MONSOON IN MUMBAI
and its bittersweet bond with the city
Come June and Mumbai city is on edge.
Saturated with humidity and bereft of patience to deal with the summers anymore, the city waits with bated breath for the onset of monsoon to relieve its inhabitants from the unbearable discomfort caused by the sweltering heat.
Summers in Mumbai typically peak in the month of May. Trees and other green cover laden in layers of construction dust and fumes from moving automobiles, stand lacklustre in the still, humid air. Cats stretch lazily under parked vehicles as people working outdoors lose tempers and vital energy due to the heat and rivers of sweat. As the slowest month of the year sluggishly melts into June, the wait for the first spell of rain is a collective plea of the city dwellers to the rain gods.
The word ‘monsoon’ finds its origin back to the 16th century from the Arabic word for season ‘mausim’, which was also adapted by the Portuguese as ‘monção’. As the Portuguese and then the British colonisers oriented themselves to the peculiar climate of the Indian subcontinent, the word ‘monsoon’ was coined to describe the wet season that stretched typically from June to September.
The word monsoon also has a link to the shared history that the Indian and Arabian coasts developed through trade and commerce centuries ago. This connection was enabled by water vessels plying off the waters of the Arabian Sea that connect the two lands. The seasonal winds that this sea encountered helped set a pattern for the direction of movement of goods and people. Whilst the winters experienced dry winds coming in from the northeast, the summers brought in the draughts from the southwest, filling the sails of the ships and helping them gather speed. These winds, dense with moisture-laden clouds also brought torrential rains to the Asian subcontinent.
This yearly ritual of monsoon is quintessential to the experience of being in Mumbai.
As the city plays a game of patience with truant clouds and fluctuating emotions, finally, on a perfectly hot and hostile day when is least expected, the sky opens up, drenching the city in its cool showers, cleansing buildings, trees, people, animals and streets alike. For a short moment in time, Mumbai pauses to catch a deep breath, enjoying this act of cleansing with a sigh of relief.
The joy of monsoon is short lived though, as the rains bring with them their own challenges - waterlogging, traffic jams, leakages and unplanned delays. Buildings in neglect succumb to the heavy rains and collapse, often claiming lives. Monsoon is a trying season for those living in informal settlements as they deal with leakages and flooding of their homes and streets. For pavement dwellers it is the worst trial through the year.
Like many things in Mumbai, the relationship of its inhabitants with monsoon is bittersweet.
As the Arabian Sea swells dangerously, its dark angry waves pacing to-and-fro with the tides, monsoon continues to beat down incessantly upon the city for four months leaving the city wet and slushy and yet layered with freshness and beauty.
As torrents of raindrops hammer down on window panes and windshields, fog spectacle lenses and prick one’s eyes, they blur out the world around us. For that brief moment in time, things, people, faces and places merge into a fluid, molten composition. And in this liquid, nebulous mosaic everything seems to blend together...
In a world obsessed with defining identities, outlining differences and focusing on the 'other', this indistinct blur comes as a welcome change.
For a fleeting instant, boundaries don't matter and for that one sacred moment in the Mumbai monsoon, the world is a saner place…
What do Mumbai monsoons mean to you? How does rain make you feel? Do let me know in the comments. Thank you for supporting a reader-supported publication.
You replicate the almost painted glory of a dry, dry, hot place yearning for dark clouds and soothing rains.
Beautiful writing, again, Minaz.
I just love how everything looks so fresh after the rain, and the smell of it coming is also one of those magnificent aromas, just like freshly cut grass. We on the other hand have hardly had any rain this year, but Sydney has been deluged once again. The weather has been really weird, cold mornings, cloudy days, some sunshine, then the cold settles in once again and I go and turn the heating up for the evening. Does it ever get really cold in Mumbai. I know areas of Australia that get a lot of hot weather but can experience extremely cold nights. Many years ago when we were travelling around Australia, we started from the warmth of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, by the time we got to the middle of Queensland I had bought a warm jacket, then coming down the west coast I had bought boots and socks, all of which were needed when we got to Kalgoorlie when it was only 5c degrees overnight.