Sweet Jesus

The ‘soon has sprung. The gods smiled on Bombay yesterday and showered the city with wet, cool drops that refused to slide into drains. Kids in knickers, topless and smiling, danced and played as the rain came down—their little bodies wriggling and slippery. A tubby man in a tank stood under an overpass and let the runoff from above crash onto his head. Men stood in ankle deep pools by the side of the road. Drops came in sideways through the cracked window of my taxi, and I edged my arm out. I rolled the window down and let myself be salted.

It was welcome. A friend from the States who visited a week ago kept saying, “What this city needs is a good wash.” I think she meant the kind where you take a pressure hose and power wash a building. She imagined one big enough to spray down Bombay and its 18 million people. A 40-minute bath was all we could manage. It was, however, well-deserved. Over the last several weeks, the city has had an average temperature of 95 degrees with about 70% humidity. I finally broke down and rented an air conditioner three days ago. It has improved my life tenfold.

Today is sunny and humid again (yes, 70%), but I think we are now officially “in monsoon.” According to me (technically, I am a weather expert because I grew up on a steady diet of Doppler weather radar; Law and Order was, and still is, regularly disrupted by my mother in order to monitor green weather patterns moving across the Texas county map), the seasons here are pre-monsoon, where it is unbearably hot and humid, post-monsoon, where it is unbearably hot and humid, monsoon, where it is sticky and wet, and bearable). Monsoon lasts until August or so, and then we hit post-monsoon. I’m much more excited about the former, although I hear its fun for a hot minute and then it’s just a hot mess. More reports to come.