Of Mangoes and Memories

I travel everyday to work in a bus. It is a white bus with clear glass panes. I usually sit by the window, on the last seat, at the very corner, so that I may all the better see the river when we are on the bridge. It has been very wet the last few days. We have been having what I can only call English weather. It rains at ungodly hours and in inordinate amounts, with neither rhyme nor reason, nor any intelligent design. The drops are all of varied size and neither in keeping with the mood nor the time of day.

Like Shei Shonagon, I am writing of and analysing the weather and I feel it is worthwhile, for it is something that is always going to be out there and is probably one of the most primitive, primal influences on our lives. When I abstract from my life, all things contrived and art-ificial, I am left with very little to talk about but the weather and hence it is oddly calming to be conscious of the weather around me and talk about it. Maybe the conveniences of modern architecture that have served to insulate us from the weather have done us a disservice, by heaping another spadeful of the earth of comfort on the grave of our true selves. The weather still remains outside our homes, howling like a gale or calm as a summer day, carrying on irrespective of us not noticing its presence. I have always thought of weather as a big old mad woman, with gray locks and dressed in patched rags, shaken by alternate bouts of fury and benevolence, of lethargy and energy. Incidentally, that is how God was pictured in a book, I think Jose Saramago's The Gospel According To Jesus Christ, although it may have been an angel or a god, and it was a man, but other than that all the particulars were the same. Well this Weather Goddess i conjure up may have a bit of Diana in her, Diana of the three faces, three in one and one in three. I probably have modelled her on Diana the old crone, the third fury, the third sister who cuts our threads of life. It is to her that the weather belongs and she does not care that the days of Shonagon are past and my days are come. She does not seep into our lives through paper screens and chinks in the woodwork, concrete serves to keep her out. My Goddess still rages on barely noticing that I rarely notice her.

But I have been noticing her quite a lot these days. It has been raining as I said and it rains without any propriety or aesthetic sense. You expect a fine drizzle in the morning, with the sun just over the horizon and a bit of dappled and wet sunlight on the grass, like fresh cream on toast, ill formed and fluid light that makes me chary to step in it for fear of slipping. Instead what I get in the mornings are dark heavy clouds and a steely grey light that casts a pall on my mood and makes me hate getting up, and then there is the rain. It rains with obscenely large drops and a dark glumness, a heaviness that is positively surly. And such a downpour is particularly inopportune as it is in the mornings that I have to leave the comforts of my home for the questionable comforts of the Goddess' arms. An invigorating experience no doubt but not one conducive to much comfort, a short euphoria maybe but definitely no great joy when the inevitable cold follows, bringing in its train a runny nose. In the nights when I like to sit in the porch and watch the moon, again am I disappointed as then the goddess decides to bring on fitful showers with a fine drizzle that shows no signs of ever abating. On a dark night it is fitting to have heavy rains with a consistency like that of treacle or liquid shimmering glass, something through which you could not see even if there were light. It accentuates the feeling of loneliness that is the flavour of a dark night, gives it a distinct character, when the rain intensifies the darkness and makes you feel cut off from the rest of the world, covered on all sides in a thick velvet curtain of the colour of dark inky blue, soft and yielding to the touch but impenetrable, immeasurably thick, all encompassing.

I remember the dark nights of my youth when I would watch just such a rain from my bedroom window and feel keenly my loneliness; my being the sole spectator of the spectacle, I being the only one partaking on a dark night of a feast of the senses and the mind, prepared only for me. The taste of the experience still stays with me to this day... I have forgotten a lot of my youth but those long nights and the sound of the rains on leaves in the garden remains. Indian rains are always heavy rains... those delicate drizzles are essentially foreign, English maybe, they have a nagging quality, particularly in the night when they obscure the sky and don’t relent as a heavy shower does after it has run its course... and then what joy as the full moon rises and I walk out barefoot, the porch wet and slippery under my foot and the effluvia of the rain, leaves and prematurely fallen fruit crunch under foot and a shimmering silvery light like the robes of Diana, Goddess, covers all. And I remember and will forever remember those nights of my youth, when it would rain on summer nights and the mango tree was laden with fruit, not yet ripe but large and hard like pebbles and the rain would pelt the fruit down into the courtyard and later in the moonlit night as I would walk out to reconnoitre, I would find the courtyard paved with the living stones of bruised green fruit. I would never be able to resist walking out on that carpet, oozing the characteristic scent of green mangoes and my feet would be coated in the resin that the bruised fruit prematurely broken oozes. Ah such joy. Rarely have I felt so alive.

But maybe I can still find something to appreciate about the morning drizzles. As I sit by my window in the bus and the tiny drops hit the pane, first slowly, a drop here, a drop there, and then the volume increases. The world suddenly grows dappled, maculated, speckled with little light coloured drops. Drops the colour of glass, like little drops of light imprisoned in a glass phial, and of a strange sharpness, crowned with a tip, almost painful in its pointed ness. Painful because it brings back memories of youthful afflictions of chicken pox, when I was similarly dappled and speckled with spots, sharp, painful and pointed, although the spots were of an angry red, making me look like a monster of the deep. It is as if the world is afflicted with the pox and grows spotted and then I feel an overpowering desire to wipe out the drops. The desire to free my vision of this spotted ness is overpowering but I also feel a revulsion at the uncleanness that I am about to touch. Anything that is spotted and maculated is primally associated with uncleanness in my mind, and there is an insane and irrational fear of contagion, as if by touching that pane splattered by rain I will end up transferring to myself those spots that I wish to wipe out. Finally I get over my revulsion and wipe the pane clean and not a moment goes by before the pane is splattered again, but strangely the way the pane gets splattered now in the full force of the rain is exactly the same as it did when it first started raining. First a few drops, a drop here, a drop there, and then the drops covers fresh, clean skin and then before long the whole is covered with spots. And again that internal struggle, whether to wipe or not, and wipe I do, and again it is spotted before long.