Madras Monsoon

Where were you when the monsoon broke out this past week?
Caught in a traffic jam?
Locked in your office behind Saint Gobain glass-sheets?
Or welcoming the gathering clouds on the beachfront?

I guess you must be the creative or the free-spirited sort if the monsoon is to excite you.
Or does it really matter?

I felt a new season had just begun the morning after. There are two huge trees down the road where I live and I often look up at them because their seasonal flowers (names don’t matter) which are spiky and reed-thin in off white colour are stunning in their fragrance.

And they seem so delicate. When the monsoon bearing clouds shake their ears before they empty themselves, dozens of these flowers drop on to the road. So there is a carpet of them after a steady shower.

This carpet greeted me when the monsoon broke out. . . was it on Wednesday last? And it felt a bit delicate when our feet trampled on them.

Monsoons do not create pleasant sights in our neighbourhoods. Floodwater, dangerous ditches, hanging cables and potholed roads.

But if you stop and look around you the sights are pleasant to our eyes - after a summer of 35 degrees plus that refused to slip away in October.

The trees and hedges are all green, truly green. The birds are on song in the mornings. Rain drops keep dripping in slow motion. And, creatures we have not seen for some time seem to come alive. Like the crazy frogs that come to inhabit the swathe of water that collects in our local playground.

So there are little things to enjoy even in our concrete neighbourhoods.

If the rains have renewed you, write and tell us about your experience. We can post them in the Letters column.

For now, we can give the mails on stinking garbage and dead streetlights a skip and post your experiences.

You can be poetic in your mails.
But limit the verses.
I am not planning to cut an album on the Madras Monsoon.