The rains finally descended this week. The heat is gone. All that remain are humidity and indecision. The well heeled would have their air-conditioners on high and cooling beverages at hand. Others, I mean the vast majority, actually more like the vastest, would have the fans yanked all the way to the highest once they had remembered in early March whether it was one or five that was the highest speed on the dial. You knew where to find pishima, in the home all right, in the afternoon and her daughter, where else but at the pub once the sun went from being yellow to any shade of orange. Now all that is over.
You do not know whether to turn the fan on or off. It is uncomfortable if you turn it on or if you turn it off. Then there is that inverse square law of fan air. The greater the distance you move from the centre of the fan the decrease in air pressure, keeping humidity constant, is always its square. But humidity is never constant. It might rain, and rain, and rain. Or the clouds will just hang.
Then you never know whether to take the umbrella or leave it. Statistical research has proven beyond any doubt that it is 2.387 times more likely to rain when you leave your umbrella back home than if you don’t. That still does not leave me any wiser whether I should lug one to work or not. And will it ever open when I really want it to. For those who drive around splashing ditch-water on umbrella folks, our city does not allow for certainties. If you decide to take Camac Street, it will get flooded. Or may be it will not. If it has rained in the early morning and you think the lane by your house should be the best way, it could well be. And then may be not. The drains were not cleaned. It was election time, folks.
For the driving kind, and thank the road gods I am not one of them, it gets even worse. They seemed to know till just last week where the biggest potholes were. This week on it is a memory game. You drive by the pavement and before you know you are in a crater. The not driving kind, that infernal nephew, always knew there was a crater. He thinks he has a crater GPS system in place. He asks you to move closer to the tram tracks. If you ram the car chamber into a hole, you moved too close to the tracks. If you avoided any and drove your jalopy as if on a racetrack, it is because he told you how.
But it is not only such things like roads. It is even mangoes. Earlier one was sure that one could eat them till one’s guts or gills gave way. Now, the perpetually constipated uncle with his perennial nostrums may well opine that mangoes after rains should be taken with milk and that too before the sun sets or the moon rises. His wife, always the contrarian, is more likely to suggest that her husband never knew his mangoes from his jackfruits and never will, and all that rains mean is that langras should give way to daseris. It will take a couple of days for you to decide whom to believe. By then the prices would show a northward movement, as the analysts say.
If all this is not enough, there comes the news that we will have both Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechury as our Rajya Sabha MPs. So one is not sure whether they are sticking to the letter of the law or its spirit because at one time they opposed the letter because it was against the spirit and now they are with the letter but against the spirit. Some say Brinda is as Bengali as any Moushumi or Tumpa, but it was Sitaram who was heard talking in Bangla. But that is none of my, or even your, business because we don’t get to choose. Thank God, sorry Marx, at least there is no uncertainty there. Might as well open the windows and go to bed. But will the mosquitoes come or do they take 15 days once the puddles stay to get that vile bug in them that will get me?
