“The rains come to Amritsar in July for fifteen days, beating down like Mastana’s wedding band. A crack of thunder and the downpour begins. The storm-water pipe from our terrace rapidly floods the courtyard. Mama’s raat ki rani slowly wilts and droops to the ground. The buffalo shed, the mochi gully, the tonga stand at Hall Gate, the mosque, the pigeons . . . nothing is spared. It pours everywhere. Little boys make tiny paper boats and float them in the streets. The monsoon is here in full splendor!
Excited, I ran up to the terrace and bundled up under the tin shed, watching the shower slanting in from all sides, witnessing the downpour, its serenade on the roof. The houses are just a blur on the horizon, the terraces lacking all definition. Each bricked edge merges into the next. The city is watercolor-washed into the dark-grey skyline.
A song is playing in my head. Eventually, it all ends in a song. Sitting on the rolled-up bed, tucked in a corner, I sing my rain songs.
For the cobbler clan, the monsoons were a challenge. Little kids waddled across the gully now turned into a slushy dirt track. We would hear the ghetto dwellers squelching their way through the night, trying to throw plastic sheets over their mud shacks to keep them from dripping. It continues to pour.
Later, when the rain abated, little crawlies came out of the ground, creating squiggly burrows in the mud, etching the sodden earth with their languorous trail. We kids would sprinkle salt on an earthworm and watch it wriggle and coil into itself. As children, we could be innocently cruel.”
To be continued…