View: Mumbai monsoon is such a public servant | Economic Times

Even though I’m not a farmer, and have nothing to gain from the monsoon — such as successful crops and happy earthworms churning the soil for free — I have always loved our rainy season. Not, perhaps, as much as John Keats loved their autumn (which is excellent news for the genre of Romantic poetry, which is already dismal enough without having me butt in with a dictionary of rhyming words), but definitely a few levels higher than a social media ‘like’.This year however, the monsoon has placed me in a dilemma that is driving me so absolutely batty that I may have to ‘unlike’ it. On the one hand, although it is being highly overenthusiastic in other parts of the country, the monsoon in my part of Mumbai has consisted since early July only of what seems to be William Wordsworth’s lonely cloud. This single cloud empties itself in the pointed manner of a public servant displaying the doing of a duty. But just like a public servant, it does its duty only about once in ten days, in a desultory manner, and for no longer than 20 minutes at a time.Presumably, the lakes that provide Mumbai with its annual water supply are also suffering this lonely-cloud-public-servant syndrome. Because while the monsoon is now on its way out, Mumbai is still short of water. Since this will lead to dreadful things -- like having to wash clothes in a bucket, bathe with wet wipes and swig diabetes-inducing aerated drinks instead of good old paani -- this means I have to plead with Mother Nature to send us battalions of highly motivated, fresh-out-of-MBA school-type clouds to fill our lakes so the people of my beloved city can continue to bathe regularly.Then there’s the other side of the dilemma. My sinuses. From the moment I emerged into the world, my sinuses have been very easily offended, reacting by sneezing at the pace of a machine gun in the hands of the hero in a Hollywood action movie to literally everything. Dust. Spices. Air. Sunshine. Himesh Reshammiya’s nasal whine. Public servants not doing their duty. Traffic jams. Mixed fruit jam. Life itself. (According to my mother, the first thing I did when I emerged from the womb was sneeze. This, in my opinion, proves that I am allergic to life itself. But strangely, every time I mention this to allergy specialists, they give me the numbers of suicide hotlines.)This year, my sinuses have been especially offended by rain. At the first whiff of petrichor, off go my sinuses. My nose runs at a speed 100 times faster than any Olympic sprinter could dream of achieving. I sneeze nonstop. My nose becomes triple its normal size. My face swells like a balloon. Every little grey cell in my head is replaced with snot. Mucus is everywhere, especially on the 203 hankies I need every five minutes.You see my dilemma, right? Either I beg for more rain so I don’t have to wash clothes in a bucket. Or I pray for no rain because without it, I will not need to wash so many hankies, thus reducing my clothes-washing use of our limited water.Truthfully though, this is not really a dilemma. I have been sacrificing myself for the good of my city’s water supply ever since I moved to Mumbai in 1993 and learned the awful truth that we are monsoon-dependent. The sheer fear of not having enough water in our pipes has caused me since 1993 to seduce the rain Bollywood-style by wearing only diaphanous white outfits from the end of May onwards, gravy stains be damned.I have done this for 28 years and I’m not going to stop now. Pass me that white muslin top, please. And that box of hankies. You can thank me tomorrow morning when you shower.