And if that is not enough, just savour an ice-candy! Yes, ice-candy in the rains! I still remember the scene of madness: another crazy friend and I - drenched from head to foot, standing in the Gariahat crossroad, and sipping ice-candy in the rains. The usually bustling markets that overflow with people is empty - everyone has headed indoors or somehow fitted under the tarpaulin sheets to escape the rains, leaving us two bravehearts to hold the citadel of the showers. The city meanwhile whispers proudly, that you can find peace only in yourself, weather and surrounds are just a prop....

I flip the album and move a page forward…

I have cracked the CAT and am in Lucknow, spending two of the most exciting years of my student life, studying and attending lectures for countless hours, making new friends, spending sleepless nights in a row on assignments and projects, and somehow in the midst of all this frenzy, learning surreptitiously the art of balancing it all. And the setting - one green campus sprouting with trees, well kept gardens, frolicking with peafowls, deer and monitor lizards. That would be baked in the summer heat of north India, but come the rains, would force you to close your books, and come out in the rains, submit to it all, to listen to the sound of the pitter-patter on the large sal leaves like a Totoro, and feel enthralled by a strutting peacock nearby displaying its kaleidoscope of colours. I have lost count of the number of nights I have stayed awake, preparing my lessons, only to find dawn arriving with rains, to walk out and rejuvenate in the rains, and then come back, take a warm shower and head to class bereft of sleep, yet full of life and energy. Mother earth is a reservoir of energy, and those who can connect to her, sometimes in strange and uncommon means, realise that every moment can be a meditation ...

The noisy, rambunctious, post MBA, city life of Mumbai was a big change to the salubrious, green, campus life of Lucknow. Yet, with a network of like-minded friends, I learnt that life is all about finding opportunities, wherever you are, however you are. In Mumbai, that opportunity was finding monsoonal solace in the hills nearby, in the largest urban national park in the world, and sometimes, even in the rooftop garden of our highrise. If the weekdays were 12 hours of forced labour in a glitzy glass tower -occasionally distracted by the clouds wafting in the twentieth floor - the weekends were chasing the rains in the Sahyadris, rappelling on the waterfalls therein or even cycling in the rains in Borivilli National Park. Or just lying on the grass on the rooftop gardens and watching the rains descend like paratroopers out of an indigo sky… For the calcuttan in me, who always wanted to head back to my hometown, it was a big learning. That it was as unfair as it was unreasonable to compare two different alternates in life. What if I could have gone back to Calcutta? Would life have been better or worse? The questions were best left unanswered, for no matter the route, there would have been ups and downs in both, and in either path, one would have tried to scour the rough edges, tried to fit in, and most importantly make the most of what was important to him. I recollect hiking in the rains to the top of a Maratha fort, and despite the adrenaline filled hike, felt absolutely calmed at the top, as clouds and rains enveloped me on all sides. My initial angst against Mumbai in my early days there, showed me there was a different side to it all, that what really mattered was the opportunities that one could create, no matter the circumstance .... 

From rains in Mumbai, my mind flicks to rains on the white sands of Maldives - who said, it has to be sunny on the beach? One can lie in the shallow, transparent waters of a lagoon, watch the baby sharks swim by, and look to the horizon to see an approaching storm, then revel in the rains on an empty silicate beach, giving a completely different meaning to paradise in a tropical island…

From the tropical heat of Maldives, I go to the cold wintry harbour of Wellington. 8 pm, after work, in a city that sleeps early, there is not a soul in the harbour. Bring on the cold winds from Antarctica to the world’s windiest capital, throw in a cold downpour, and only a madman will stand in the rains. Yet there is peace to be found in that isolation, with perhaps, only an ice-candy missing…

My coffee is almost over. I need to head back home. There are many more pages to go through, I smile at the largesse of my memories, as much as I giggle at the brief joblessness of my Saturday morning. There’s Paris with its shivering September showers, the warm museums of L’orangerie and Pompidou welcoming me for more reasons than one; there’s the fascinating sleet of Liechtenstein in front of the king’s castle where I first experience a snowfall and get overwhelmed to see the mountain tops iced in white; there are the tea gardens of Munnar glistening in rain-washed freshness as clouds rise from the valleys below like fairy wisps on a crazy autumn morning. And then there’s an entire chapter on Sydney - skipping work to lie in the rains in its southern fringe at Watsons Bay, walking in the Blue Mountains after the rains to see its empty waterfalls come back to life, getting drenched on a pier in the heart of Jervis Bay to be rewarded with a rainbow for drizzle-day gallantry - or sometimes, just sitting idly by a river on a cloudy day, and watching the memories pass by, just like the river...

I look to the horizon filled with mangroves below and clouds above, but beyond those slaty-grey clouds, I can see the Sahyadris blessed with rains. On one such hilltop lie the decrepit ruins of a medieval fort. A pilgrim has just completed the walk to the top to see nothing in the cloud cover. Yet he sees everything in that moment of realisation - that what really matters is the opportunities that one can create, no matter what the circumstance ....

19th December’20

(Photos from personal archives)