Chp 181. Of rain, downpour and swimming

“Dude... I hear it’s starting to rain a lot over there in Mumbai.”

“Unfortunately yeah, things are really bad down here.”

“How bad? Any case of flooding like last year?”

“Yesterday the water came up to our ankles!!!”

“Really? So the water’s ankle-deep on the streets?”

“I’m talking about my house!”

“Oh!! ... Well... considering last year, I guess it’s still not that bad, right?”

“We live on the seventh floor.”

“....”


Yup, that is me, always trying to use humor as a defense mechanism whenever I feel disappointed, especially when I know there’s nothing I can do change what’s bothering me. Hardly five days into the rainy season and many lives are already lost. Such a sad sad situation down here.

I really don’t think it was this bad during the other years I was here in Mumbai. I remember the rain, but I am pretty sure when it rained those days, at least in the initial phase, it never rained continuously like it is raining right now. Right now it’s pouring non-stop. It feels like the last time I won a draught-beer drinking competition and had to spend the next ten minutes peeing (and burping and farting), wondering whennn the hell it was going to stopppp...

Some people fear the rain because it leads to floods which prevent them from going to work or earning their daily livelihood. Others are simply hydrophobic because they don’t know how to swim.

I am not afraid of drowning because I CAN swim. I was a champion “swimmer” back in school, but only at the shallow-end: Being an athlete, I could out-run everybody in that section. Yeah I did say out-RUN. But when it comes to real swimming, hehehe... let’s just say I have the notorious reputation of coming last in every aquatics event held back in school and college.

The main reason why I can swim but suck at it is because I wear contact lens. I’ve lost 6 lenses under water so far, two of them during the same water-polo match back in school. And I still remember that day so clearly, especially when my team-mates Vivek, Ujjal, Boppana and Sathish dived under the water in search of my lenses!!! Man, we really were an extremely optimistic lot. Or rather a boneheaded group of friends

That was a very expensive water-polo match And we were playing for THIRD place! And we still lost on top of that. That was the day I promised never to play water-polo again and stuck to running around at the shallow-end. It was... fun.

And don’t even suggest I should have played water-polo without my lenses. My power is -5.75 so in the confusion of ball scrambling and water splashing everywhere, there is a good chance of me blindly trying to slam towards my own goal!

Anyway, now I wonder how my life would have been like had I possessed normal eyesight. I would have definitely become a better swimmer. I would have enjoyed all those visits to water theme parks much more. And maybe, there’s also a slight chance that I would have been “luckier” when it comes to relationships instead of spending most of my free time blogging while other guys are scoring. But alas, those who live by the blog, die by the blog. Touché.

I hope this rain stops soon. EURO 2008 is going on and I dare not watch any of the matches at my friends’ places because I don’t know how long I would be stuck there due to the rain. And watching alone at home isn’t that much of a fun as watching with friends, unless I am drunk. And I don’t drink any more, ergo I’m back to my problem about being bored.

At least one good thing we’re getting out of this rain is that we don’t have to switch on our ACs any more because the climate is extremely pleasant. And this coincides perfectly with the fact that Reliance Energy had just hiked the electricity by 10% here in Mumbai due to the ongoing inflation.

But still, I hope you go away soon, rain. Things are starting to get real wet around here, and it’s not the good kind