(In a lighter vein)

By Vincent Van Ross

If it rains, there could be a flood. If it doesn’t, there could be a drought. What a choice!

If it doesn’t rain there would be no crops. If it rains soon after the harvest, again there would be no crops (because they would be destroyed). What a choice!

If there is one god I really fear, it the rain god! Sometimes, he opens all the taps on the clouds and lets them run till the taps run dry. Sometimes, he does not open them at all and lets the earth run dry!

The rain god is one god you do not know what to do with. You can neither afford to please him nor displease him!

In Delhi, we had a dry spell and a wet spell this monsoon. The wet spell was really wet. So many colourful umbrellas went up when rain came down in torrents. So many different varieties of raincoats rolled out of closets when it rained.

If I wanted to describe the scene for animal lovers, I would say: it rained cats and dogs! (You can very well imagine what would have happened to the mice if that happened!) To borrow an expression from one of James Hadley Chase’s thrillers, “it was raining fit to drown a duck!”

The streets were really water-logged this time! Who says we have only the Yamuna for a river in Delhi? If you had taken a look at the streets of Delhi this monsoon, you would have sworn that they were rain-fed rivers and tributaries of river Yamuna!

There were water-sheets where there used to roads! If only they had stayed that way for sometime, waterfowls would have migrated to downtown Delhi for breeding!

People became ducks and waded through knee-deep water. In the confusion somebody said: “If I remember correctly, there used to be a road somewhere here!”

I think he should thank his lucky stars that he didn’t have to say that there was a manhole somewhere here. He might have performed a vanishing act, before he knew what was happening, considering the fact that there are still idiots around who remove the manhole covers during rains to facilitate better drainage!

Flooded roads became free parking zones for vehicles. Of course, nobody parked their vehicles willingly. The vehicles had to be parked there because rain water invaded their engines unannounced and the vehicles would not move!

My own car was sailing on two feet deep water on the road. I had my car in the second gear and my foot on the accelerator. And, a constant prayer on my lips… “God please tell the driver of the car in front should not stop come rain or storm. The rain and the storm were already there though! If he had stopped, I too would have to follow suit and stop the car in the middle of the flooded road. That was sure to drown my car!

That is not all! I would have to jump out of my car and start swimming without any preliminary lessons on how to swim. Agreed, some people don’t know how to swim. That is okay. But, in my case, I didn’t even know how to drown!

The wheels of my car were groping under water. Sometimes, they went down with a thud and then came up suddenly. Nobody told me anything but I was intelligent enough to guess that those were potholes!

In the middle of this pouring rain some street urchins rushed to the middle of the road and started dancing. One of them slipped and vanished under water within no time. If he weren’t fished out immediately, he would have ended up exploring some netherworld under water!

I found two fat ladies, who could put sumo wrestlers to shame, struggling with their umbrellas as a strong wind blew past them. Both of the ladies threw their entire weight on the umbrella to protect their vast bulk from the rain.

The umbrella of one of the ladies opened the other way and became a cup and started collecting rain water in it. The second lady, who tried to help her set the umbrella right, lost the grip on her own umbrella. The umbrella took flight, turned over, became a boat and started sailing down the waterlogged road!

Just when I thought I had emerged out of those deep waters safe and sound, my car dived into a pothole and splashed a flurry of water on to a guy in white dress who was staggering along the footpath.

The gentleman was muttering a curse and hurling abuses at me when another car passed between us. And, it threw up enough water on him to dye his clothes with mud and dirty water.

The man on the footpath made a gesture as if he was going to hit the car driver with the umbrella as he yelled: “What the hell do you think you are doing, you #$@*&=+?”

The car driver seemed to have a great sense of humour! He rolled down his window and peered out of the car. Unlike me, he made no effort to apologise! Instead, he gave the guy a mischievous smile and screamed: “Holi Hai!”

As I neared my colony, the roads were again waterlogged. I found a couple of young boys, in blue jeans jaywalking in the rain. I had never seen before. They were just enjoying the rain and singing the popular number as they walked: “Singing in the rain…”

In the knee-deep water, they were heading towards the rainwater drain without realizing it. Before I could caution them, they stepped into the drain still singing. They quickly grabbed the bumper of a car parked near the drain before they sank and heaved themselves out of it. If they hadn’t done that, they would still be singing in the (d)rain!