Goa - It is like opening your eyes to a new made world
Lying in bed looking up at your tiled roof you can see the lightning stutter through the sky. The glass tiles throw fragments of blinding light around the room. The thunder scares the dogs under the bed. And the rain pours down, every little sound caught and magnified by the roof, until you feel that you are drowning in your bed.
Fields fill up and become miniature lakes, small seas. And then comes the true melody of the monsoon. Great rolling waves of frog song that go up and down the field. My first monsoon in Goa taught me that frogs don’t just croak. They flute. They whistle. They pipe little melodies like birds. They rattle and pop with strange percussion rhythms. Their song fills the fields, resounds through the house. The resident frogs join in. There’s the little yellow fellow who lives in the bathroom. That base rattle is the large green one who has decided that a pan in the kitchen is home. A little later on swarms of newly minted frogs will hop across the porch, driving the cats crazy.
My daughter welcomes back the large puddle that always sprawls across the road in front of our house. From when she was a child it has been a monsoon ritual to frolic in it, to mark the tadpoles changing to frogs in its tiny world.
Going for a walk in the rain, I stop to watch a small family of turtles cross the road. They are joining the long-legged birds in the field who walk around delicately snacking on the bounty of frogs. The birds are small points of white light in a world that has dissolved into a thousand shades of green. Everywhere trees are stretching out long arms in ecstasy, holding up their faces to the downpour. Green softens the outline of old abandoned houses, discreetly covers the mounds of garbage, draws whimsical lines from one electric pole to the next. It fills the eye with solace. Living in Mumbai I had forgotten that green could be this vital, this beautiful. It is like opening your eyes to a new made world and being renewed yourself.
And then comes San Jao, the most delightful of Goan celebrations, held to honour St. John the Baptist. Villagers manufacture headgear out of flowers and leaves. They re-enact the ritual of baptism, leaping into wells and rivers. Music plays and everyone celebrates the rite of baptism, of renewal, of being blessed by wonderful rain.
Venita Coelho is a painter, director and author of Soap! Writing and Surviving Television in India, Dungeon Tales and The Washer of the Dead: A Collection of Ghost Stories
Mumbai: Return of an old love and an old sneeze
Like most other Mumbaikars, the monsoon is an old romance with me. The rains came in June, the MRF Tyre Man told us how many days we would have to wait and when it was the first day of school, it would be raining so that we could try out our new Duckback raincoats and thump into every muddy puddle with our Bata gumboots. The rains were always a promise: One day it would rain so heavily that the city would grind to a stop and we would be given a day off at school and one more day to finish the homework that was due, one more day to study for the test.
Like most childhood romances, the shine wears off when you’re an adult. You’re working in an air-conditioned office which is kept at the same improbable temperature come rain or shine. This is because, you are told when you complain, that it is the right temperature for the machines. By machines, they mean the computers. You now know your importance in the order of things: the temperature has not been set for human standards. It is the hardware that counts. Without unions and with only a flimsy half-understood contract to protect the humanware, no wonder the computers count for more. Now the rain becomes a misery. Nothing protects you from the way the rain hurtles through the concrete canyons of Nariman Point. With the wind coming right of the sea, it tosses the rain down your back regardless of whether you have a raincoat or an umbrella or both. Your feet are wet and your socks are wet. The bottom of your trousers is always wet. And inside the office, it is still the temperature at which the computers work at their optimum. You? You’re sneezing.
At some point in life, your work world ends and you can now sit by the edge of Shivaji Park and watch the rain come down in torrents. A week later, the mud-red park is now a symphony of green and frogs, loud frogs and overhead a wet kite wheels, waiting for its lovelorn prey. This is the time to sit by the sea, at a safe distance and to wait and watch as the world turns into grey. Grey the horizon, grey the sea, grey the sand, grey hair, grey world. It returns an old love and an old sneeze. The rains are back. The turtles float lazily in the well at Sitladevi Temple and the moss begins its slow slide down the buildings of Mahim.
Jerry Pinto is a writer of poetry and prose, and his books include Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, Surviving Women, Asylum and Other Poems, Em and The Big Hoom
