Pop de mumble!

You feel like your walking on silvery cold fish bellies. Everything is wet. Nothing dries. Your nose sprouts a leak. And that’s when you know the monsoon is in for good. Well, Joni Mitchell said, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. A burst through the gray, a week yellow pallor spots your yard and out you go to bask in it, turning every inch of your face and body as though under a blocked sprinkler choking water out in spurts. Just as the imagined meager warmth filters through you epidermis, plop! You go colour blind again…the gray belly delivers ferocious lil gray monsters.

The monsoon’s were fun you know. When pollution was yet to be a concern, before we found out about acid rain, before the roads were raised and all the piddles of men and dogs swirled around in some catalystic formula of liquid manure and stagnated around the bushes in the garden; before our moms got wind of all the dengue, malaria, cholera and family and kept us indoors and stunted our immune powers for good. We’re old before our times and we ain’t going at it gracefully ;-) Really, with absolutely nothing to do when you’re marooned on an island (thank god for raised foundations!) and perpetual power cuts and swatting yourself silly and turning yourself into a polka dotted canvas of dead squashed mosquitoes, you just gotta look around. Well, it certainly is the greenhouse effect! Literally…man you’ve seen so many shades of green before; all the emerald glistening with dew, rustling in the breeze, sprinkling you with fresh oxygenated water? The traffic’s on a low. Not a murmur of a thanni potta exhaust trying to sputter to life. You learn to breathe in deep. So you begin to listen. You feel a lil Elizabethan with the mufflers around your neck like a cruffed up high collar. And in keeping with it, life is shortened with every sigh. That really can’t be helped cause you do begin to listen to all the beauty you clogged your ears and eyes to with a diagnosis of ‘cold’; to your own breathing, to the buzz of insects, the croaks of frogs whom we thought long gone, the slick trails of snails, the sky in the water, the bristling wet crow, the huge cute bandicoot sheltering in your verandah shrugging its patchy coat, the moist-laden silence.

That’s the upside. There’s beauty in everything. And of course asymmetry is the rule of being beautiful. Your nose is a sprinkler, your throat sounds like a cross between Doby and Hagrid, you want to shove your back scrubber down your throat and get that itch, you hate stepping into the bathroom cause it’s perpetually damp, you wish you can go without a bath or a brush but risk end up smelling like a mouldy piece of cloth, you slip and slide with your rubber chappals after every cockroach that wants to snuggle into your room, and the Hit you sozzle them with never outgrows its pungency, your mom keeps ordering you to blow your nose (very embarrassing), you can’t be without the fan but you freeze even at three, fever’s on the way, power cuts leave you with no option but to sleep, you fall in love with your bed but every time you get up you got a blasted headache cause you’ve overdone it, ice cream is elusive and just kashayam at regular intervals, weirdly you come to like it.

Yup, it’s a world of black and white. We all need highlights…contrasts. Just shut up and look around. And when you think you’re tired of waiting, when you think you’ve had your share of monsoon beauty, go look at yourself in the mirror in the half-light. You want to be out there! Watching it all.

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got till it’s gone…