The sun would probably be out by the time you read this, but it is still raining in Chennai as I write, and I am reminded of an old saying in Hindi — I will give the translation straightaway — that one whose mouth gets burned by hot milk drinks even buttermilk very cautiously.
It’s being raining for the past two days and I remain undecided whether to enjoy the sound and sight of these unseasonal showers, or to worry. December 2015, when Chennai nearly sank, is behind us by not even six months.
For me, however, the memories of January 2001 are equally alive — that was when I moved to Chennai, and first impressions are always lasting — and sometimes I find it difficult to believe its transformation from being water-starved to water-scarred.
Back then, in the flat I lived in, water came only for 30 minutes in the morning, that too in the tap in the balcony. I had bought a large plastic vessel, which I had placed under the tap in the balcony, and I would leave the tap half-open before going on sleep. Early one morning, I was rudely woken up by the incessant ringing of the bell. Opening the door, I found a long queue of my neighbours — the queue descending down the staircase — waiting to have a word with me.
“People are struggling for a single drop of water, and your bucket is overflowing for the last 20 minutes!” the secretary, wearing nothing but a veshti , shouted at me. From then on, sometimes I would wake up early to collect water, and sometimes order extra cans of drinking water to bathe.
In early 2005, my landlord decided to sell the flat. He first made the offer to me: a one-bedroom flat right on North Usman Road for a measly Rs. 5 lakh. After I declined, he put an ad in the paper and told me that if prospective buyers came to take a look, I should not tell them that the building had a “water problem”. I did exactly the opposite, because I did not want the flat to find buyers so that I could stay on. Finally, a broker bought it over and hiked the rent by 10 per cent.
In December 2005, it rained so heavily that Chennai got rid, once and for all, of its image of being water-short. Rents shot up, the real-estate market boomed, and the city, almost overnight, was transformed into a concrete jungle, with no allowances being made for Nature’s idiosyncrasies.
Nature was unforgiving when it struck back exactly 10 years later. Nearly 300 people died and more than one lakh — rich and poor — had to temporarily abandon their homes as the city got flooded. The worst sufferers were those who may look rich but are actually poor — the EMI-paying middle-class — many of whom had to start life from scratch once the water receded after destroying their hard-earned luxuries, from the car to the washing machine.
And now it is raining again. I know of a man, living in Kotturpuram, who hasn’t slept in the last two nights because of the sound of rain. He hasn’t gone to work either, fearing that he would find his home submerged on returning from work. Last December, he and his wife and their only child had to be rescued by the Coast Guard as floodwaters submerged their nest.
There must be countless people like him in Chennai who now get scared by the very sound of rain — a sound that, until the other day, was music to their ears. Universally, rain inspires poetry, but in Chennai, sadly, it now strikes fear. It is going to be a while, perhaps many years, before the city rediscovers the romance in the rains.
