The other day I was stuck in a traffic jam in the midst of one of the heaviest downpours of the season. We inched painfully forward through pouring rain on the waterlogged road, virtually unpassable on one side as there was over knee-deep water there. Low-slung cars like ours were attempting to slink past it by sticking to the sides of the pavement, inundated periodically by waves of dirty water. People, as they tend to do in Delhi, began to throw all rules out the window and one enterprising gent in a Tata Indica decided to try to drive his car on to the pavement. He failed utterly, and his car blocked the only moving lane on the road. Rain was pelting so hard that the view from the windows was reduced to a watery blur. The driver killed the engine and sighed, "There's nothing like monsoon in Delhi to make one forget how beautiful the rains can be elsewhere."
He was from a remote village in the hills of Madhya Pradesh, he said, and had returned only days before from a 10-day visit there. "It rained every single day there, to everyone's delight," he said. "We'd sit in the veranda sipping sweet tea and simply gaze at the clouds and rain dancing together." People in his village welcomed each shower, as it drove away memories of the parched, hot summer. Grandmothers devised special menus to offset the effects of the increased dampness, even as children found every excuse to frolic in the rain. There was hardly any waterlogging in his village. "It is probably because of the absence of concrete and the presence of many small village ponds in which the rainwater is collected for later use," he said. Many villagers opened the lids of their personal tanks to collect and store rainwater. "My loveliest memory is of bathing the family cows in the rain, rather than from the tank inside their shed," he said wistfully. Perhaps this summer's drought had heightened people's appreciation of the rains. "It now seems so unthinkable, but we actually sang songs in praise of the rains," he said moodily. "The cloudy skies, cool wind and the gentle pitter-patter of raindrops that sounded so wonderful there are the source of acute discontent in the city."
Ahead of us was one of the capital's overflowing sewers, clearly responsible for the waterlogged road and the resultant traffic jam. Yet again, I mused aloud how short-sighted our civic planning was, for it allowed clean rainwater to mix with raw untreated sewage and flow into the beleaguered Yamuna. Instead, this huge volume of water could have helped recharge the city's depleted water table. "In the village, after the rains, you can see the water levels in the wells rise right to the top," said the driver. "But the irony of living in Delhi is that after braving this kind of waterlogging all day, when I finally return to my room in Sangam Vihar, I'll probably find that there isn't a drop of water in the tap!"
It looked like we were going to be stuck there for a while, so I asked him to put on the radio. Sure enough, all the FM channels were playing lovely old Bollywood songs about love and longing in the rain. The mellifluous voice of Mukesh, exhorting the rain to pelt down even harder, filled the car. Just as I began to chafe at its syrupy mistiming, the driver abruptly switched the radio off. "No one would ever write paeans to the Indian monsoon if they had experienced rains in present-day Delhi," he said.
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