The monsoon is here

June 12, 2008

As temperatures soared since the beginning of March, tempers flared too. Blame it on the furnace liking conditions inside the house with a high humidity. The first downpour of the monsoon season Tuesday evening brought a much needed respite from the heat. The first showers are always welcoming. I love the cloudy look while many find the Seattle-like gloomy atmosphere very depressing. The first rainfall of the season is akin to the first snow of winter. The excitement is high when one doesn’t really give much thought to the long winter ahead or the incessant downpour for weeks confining us to stay indoors. It’s also the beginning of muddy roads, power cuts, mosquitoes breeding in poodles of water and when white clothes are better kept in wardrobes.

Yet it’s fun despite all that it gets with it. The smell before the rain or the dust settling in with the leaves showing their true green color, roads cleaned naturally – there’s more to celebrate during monsoon than any other season. Chai (for a buff like me) has never been more exciting. And for people like me with all the time in the world, it’s a pleasure to watch the rain while singing “rain rain go away” to my toddler son. Sure, it disrupts our evening schedule but who cares? - it gives me an opportunity to go out with LG at noon or any time of the day when it isn’t raining. And sometimes the unpredictability of it all is such a turn on with LG looking at me like I’m crazy to go out at that hour of the day!

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One Response to “The monsoon is here”

SK on June 27th, 2008 4:05 pm

Hi Lakshmi,

I just read your blog on the arrival of the 2008 monsoons, and that led to some long-dormant colony of memory neurons in my nitwit brain to spring back to life! My mind fleeted back to one or two occasions in my childhood when I happened to encounter these little scarlet red, very velvety insects that emerged out of the wet soil during the first rains at my native place in Karnataka.

Since then, I have always wanted to find out what they were, after all. Back then, there was no such thing as Google, probably not even a Jules Verne-like visionary who had thought of something like it but today, as a thousand times before and a million more in the years to come, it was Google to the rescue, once more! A quick search led me to this link about a child’s love affair with this mysterious insect:

http://nargisnatarajan.sulekha.com/blog/post/2007/04/my-first-love/comment/1146216.htm

Two paragraphs into this blog and it could have been me writing this, though not in so many beautiful words. Some very relevant parts from that blog are copied verbatim here:

“My first love was someone called ‘Beerba Boti’. I do not know the botanical term for this bug, beetle, insect or whatever it is. If anyone knows please enlighten me. Had it been a little later in life, this someone would perhaps have had a more human name. But then I was only a child and children have very peculiar love interests. Children also have a number of first love in their lives but fortunately (or unfortunately!?!) they do not have any last love. Therefore technically, Beerba Boti could be termed as one of my ‘in between’ loves.

This was how I met Mr.B. One day, just after a heavy shower, when the grass was green and the skies were blue and I was on the lawn in my White House, having a rendezvous with the red roses, I noticed a small blob of blood right next to my feet. At first I thought a jealous thorn had intervened. But a spiky intrusion cannot be painless. So I looked down and examined the blood red globule. It looked like a miniscule unspotted beetle. It also felt smooth and velvety. I gently picked it up and put it in the center of my palm. Immediately I was smitten with this tiny love bug. And thus began my scarlet affair.

I had to search for a home for my little velvety Thumbelina. One of my aunties helped me find it. It was a small matchbox. She emptied out the matchsticks and filled it with grass. Then we carefully laid it on the mock verdant bed. We kept the box closed so it wouldn’t escape into a heartless Gulliver’s world. We also made tiny perforations on the lid so that it could comfortably practice its strenuous exercises of inhaling and exhaling. Every two hours I would take out my smooth scarlet pearl from its wooden oyster, gently lay it on the table and lovingly gaze at it.

I marveled at its texture. I was awed by its colour. I was fascinated with its size. But I was quite disappointed with its behaviour. While my tiny heart had been totally captured, the signs from my mini friend were hardly favourable. Its tiny ruby form never ever stirred. There was not an iota of enthusiasm. There were simply no signs of stimulation. My love affair was only one sided.

I complained to Mummy. With a shrug of her petite shoulders, she said that was what had to be expected. I had unwittingly plucked out a velvet button from the lush green coat of the earth and placed it where it did not belong. For it to fasten its soft self onto our steely surroundings would take time. To gain my trust would probably take a lifetime.

But I was determined. I went to another of my aunties who hailed from Hyderabad and who also seemed to be quite well versed with all the creatures big and small. I began pestering her for something, anything that would help in a reciprocal bonding with the tiny creature. She taught me a small little ditty. She said it was meant especially for the little one and that all the children in the world sang this for all the Beerba Botis in the world. She was sure this song would succeed in bringing it out of its shell. ”

To all readers of this blog comment: I hope each one of you have had the serendipity of plucking “out a velvet button from the lush green coat of the earth”, when you were a kid yourself. If not, well, like Lakshmi remarked in one of her other blogs, reading this blog comment might seem to you like one of those “If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand.” kind of situation.

Well, I just wish I can meet this scarlet darling atleast once in my life, hoping against hope that its kind is not already extinct, and that I have my digital camera ready when that happens…

- SK