Letter from Delhi: monsoons can’t come too soon

News of the annual rains' landfall in the south marks the start of a long and painful wait as residents of the capital dream of relief from the sweltering summer.

Pedestrians run as seas swollen by monsoon rains send waves on to the road near the Gateway of India in Mumbai on June 13, 2014. Indranil Mukhurjee / AFP

NEW DELHI // While Delhi reeled under a heatwave last week, with temperatures touching 48°C, the monsoon crept up on India’s south-west coast, quenching the summer in Kerala, Goa and Maharashtra.

It will be more than a month before the monsoon arrives in the north, but for Delhi residents, news that the rains have reached the country sets off a period of keen expectancy.

Indeed, the thirst for the monsoon is a countrywide phenomenon. In her poem Ode to Drowning, the poet Tishani Doshi wrote: “There are as many ways / of yearning / as there are ways for rain … How long to wait / for everything to turn.”

This yearning has characterised the six summers I’ve lived in Delhi. Like Ms Doshi, I grew up in Chennai, in the south of India, and my memories of the monsoon are vivid.

The skies turn an apocalyptical black. The wind lashes through the tops of palm trees, setting up an immense howling and rustling. The rain pelts down hard and long.

When the monsoon relieves the heat and humidity of a Chennai summer, it does so in a dramatic fashion, says Padmaja Ayyappan, 26, a software engineer born and raised in the capital of Tamil Nadu state.

Every summer she waits for news that the monsoon has made landfall in Kerala, the state next door.

When it happens, “it’s as if I can fool myself into believing that the summer has ended”, she says.

“It’s all in my mind, of course, but I imagine that the temperature has dropped and that the air is cooler. My mood improves immediately.”

On the southern coast of Gujarat, in the town of Veraval, a boatbuilder named Allah Rakha Sheikh keeps an eye on the sky for signs of clouds.

The monsoon is upon Mumbai already, just a little way down the coast, and he is hoping to finish a round of weatherproofing before the rain sets in.

Mr Sheikh’s work increases during the monsoon. In coming weeks, when a seasonal ban on fishing takes effect, boat owners will send them to people like Mr Sheikh for repairs.

“In the entire fishing trade, we’re the only ones who work more during the monsoon, rather than less,” Mr Sheikh says. “But the rain makes it hard to work as well. Paint doesn’t dry as fast. There are puddles of water everywhere.”

The monsoon brings a fillip to the livelihood of farmers.

Baburam, who goes by only one name, farms a small plot of land in the Uttar Pradesh village of Katra Sadatganj. However, it isn’t enough to support him and his family and he also works as a labourer on nearby farms.

“When the monsoon is good, we stand to gain a lot,” said Mr Baburam, who grows mostly vegetables on his land. “But it depends on the rain. If we’ll get a normal monsoon, we’re happy.

“We’re always apprehensive about how much rain we get. We’re in constant anticipation until it starts raining.”

For Delhi’s residents, the suspense lies in how much the monsoon has exhausted itself before it reaches the capital.

I have known Delhi summers with little rain, which slid uncomfortably and stickily into winter in October. I’ve also known more forgiving years where the monsoon arrived early and emptied itself over north India, bringing a swift end to the heat.

“This is always the dilemma,” says Mayank Shekhsaria, who runs a sweet shop in south Delhi and commutes there from a Western suburb every day on his motorcycle. “On the one hand, I’d like it to rain. The weather would be so much more tolerable.”

But on the other hand, he says,. It takes him an extra half an hour — sometimes more — to reach his shop when Delhi is beset by the monsoon in August.

“Those snarls on the road are terrible, and I curse them every day,” Mr Shekhsaria says. “But then, invariably, I remember how much I resented the summer, and I feel happy all over again.”