Commentary/Dilip D'souza

It's June, and I wanna be wet!

They called it a pre-monsoon shower, the one that deluged Bombay on the first day of June. Maybe it was, by some complex meteorological definition.

To me -- as I sat on a little parapet that morning, watching the clouds grow swiftly darker, the wind whip up little dust devils, the first few drops thump heavily around me and then turn into a serious downpour that lasted till lunch -- to me, it was certainly the monsoon come again.

As every year, I felt the familiar, warm tingle flooding upwards from my toes. I breathed deeply of that brown, intoxicating earth-smell, marvelled in the sudden coolness, quaked as the thunder boomed massively overhead. And all over again, I thanked somebody that I was right here, right now, to enjoy the start of the monsoon. Oh sure, by the time September rolls around I'll be thoroughly sick of it: the rain, the dirt, umbrellas that break, the floods, the feeling of being slightly damp all day. By July, come to think of it.

But it's only June, and there's nothing on earth quite like that first rain of the season. Pity the numberless hordes across the globe who will live out their lives without knowing it!

Last year, it blew in on the back of a cyclone. That night, the wind howled through the trees, slamming our windows and doors shut with a shuddering force. The rain wasn't very heavy when it began, though it would become heavier as the night went on. The thought, when it came, was simply irresistible. How enthralling it would be to walk along the nearby seashore! The rain in our faces, the wind in our hair... Very soon, we were there. It was a startlingly dark night, I remember. Some bright lights out at sea were the only blemishes in the blackness. But we had little energy for curiosity about odd lights. It was hard to think of anything but the immediate experience of the rain. The wind was so strong we had to lean far forward into it just to make a few steps of progress. It was sending raindrops stinging into us, as if hundreds of very wet thorns were singing through the air.

Stinging or not, it was an exhilarating, energizing 15 minutes that we spent there. I returned home with adrenalin flowing, charged up like I hadn't been in weeks. That was the effect the season's first rain had on me.

In fact, that night it was even stronger than we knew. The next morning we woke to an astonishing sight. A huge ship had run aground on the rocks just off the shore, no more than 150 yards away. Ah yes, those lights at night! Now we knew what they had been. The freighter lay there like some rusting sea beast, silent and enormous. Already, people were thronging to see it, Bombay's newest tourist attraction. A shipwreck, of all things! In thousands they came, for weeks afterwards. Today, a year later, the tourists have found other attractions. But the ship lies there still, a reminder of that wild, beautiful June night when on that stretch of shore, it was just the wind, the new monsoon, a ship heading for disaster on the rocks, and us.

The monsoon comes every year, I know. In that banal sense, it is routine and predictable, I know. But that doesn't explain why that first cloudburst never fails to delight. Why does it always pack that breathtaking punch? Why is it such a decisive answer to long days of draining, wearying May heat?

Not that the May heat does not have its compensations. When the two gulmohur trees outside burst into flowering flame, I can't help the indulgent thought that our balcony is, bar none, the most spectacular spot in the city. Almost overnight, the trees go from a nondescript green to that vivid, livid, orange-red. Within days, the flowers drift down, turning our drab compound into a carpet of lush colour.

Summer's here again: I know that when the gulmohur blooms so abundantly. In Bombay, that can only mean mangos. This year the orchards must have been particularly fecund. We are overrun with carts and baskets full of the luscious, voluptuous yellow fruit, bursting with ripe flesh and sweet juice. They're here in opulent variety, though you can tell a true Bombayite by the way he dismisses all but the exquisitely-shaped Alphonso, the King of fruits. "Those are not mangos!" he'll say derisively of any others.

In May, I think: so what if it's hot as hell and I'm never quite free of sweat? There are mangos to be eaten! I guzzle them down almost sinfully, all month long. My fingers and face remain in a near-permanent state of stickiness. Then June arrives, and I think: so what if it's going to be a long twelve months till I have mangos again? The rains are here! And in a flash, they have washed away the sweat and stickiness of May.

That's why the mangos, the gulmohurs, are just the advance notice, only a reminder that summer must give way to the rains. They point the way towards that release from the heat we all long for, the magnificent climax of that first rain that always seems to know when May has turned to June.

In his scrumptious Chasing The Monsoon, Alexander Frater writes of watching the monsoon break on Kovalam beach in Kerala. "Everyone shrieked and grabbed at each other," Frater says. In his case, that meant the dark-eyed woman to his right. "Her streaming pink sari left her smooth brown tummy bare. We held hands much more tightly than was necessary and, for a fleeting moment, I understood why Indians traditionally regard the monsoon as a period of torrid sexuality."

Then, as the deluge really begins, she is gone.

A momentary romance, that quick magic, the wisp of a mystery -- this is the stuff of the monsoon. Ask me only weeks hence, I'll be cursing it. But for now, it's an entirely different emotion I feel. I felt it on the seashore last June; I felt it again on the parapet a few days ago.

Without a doubt, it is at this time of the year that I feel most Indian of all. That I feel most glad to be Indian. Make of that what you will. Me? I'm going to get wet.

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