For as long as I can remember, the monsoon is always expected in Delhi in the last week of June. No one believes that it’ll actually turn up then; there are wet seasons when the monsoon trades in its starring role for a couple of guest appearances. There was a year — 1987, I think — when it rained three times, briefly, and the city felt and smelt like a prickling armpit. The monsoon is that erratic uncle, always imminent, who still ambushes you when he does arrive. Like two days ago when Delhi received nine inches of rain in a single morning. That’s almost a third of the thirty inches the city expects to receive through the whole rainy season. It felt like consolidated compensation for being air-fried through forty 40-degree days. My terrace became a shallow pool which flowed into the house: the rains kayoed the drains.
The uncovered nala or gutter running past the front of the house filled till it flooded the colony road. From my residents’ association WhatsApp group, I learnt that gutters aspired to be ‘stormwater drains’. I learnt from a neighbour on my morning walk that the massive stormwater drain that serviced the All India Institute of Medical Sciences had apparently collapsed and turned the road running past the hospital into a river. Looking at the photographs of submerged vehicles the next day, I thought of the bus that used to drown every year under Minto Bridge throughout my childhood. Either that or the Statesman published the same photo every year on a pre-determined day just to let Dilliwallahs know that the monsoon had properly arrived. Since I took a bus to school and back every day, I used to ghoulishly wonder if the children got out alive.
A certain amount of pro forma talk about global warming is de rigeur now after a weather event if only because no one talks about the climate crisis in the normal course of things. The massive downpour was an occasion for newspapers to feature expert meteorological commentary on the bleeding obvious: rain now fell in concentrated downpours or not at all. But even granting the stupidity of our political masters and the indifference of their subjects, it’s hard to understand why cities like Delhi don’t harvest the monsoon. To let precious monsoon rain run off into drains or leach into roads in a city as chronically water-stressed as India’s capital is worse than criminal; it’s a form of suicide.
One of the perks of the retired bhadralok life is that you don’t have to commute, so unless the weather invades your house (as it did mine on Friday), you experience rain disruptions as belated spectacle rather than first-hand frustration. The truth is that in the digital world, most of us experience the world at one remove. On social media, there seem to be more people trying to get to the bottom of an alleged rainwater leak in the temple in Ayodhya than the state of their own roofs. As the harried resident of a newly-built flat beset with what contractors and architects laughably call teething pains, I have nothing but sympathy for the champions of the bhavya mandir. As all newbie flat-owners know, buildings can only be pronounced built after the first rains. The Ram temple isn’t so much a finished structure as an ongoing project, a political rainmaker.
The election defeat in Faizabad, the constituency that contains the temple, must have hurt the Bharatiya Janata Party. To have made Ayodhya the cynosure of all eyes on January 22 — literally, since every 24x7 news channel had its cameras trained on Narendra Modi cosplaying principal bhakt — to have refurbished that dusty town and turned it into the omphalos of Hindu India, and then to lose — how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it must be to have a thankless child. The question for the BJP is, how does it, metaphorically speaking, rainproof Ayodhya?
The other rain-affected event I watched indoors was the T20 World Cup happening in the new world. Watching the semi-final against England in Guyana, the rain breaks seemed designed to create suspense in a game that India otherwise won easily. Not that I need any weather-related tension to enjoy beating England. My view is that there is no such thing as a boringly one-sided win against England or, for that matter, Australia. The more lopsided the better. Rohit Sharma’s pulverising of a Mitchell Starc over was the highlight of the win against Australia and I wasn’t pleased to see Australia getting to within 24 runs of India’s total.
The performance against England was better for my nerves. I can watch Rohit Sharma and Surya Kumar Yadav bat forever in this short, low form of the game. There’s a calmness to them, in between the hitting, that gave me what I came for: the big hits without the heart attacks. I used to think of Rohit Sharma as the poor man’s Inzamam-ul-Haq but as he has become more consistent, I’ve come around to believing that he’s nearly as good as the great man himself.
The main reason to watch T20 is the batting; that’s what it’s designed to showcase which is why those low-scoring matches in the US were so dull. When the Australians christened their T20 competition the Big Bash League, they got it exactly right. But watching Kuldeep Yadav and his bowling comrades reduce the English innings to ruins spoke to my inner, anti-angrez yob.
I’ll watch the final between India and South Africa with the dispassion of the perfect spectator. T20 tournaments mean nothing to me so long as India doesn’t lose to England or Australia and that hasn’t happened. Should the seasonal motif of rain seriously interrupt the final, and should the Duckworth-Lewis target favour South Africa, I’ll cheer the Proteas on. Indian fans are constantly (and ridiculously) moaning about India not having won a big ICC tournament for years. Given how magnificent the Indian Test team is in the only form of the game that matters, this is mad. Besides, the South Africans have never won a World Cup of any kind. It’s about time they did. And what of the Indians? Well, as I discovered last Friday, into each life, some rain must fall.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
