.jpg) In the Valmiki Ramayana, Rama is in Kishkindha, waiting for the rains to end so that he can begin the search for his beloved Sita. He says to Laksmana, “You feel as if you could climb to the sky on this ladder of clouds and place a garland of flowers around the sun… the sky, struck with lightning’s golden whip, cries out in pain in a rumble of thunder… cranes are drawn to the clouds by desire and fly around them in formation, like a garland of white lotuses that streams in the wind across the sky.” Whatever the intensity of his pain, Rama is able to express his wonder and relief at the arrival of the monsoon in words of extreme beauty. “The dust has settled, the breezes have cooled, the discomforts of summer have passed,” he adds.
For centuries, the most poignant and exquisite works of Indian literature and painting have depicted the monsoon – the lowering dark grey skies, the denser greens and deeper reds of the flowers, the harsh cry of the peacock that sounds sweeter in the rain. Part of the reason for Rama’s anguish at this point in his tragic story is that the monsoon was, traditionally, the month of union and reunion. “Kings have stopped their expeditions and all the travellers have returned home,” says Rama wistfully. The rivers were in spate, roads were closed and all work had stopped. Soldiers, sailors, farmers, traders and all kinds of itinerants came home to their wives and children during the rains. And so the monsoon is also a sringara masa, a month of love.
Although it is the twenty-first century, we all know what it feels like for the stifling months of the summer to end and to smell for the first time (even in our benighted cities) the musk of the wet earth. But I’m not feeling the pangs of love – in union or in separation. Rains in the city, our city in particular, are about drenched commuters and grouchy beloveds, frustrated traffic jams, angrily flooded streets and more random power cuts. In my own tiny and very sheltered (from all storms) life, it means that the street dogs we feed will sneak in to the stairwell, sheepish tails between their legs, assuming that precarious doggy invisibility that is always defeated by wet-dog smell. It means that the local mouse, whom we do not feed (intentionally), will find his way into our apartment through an open window and burrow among the mattresses on the floor, only to be discovered months later when he has become the patriarch of a thriving clan. It means that I will run in and out all day long, chasing clouds that may choose to spontaneously relieve themselves on my clothes drying on the line and which leads, inevitably, to furniture festooned with garments that are not usually in the public eye.
The rainy weekend on which I write this has had very little of the discomfort of being out in the city but it has amply rewarded my petty anxieties. The smelly dogs have snuck in, I feel sure the mouse is about, and the furniture has acquired new and interesting dimensions. But I have also seen lightning’s golden whip and I have heard the sky cry as her “tears roll down the street.” I have wanted to climb the ladder of clouds and garland the sun. I have inhaled the still sweet fragrance of the tired earth and I have held my breath as the gulmohur pulsates more darkly against the sky. My ears have been tuned to the shy splutter of raindrops on the plants that dance in my balcony. And I have stayed in bed with Valmiki and wished that some one would bring me chai and pakodas. Arshia Sattar
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