Monsoons of Calcutta...

Jokhon nirobe dure, darao eshe

Jekhane path benkeche…

Tomay chhute chaowar muhurtora

Ke jaane ki abeshe disha haara

Ke jaane ki abeshe disha haara…

The most cherished of my memories lie in the monsoons of Calcutta…

It was the 2 monsoons of Presidency that changed my life… forever…

This post is a symbol for all who feel a part of their lives shall always remain frozen in the fabric of space and time and without which life feels a touch incomplete… and there is a need to visit that part every now and then to make us almost whole again… the innocence of want, the naivety of hope and the imagination of youth…

And the music that takes us back there…

The song above makes me want to connect with ‘me’ again all those years back… makes me want to touch that fabric again… find peace in that which is behind the curtain of all these years…

Monsoons of Calcutta… the intoxicating smell of rain against the half-baked brick and mortar of old houses… that have stories of so many monsoons to tell… the lazy expectation of youth unabated by the dullness of the rainy day… the birth of innumerable romantics with the incidence of the first drop on a cloudy day…

It all began with my first introduction to ‘that feeling’... the ability of human imagination to render a person completely useless… the lazy evenings… listening to bangla music on those FM channels… songs from the heart for the heart… soft and delicate music interspersed with loud and thumping music all towards the same cause… against the pleasant damp environment with the pitter patter of the drops on the soft rustling leaves… bringing such pleasure and pain all at once…

Those were the lost days… ‘Reality’ didn’t matter… a lazy beautiful dark desire-filled world… and the subconscious unrelenting imagination creating an emotion ridden lonely lovely world… painted with shades of grey with the sparks of orange…

In between the evenings often lay glorious times spent with the crowd… singing… listening… taking elaborate walks round the dimly lit campus… thinking…

Thinking… life suddenly opened out in front of my eyes… it was beautiful… the sudden expansion of the horizon… the natural high of the ‘suddenly’ conscious… the ability to see from back to beyond…

I was a changed man… I was finally ‘me’…

By the time the second monsoon could arrive, life was moving… Having found the ability to see clearly meant the hurt was a billion times worse… but all that was now past… life had moved on… I had moved on… there materialized new found interest, beauty and above all Hope…

Empowered with the wisdom of the previous monsoon, I was sure… sure of going for broke… nothing else mattered anyway… Of course this time the monsoon was also accompanied by Floyd… the dark room now had a second master… Rising and falling emotions to the undulating notes, ‘comfortably numb’, sure as hell, made me ‘feel’ everything that was there to be sensed…

Along with that came numerous exchanges… sitting by the terrace… the dark sky only lit up by the excited flashes of lightning, and the sound of torrential rainfall lost in a voice… the voice that could be sweeter than the mood and more musical than the music…

As evening became night, and night became day, I realized ‘us’…

So that’s the story of the 2 monsoons of my life… One that helped find ‘me’, and the other that helped to found ‘us’…

Sitting here looking into the Mumbai night… almost as damp… I am missing the enticing intoxicating smell, missing my ‘home’, my terrace and cherishing the Calcutta Monsoon… and life…