The Heroes Our Rains Bring

Tell me the name of your local meteorologist.

Not the one on your weather reports, not the attractive one with a laser beamer and 3d maps with swirling clouds and smiling suns.

Tell me the name of the person who sits in the local weather office, crouched over a desk, reading numbers on spindly instruments, and who pushes up their glasses to look at a sepia-coloured map with isobars. Bet you can’t.

When I was 14, I knew the local weatherman- Ramanan. All the kids my age knew his name. How do you not know the name of a man whose appearance on TV you had waited for for almost a year?

Every November, when less tropical places in the Northern Hemisphere would bundle up against cold winds and snowfall, the eastern coast of south India would buy cheap umbrellas and raincoats and schools would relax their rules on flip-flops. At the slightest indication of dark clouds, the school-going population,  would switch TV channels to the news, and wait for Ramanan. Soon enough, between the clips of female newsreaders in elaborate Kanchipuram silk saris and gold necklaces, a bespectacled man would appear-seated at his desk, with a map of Tamil Nadu’s coastal areas and the Bay of Bengal behind him. He would point a thin cane at places on the map, to indicate the low pressure zones over the bay, and the path that the northeast monsoon would take before it struck land. And then, the words we have been waiting for- ‘Due to anticipated torrential rainfall, it is advised that schools remain shut in Chennai, Kanchipuram, and Pondicherry today.’

This was before Whatsapp and free internet. This was 2004. SMSes were sent to celebrate the sudden declaration of the holiday. Shoes come off; books that were wrapped in polythene covers before being put in satchels were taken out. Childless neighbours were informed of our presence at home by our mothers. Come lunch time, and we would eat out lunches in the tiffin boxes in which they had been packed in the morning- a meal intended to be consumed in the noise and bustle of school lunch-break was eaten in the gloom of our apartments against the din of a hundred TVs playing a hundred soaps.

The price of jasmines and firecracker flowers went up. The old ladies from the ground floor apartments had to cut their flower-strings in half to make them last longer. The price of vegetables also went up. In summer, water scarcity; during monsoons, rotting produce. My mother went to the grocer at the corner of our street and stocked up on milk and eggs. The milk would be shared amongst the neighbours, not the eggs though- our neighbours thought we were vegetarians; we were asked to encourage that illusion by our landlord, lest we offend our Brahmin neighbours.

At the end of the first drizzle, all the women gathered at the steps of the ground-floor apartments. They chatted, and speculated about the next rains. The boys went to the roof and played cricket. The boy from the next apartment also came, in his veshti (which we joked would prevent him from being stumped out), and little tuft of hair tied at his nape. He was taught Vedas and mantras at home by his father and uncles, and the functioning of schools or lack thereof was of no consequence to him. Us girls also walked on the roof, condescendingly watching the boys at their match, till one of the mothers would ask us to get back inside and away from the eyes of the young men who had begun to gather on the roof of the next building. In the skies, clouds rushed in a hurry, as if being chased by an invisible shepherd from above the seas. Years later, watching the monsoon clouds from the roof of a dormitory building in a university campus, my heart would ache for an unknown, but familiar boy in a red t shirt, the brightness of which stood out in stark contrast against the greys of the buildings and the sky.

At night, the rains came down in all its glory. The shepherd has rested the clouds. By next afternoon, the power went out, and we were told that the subways which connected our neighbourhood to the rest of the city was flooded, isolating us. Milk and newspaper supply lorries had no way to reach us. Even without Ramanan, we knew that the schools would be shut. That night, in a darkness only lit ominously by the lights from the hospital across the road, my mother built a reputation as a good and trustworthy neighbour- she lent candles, bandaids, and Vicks VapoRub to people who lived in our building. But all the while, she wondered aloud if we had to live in this place, where a day’s rainfall would leave people stranded. Where she grew up, monsoon was a month-long event, and no schools would be declared shut. When the neighbours asked her, ‘Is this enough rainfall?’, she smirked.

The next day, the power came back on, and waters receded. Ramanan sat at his desk and told us that schools would be shut for a day more. My friend SMSed me, ‘but the sun is out.’ But Ramanan’s word was supreme. A child squealed in delight from outside because her autorickshaw driver told her that the school was shut. Her mother hastily got her out of the uniform before it was wrinkled.

During monsoons, children found heroes in unlikely persons. One of them was our local meteorologist.