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| Yeah, school's still open because our educators are heartless |
Torrents of rain hit the city, until your drowning in your own filth - oh and I am not exaggerating about the rain or the filth!
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| Just because it's filthy does not mean you can't enjoy yourself |
Many have grown up with a stream close by to their house...
I did too - my stream was an open gutter filled with feces, urine and whatever the heck had turned the whole thing into a moving black stream of sludge!
It bubbled and gurgled and you might as well have thought it was some witches brew that got away to torment the souls of mortal men!
There was even a small bridge to cross across the stream (granted it was just a granite slab over the horror where dreams go to die and resurrect as nightmares!)
Ok, ok, I'm exaggerating! Yeah, no I'm not! It was disgusting!
So, you can kinda guess what happens when the monsoon showers hit the City, that obviously decided it had no need for town planners or a drainage system!
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| Rickshaw in all seasons, a water taxi during the monsoons |
It was quite a site to behold - you know it's coming, you can hear the pitter-patter of raindrops eventually sounding like God is personally throwing water balloons at your house!
But the great thing when you're only 5 years old is that all of this is irrelevant ... why? Because as far as you are concerned, your house has turned into a water park!
I marveled as the water came rushing into the house, I loved watching the yellow and grey torrent that whizzed past the hous,e with such speed that you could ride the damn thing!
In fact, I would have ridden the damn wave until I saw that the entire neighbourhood's turd-balls had beaten me to it!
It is quite a site to watch as people try to dodge the god-awful reality of floating crap! Your crap, their crap, everybody's crap!
But when you're 5, you don't have to dodge anything!
You're carried around in the arms of your elders, away from the gritty and moist world just underneath you.
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| Parenthood - doing it right! |
All you gotta do at that age is stay dry, sit on a high chair or the bed and keep the hell out of every adult as they try and rescue the house from the God of Rain, who has blessed and cursed them at the same time, because gods can be like that!
And that's where my earliest memory comes in - all I had to do was stay dry!
As the waters began to rise in my house, I was sitting on a high chair singing the children's song "Row, row, row the boat" and holding some stick in my hand, that was of course my paddle!
I was watching my grandparents desperately take buckets of water and pour it outside - for every bucket of water they threw out, three buckets of water came right back in.
And me? I kept singing and shaking that wooden chair - until I heard the crack .... and then came the crash!
Into the disgusting, likely plague-infected, water I went, arse first!
Luckily for me, I wasn't too badly injured.
That, of course, didn't stop my grandma from smacking me silly for breaking the chair and getting all wet!
I don't remember much after that but there is a hazy memory of my paternal grandfather coming over to pick me up and take me to their house, which was always dry during the monsoons - their house was on a slight elevation.
I wonder though if the two memories are connected or have I merged two separate incidents into one.
How could my paternal grandpa come over and pick me up? The floods would not allow him to do so
Were the phones working? Did my maternal grandma, after smacking me and drying me up on the bed, call him?
Who knows! All I know is, that song "Row, row, row the boat", is now firmly part of this memory!
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