I can never photograph the monsoon
but I will write about her
A season of ambivalence. Like ugly crying after a long day of stifling emotions, pent-up heat leaves the earth in tears. One moment, you’re warming the palms of your hands with a mug of tea that you’ve hopped out of bed for. You leave momentarily to return to a lukewarm concoction, grudgingly sipped. One minute, the clouds that line up outside your window are tantalising; the next, you’re drawing up excuses for plans on the other side of town. As you lie down in a room that, after months, hardly needs a fan or air conditioning, a breeze finds its way in to leave the tiny hairs on your hand standing. In a few moments, a light drizzle is seen rather than heard. By the time you realise it’s raining, it begins to pour.
A season in motion. You’re running: into the downpour or into cover from it; late from all the traffic, or home to beat it. Trees sway indecently. Water flows through streets, occupying spaces she’s otherwise forbidden from entering. Walks around the neighbourhood. Walks in parks. Walks serving as moments to marvel at a city otherwise dry and oppressive. I’ve never adequately captured these moments in the rain. I’ve barely been able to capture photos of the rain—not because I haven’t wanted to, but because she is, by nature, elusive.
A sensory expansion, without the risk of overload. Everything is just the right amount of too much: the din of rain against the window and the sound she makes gushing down the pipes. Music that surrenders to her — with lyrics or in raag Malhar or Megh. A shiny exterior—almost as if freshly painted— on cars, brick walls, and foliage around built structures, gluing them to the earth and reminding them of their impermanence. The overpowering smell of masala chai, green chilli bajjis and pakoras, momos, or the roasting of corn on a cob (bhutta) on every street corner. The undeniable shared sense that everyone everywhere is either feeling, saying, or thinking something about her.
And lastly, of petrichor. I hate this word. I reckon it’s deemed beautiful because it rolls off your tongue like an attempt at poetry, but it’s incongruous and uncharacteristic. It is utterly and undeniably empty, offering little value to anything about the rain, stripping her of emotion. There can possibly be no way of using it in a sentence organically. It reeks of pretentiousness, when, in fact, it should simply smell of silent rebellion; of heaven and earth colliding; of confusion surrounding whether the smell precedes the gratitude from the sprinkle or succeeds it; and of the changing of the seasons.