The Monsoon

When I tell people there is a season in India where it rains, they are shocked. A whole season? What do you do? How can you ever go outside?

The image of it raining for an entire season sounds pretty awful. Like a gloomy day in childhood where you can’t go outside to play, so you stay inside and drive your parents crazy by banging on pots because you’re so bored. Or maybe like Portland, Oregon, where my parents and I lived for a year when I was three. I don’t remember it much, but my parents told me there wasn’t a single time they went to the park to the park where the benches weren’t too wet to sit on. It drove them crazy. This was only a few years after they had moved out of India, out of monsoon country.

But the monsoon isn’t like Portland or London, or any other rainy city. In London, for instance, it drizzles for hours, stops briefly, then drizzles again. From what I’ve seen, the monsoon never drizzles.

Today was a sunny morning during the monsoon, not an uncommon occurrence. An hour before lunch the clouds had come in, but I didn’t think much of them. It just felt like a slight change in the light. I went to go wash my hands for lunch when the power went off with a click sound. The TV beeped off, the fan began to slow from its white noise drone into an audibly slow rotation. Washing my hands in the sudden dark, I felt like I lived in another time, without electricity. All the doors slammed one after another. “There’s a ghost in the house,” my uncle joked. The monsoon wind was coming in. Right before the rain hits, there’s the most wonderful cool breeze that makes you feel like you’re standing at the top of a ship. You feel like you could do anything. I used get confused when people said they could smell rain coming. Now I know. Somehow you can smell the damp. There is this earthy smell in the air.

The rain came down just a little harder than a drizzle at first. It was like being caught in a summer rain, where it falls softly at first enough for you to pray it can stay off until you reach shelter, but right when you start praying it pours and you’re already soaked. And technically, it is a summer rain. India’s summer actually happens during the northern hemisphere’s spring, but it’s the hottest time of the year, 90-110 degrees on average. The monsoon saves India from what would be an unbearably hot summer. I’m pretty sure we would all literally die without it. Compared to what would probably be 120 degrees, a couple of storms aren’t so bad.

Today the monsoon rain was coming down in pip-plops, small ripples in puddles. The contemplative kind of rain. It’s not always like this. More often it pours down in huge drops that soak everything instantly. It gushes out of the rain gutter like a waterfall and forms lake puddles. It makes you worried it’s going to flood if it doesn’t stop within the next ten minutes. Once in a long while it actually does flood.

Then it clears and it’s wet but quiet. The sun makes everything the ickiest kind of humid. When it dries it’s all sunny again like a summer day, a summer day till the clouds come in and it monsoons all over again.