Rain and I

The best things in life, I have come to realize, are always very brief and transitory. The first sips of cold water when thirsty, the brief moments of triumph when you crack a difficult question, the last bits of chocolate in Cornettos ice-cream, the last forty or so seconds in Schubert's Ave Maria. My favorite kind of weather is the 15-20 minutes just before it begins to rain. The sky changes colour faster than at dusk or dawn, the breeze is swift and cool, there is a sense that it could start raining any second, of anticipation or apprehension depending on whether you want it to rain or not. Then, the rains come down and at times, for me, it spoils everything. 

Someone told me today that she thinks that she shares a special relationship with rain as it always rains on her birthday. Come to think of it, I cannot remember any birthday of mine either when it hasn't rained for at least a little bit. And, yet my relationship with rain has always been a turbulent one. I love to watch it rain. I like the sound of it. I like the little splatters it makes on concrete, as a kid I used to pretend they were dancing dwarfs with a life-span of a fraction of a second, one emerging and disappearing immediately, with the next one following on its heels. I love the idea of a raaga like Megh-Malhar or Amritavarshini bringing about rain. Rains, I find provide the best sort of backdrop to a certain kind of writing. Stories need their own weather, just like they need they own music. Dark themes need the night, horror need the chill, the ambiguous ones require cloudy weather. Maybe its a reflection on too many Yash Chopra movies at an impressionable age, but I think love stories need the rain. 

But I hate being in the rain. I hate getting caught in the rain, the grainy dirty feel on my chappals, the splash and the muck and most of all, droplets dripping down my hair to my forehead. I have watched people getting drenched in the rain and enjoying it with feeling ranging from curious amusement to exasperation to distaste to perplexity. Its something I have never understood. My love for rain is that of a homophobe for a friend of the same gender - at an arm's length. Rain foils plans, causes road blocks and gives you a cold. They are meant to be watched from the protection of indoors, preferably if they are of the cats and dogs variety, not the effeminate and persistent Bangalore drizzle. But I still like the monsoons, mostly for those 15-20 minutes before it rains.