A Kerala Monsoon Tale

How do I describe thine beauty!!! I can’t so I’ll share a pic with a story instead.

Every year, without fail, on 1st June, I remember my childhood, and remember the Kerala monsoon in all its glory.

Thunderous rain that would come down in buckets, loud, non stop, for days together, without a break or respite, filling canals and ponds, bringing down electricity and telephone poles, drenching everything in its path….

As a child I remember mushrooms growing on the corners of the wooden swings in public parks and benches, and sometimes, we wouldn’t have electricity for days!

It was always the first day of school, of a new academic session, that would be the first casualty of this rain. For some reason, our academic years started on 01 June and that’s the day the monsoon would burst out of the clouds onto God’s Own Country. I never. understood why they didn’t change the date.

All of us children, my friends and siblings, would be ready in new uniforms (or old uniforms with freshly opened seams, to cover our knees), bags with books freshly covered with brown paper neatly labelled, with new shoes (we’d just need a new pair every year, much to the annoyance of my father), and anxious hearts – who’s going to be the class teacher this year – waiting for our rickshaw to arrive and take us to school. Within minutes, we’d realise that there was no way anyone would make it to school in the downpour and invariably, the first day of school would also be a holiday!

As we grew older, the monsoons became erratic and it wouldn’t necessarily rain on the first day of school. But when I think of the monsoon, I only remember the holidays and the fury of those rains.

The monsoon reached Kerala yesterday and seeing the photographs of those dark skies in Kochi (Cochin) filled me with intense nostalgia and the desire to be that little school girl again!