Soggy Season

(MIS)ADVENTURES IN THE MUMBAI MONSOON

The trouble with monsoon season is the rain. I don’t mean the fact that there is rain. No. As a Brit I’m no stranger to rain, and wouldn’t dare wish for an end to something so conversationally rich as precipitation. What would I small talk about? And what excuse would I have stare wistfully out of the window, cup of tea in hand, pondering just how much it’s coming down out there? The problem here is how it rains.

When the monsoon comes to Mumbai, it makes damned sure everybody knows about it. It rains dangerously. It rains provocatively. It rains dirty. It coordinates with the tides and conspires to bring the city to a standstill as often and as dramatically as it can. It dumps a month’s worth of rainfall in just a matter of hours and then sits back to laugh at the people as they try to navigate their new landscape. The roads are now rivers; pavements the muddy riverbanks either side of the coursing torrent. Staircases are waterfalls, potholes like plungepools. The traffic police bob around like minions in their butter yellow waterproofs, wading through the grey-brown water, wheezing into their whistles, barely audible over the car horns and downpours. 

This first one is the access (or lack thereof) to Dylan's office after a downpour.

As I write this, the monsoon is having a surprise resurgence. Last week we were enjoying intense, glaring sunshine — and suffering the sweat that comes with being caught outside in it while still dressed for a temperate monsoon morning. ‘Looks like the monsoon is over!’ we all cried. ‘Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?’ we all agreed. We forgot, momentarily, about the nature of the Mumbai monsoon and, of course, that’s why it chose to rear back up and show us one more time who really holds the power here: the power to send waves (see what I did there?) of panic and chaos through an otherwise pretty unflappable city.

I admit that I was supposed to go running this morning but instead, I am sitting in my living room, where it is not raining and where the ground is not slippy, reflecting back on some of this soggy season’s most memorable moments. There aren’t actually very many because Jasper and I successfully dodged most of the monsoon with our summer travel bonanza — squeezing in trips to both the UK and New Zealand. 

But anyway, here you have it — a handful of Mumbai’s Soggiest Spectacles.

1. Padel Court Toppers

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I have been sucked into the world of padel, now that I’m officially documented (once again) as the ‘trailing spouse’. This is all very relaxed and ladylike during the dry season, but when the clouds roll in and the heavens open onto the already quite slippery surface, the padel risk classification goes up a level and we might as well be playing in rollerskates. In response to this, padel courts around the city have put up something that might be called a roof. I say ‘might be called a roof’, because they aren’t what you are picturing. Comprising a length of tarp and a significant work of bamboo scaffold-artistry, a ‘roof’ over a padel court can look like just about anything on the ‘tiki hut to field hospital’ scale. Some of them allow natural light in, and air flow, and offer enough height to successfully send and land a well calculated lob. Others do none of these things. By this late in the season I have worked out which ones are playable and which ones are too dark, too hot or too infuriating, so I am not completely without padel. But nothing dampened my enthusiasm for makeshiftery like having the chance to play on properly designed, correctly covered padel courts in Jersey.  Now I understand how it’s meant to look. That said, showing the young man who worked there what my regular padel courts look like on a rainy day cheered me, and him, up no end. 

Spot the Jersey courts...

2. Government-issue Alerts

In my first and second years here, I heard rumours of ‘the government has called an amber alert’. Or a red alert for days when they really didn’t want people going about their business. It wasn’t until my third year, that I found the source of these mysterious alerts: a PDF document posted online and updated every day. It’s a very simple 7 day calendar with green, yellow, orange or red shading as per the different weather status in the different regions. Simple, but a very effective way to communicate to those people who know where to look. For those who don’t have this particular webpage bookmarked, I am sure the information is disseminated via other channels. For example Instagram, where the Mumbai Rain has its own account. It is, naturally, a human being using the pseudonym of Mumbai Rain, but what a great way to pick up seasonal work and then disappear off the internet for the rest of the year. Speaking of effective ways to alert a population to impending weather, New Zealand has really cracked the code on this one. In New Zealand, the government has the power to hack every single, connected mobile phone in the country and use it to perpetuate an un-ignorable, digital airhorn. It’s the stuff of every good apocalypse movie: loud, alarmist and supported by every news channel and radio station across the country. For now, though, India seems okay with their PDF. 

3. The School Class Whatsapp Freakout

Oh parents, parents. How many times do you have to be told that your children are safe in school when it rains? This year, red alerts have been relatively sparse and so, in general, schools and workplaces have remained open throughout the drenching. However, there have been two notable occasions on which the rain has been so undeniably menacing that the parents in our year group (and perhaps other year groups) have taken it upon themselves to panic, spread that panic, and then launch a coordinated raid on the school. The first collective freakout happened at the very end of last term, as the monsoon was just beginning to tease at its dominance. As luck would have it, when the messages started — questioning the sanity of sending children to school in the rain, or of leaving the children in school in the rain, or of listening to the school when the school tried to reassure parents that the school was not submerged in the rain — I was on the hockey field, soaked to the skin but blissfully unaware. As bad luck would have it, I then succumbed to a migraine and spent the two hours when I would have liked to be asleep, listening to my phone buzz with the frenzy of parents providing a running commentary of exactly how deep the puddles were, how far up their legs the water would have reached had they not insisted on the security guards hand carrying their children from the school entrance to their waiting car, and of who had and had not yet shown up to collect their children. My migraine-inflicted eyes weren’t working so I couldn’t read the messages until afterwards, which meant that Jasper’s nanny set off at the normal time to collect him. She arrived after the earlier high tide had retreated together with both the heavy rain and most of the puddles, meaning no security guards were needed to carry him. The lesson we learned on this occasion was two-fold: firstly, that the children were absolutely fine in the school, just like the school had said and secondly, that people who rush to collect their children at the very moment that the tide: puddle: rainfall ratio is at its most disruptive, end up much muddier than those who listen to instructions. 

I am definitely not denying the rain was heavy. This is Jasper's school gate.

4. Sandwich Parents

You thought I’d forgotten that I said there were two notable occasions on which the parents in our class whatsapp group absolutely lost their lids over a bit of rainfall, didn’t you? Well, I didn’t. The second occasion was at the start of this academic year. The watershed (sorry!) between the two academic years is only really significant in this case because at the start of this year, our little darlings started eating their lunch at school. Since August, their schoolbags have been stuffed with not only a snack tiffin, but a lunch tiffin too, to keep them going all the way through to their new, mid-afternoon pick-up time. What does this have to do with the rain? Or sandwiches, for that matter? Well, some of the children are sent to school with freshly packed tiffins which hold both their snack and lunch. Jasper is one of these children. And his lunch tiffin contains a sandwich, as you might expect if you are also from a sandwich culture. Here in Mumbai*, however, the culture is not to fling a couple of slices of bread and a slither of cheese into a plastic box and hope it’s not stale by lunch time. Not at all. Here, parents instruct their cooks to prepare a several-layered hot tiffin for their children and have it delivered by the driver, in their Audi, to the school gates in time for the lunch break. Some of these hot-meal proffering mums are visibly horrified by the idea that Jasper will be forced to survive on sandwiches and can’t seem to get their heads around sending all the day’s food in one go. That is, until the heavy rains threatened the lunchtime delivery rush and guess which parents didn’t have their knickers in a twist? That’s right - the Sandwich Parents. And I am a full-time, card-carrying Sandwich Parent. 

(*Let’s be clear, this is not everywhere in Mumbai.)

I even gave you a bonus sandwich picture because Dylan also gets a cheese, ham and Branston pickle sandwich in his tiffin, and he seems to get along just fine. Also - I don't think Jasper's lunch is too shabby (if perhaps a little heavy on the about-to-expire Pringles that day).

5. Water Sports 

Sports during the rainy season can be a mixed bag. As I’ve already mentioned, the padel court roofing get-ups leave a lot to be desired, as does the mysterious green tinge that the pool in our apartment complex comes down with every single time it rains. I’ve lost count of the number of messages we have in the complex’s ‘society management app’, telling us that the swimming pools are once again being cleaned and are therefore once again out of action. As someone who grew up in a country where the rain doesn’t stick to a designated 3 month scheduling block, and where swimming pools somehow appear to function all year round, I have to question whether or not there are any professionals involved in the pool maintenance. Best not to think too much about that, however, because every now and then we receive a really alarming ‘immediate shut down due to a biohazard’ message and I wonder if I ever want to go swimming in that pool again. And so onto another kind of unwelcome biodiversity: that of roadside slime. A few weeks ago I did a(nother) 10KM race. Except this time, instead of being at night and in the heat of summer, it was at dawn and in the midst of the mother of all rainstorms. The rain was so heavy that phones were in plastic bags, caps were to stave off water instead of sunshine, some people were in shower caps, some had abandoned their shoes and most people were too scared to use their headphones for fear of them not being that waterproof. By the time I crossed the startline I was soaked through, from my head to my ankles, but the real trouble started when I got out onto the open road. There, I found the real test: muddy slime. At least, I hope it was mud…as I high-knees’d my way through rivers of ankle-deep slop. Despite being essentially an underwater run, the route was pleasantly ordinary and my time came out better than the run before. Plus, I carried the chest-puff of ‘I ran 10K in this’ around with me all day, while other people bemoaned the dreariness of another rained-out Sunday. I don’t know if it’s my Britishness or something else, but I will always wear resilience against the elements as a badge of honour. And fortunately, this seems to be something Jasper is on board with too. He currently attends a bi-weekly football class in our apartment complex and while other mums see a drop of rain and shoot of a quick ‘Is class on??? In the rain????’ to the (rare gem of a) teacher who takes absolutely no notice of the weather, I quietly put Jasper’s raincoat in his bag and boot him out the door. He doesn’t melt, and he doesn’t catch whatever cold people think is circulating in the raindrops out there. Quite the opposite, he has the absolute time of his life playing puddle football in the pouring rain, with a very advantageous student to teacher ratio!

Three pictures of some very wet sporting endeavours: hockey, hockey, running.

6. Dylan’s Big Building

It’s easy to forget — for you and I, perhaps, not so much for Dylan — why we are here in India. It’s because Dylan is building a big building. And on one early monsoon run at the racecourse I captured that big building reflected beautifully in a lake-sized puddle that shouldn’t have been there. I’m sure you’ll agree, now 4 years in, it’s starting to look like he’s getting somewhere!

That's his - right in the middle there. But when it's finished, it'll be taller than all the others.