Rainy Days

Its been a long long time since I have been to Mumbai. The city I called home for the first 22 years of my life. I gaze back and try to think hard what it was like, I mean the crux of it all, but all I remember is the daily, the routine the unbroken hum of activity and the rain, oh God yes the rain.
I watch movies, yeah the Hindi ones about Mumbai and they always portray how its heartless but people almost always band together and overcome whatever it is that is evil, may it be a huge scam, terrorism or any other ailing human social situation and if they cannot overcome it they at least have the dignity to die trying. And just to set the tone of this rambling lets get one thing straight, I have no such insights. Maybe some see it that way (big city, people as one etc.), my perception of the time I was a part of Mumbai is very singular, just me and all the rest as in people, weather, circumstances a huge part of the scenery. I'm not even saying there is no kindness and faith, all I'm saying is thats not what this post is about.
Mumbai for me set that tone, the city always threatened to swallow me whole and all I did was walk with my eyes straight ahead and accept what everything was and decipher the beauty as I went, from the whole scenery that was Mumbai.
By walking I mean the actual walk, I walked most of the time. Sometimes to reach destinations but mostly just for the sake of walking. I walked the city in the scorching May summers, the mild December winters and the season that is really the defining feature of Mumbai, the monsoons. I walked in the traffic, through the exhaust fumes, around the puddles and by the dusky sea shore. It was all about walking and thinking. I have also walked through the slums and today I wonder how I was never assaulted or killed, maybe I really was invisible the way I felt most of the time in the big sea of people in Mumbai.
I used to take the train from the suburb I lived in to go to Mumbai downtown and it was not work related so I could avoid the "crush" hours. I went to the British Council Library for reading and browsing and once done with that I just strolled the streets till it was time to catch the bus back home. This whole journey took on new meanings when done during the monsoons.
I thought just thinking about it would make me write volumes but now it seems like its so deep inside me and so delicate I can only feel it in the middle of my chest, very near my heart. The moist emotion of walking in the rain in Mumbai. The hazy misty dusks and dark gray early mornings with clouds so heavy with moisture and promises of downpours that they looked sagged down upon the city making it look cozy and where this sky met the sea it looked like a wet canvas that had no dimensions a place where a being could cross over into something surreal.
I have been away from Mumbai and its with mixed emotions I think of a lot of things this place represents, but one thing that I have unequivocal feelings about is the rain, and its all good.
Rain in Mumbai is a downpour calling it a shower is an understatement. Its not just a weather condition or a season, in my mind its a place. A place where I was a child one moment and then a teenager and finally a young woman of 22 when I bid it goodbye. Its a place where I carried the heavy heart that only a teenager can boast about, I shed unimportant tears that meant so much then in that place called rain. I fell in love and fell out of love with the heart wrenching and short lived fantasies that only youth supplies. And now in my heart I get to carry forever the bruise of all the rains I lived through in Mumbai. Every new place I have lived in since, countries and oceans apart, when it rains I'm back in that place called rain in Mumbai and my bruise hurts with bittersweet pain of youth that I hope and pray will never go away.