Akimbo in Bombay Rain.

This post comes delayed, very delayed. K ’s mind has become as erratic as the rains. K awaits a cathartic downpour, but all she receives is a plenitude of a trickle.

Rains are magical to Mumbai, they are the witches Morrigan summons every year to protect this Venusian mistress. The smell of the city is like no other, its moods unmatched. Her pendulum nature is quite an addiction.

A walk from Churchgate station to Kala Godha at 8.30 am sipping a cup of hot coffee in a consistent drizzle, gives you a lesson in love. The fragrance of human commotion is visible and forgiven, for the sheer pleasantness of weather. The over looming aroma of coffee and gudan garm; alternating with the sharp smell of cutlets and samosas submerged in fuming palm oil, to the crisp fragrance of freshly baked bread, and somewhere at an unexpected juncture you can smell god in potted mogras.

The wake-up calls from the Koyal, the man who jogs at the oval from 8.15 to 8.45 every day, the septuagenarian on the 3^rd floor of Court View stands from 8 am onwards by the window watching grumpy, sleepy migrants haul their bodies to work every morning.

How can one miss the man who changes his wind-chimes every monsoon? (The earliest I recall was a large bronze sun; a ball of shimmering gold. The next came, long hollow bamboo shoots, making odd khadak, khadak sounds, annoying but familiar to the heart. Presently the aluminum/steel trinket brought from a $1 store has taken over. it hangs in there, on the so called balcony - a testimony of a Chinese worker's craft that made its journey into a South Bombay apartment.

(A walk across the Oval deserves to be a stand-alone experience to be narrated)

The silence in the Quila court corridors is far more pleasant than the joy of justice at vormittag. The Army restaurant, where no defense personnel ever ate, has opened its shutters as a scrunched child labor swabs the floors with hot water. Across the lane, stands a muted, large, beautiful structure with never opened rotted gates. On its broad stone steps, drug addicts, infested with flies sleep away, abandoning the city’s mirth.

As K walks across welcoming the Rhythm house only for its architecture, she nods at a familiar set of brown eyes. He silently stands at the opposite corner, looking at the black horse painted across a pub, named after a whore- house street. He smiles at her, she responds, they talk about a new element that they discovered in the horse that day. ‘It is in motion’ if you observe carefully. She agrees.

They part ways, he heads to the blindingly blue synagogue and she disappears into the opaque beige lanes.