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There aren't many rainy Sundays left this year. Mumbai might have spent its last one yesterday. I was driving back home on the Western Express Highway when the skies broke. Mumbai's rain strikes asphalt with an ironsmith's fury, raising sparks and smoky mist. Within minutes, large swathes of road around Vakola got obscured. A quick turn into a flooding, creaking Khar subway, a few more blurred roads, a drive past fisherfolk colonies and a growling sea, and it's home. It's great to be home on a pouring Sunday.
By then, Pritish Nandy had twitted his ode to a rainy city: link to the un-gimmicky and charming 'Beautiful Day' by U2, Bono crooning his heart out on a forlorn runway.
It's a beautiful day/ Sky falls/ Don't let it get away/ You love this town/ Even if it doesn't ring true/ You've been all over/ It's been all over you...
It's been one of the moodiest monsoons. It sulked till the country's new government, festive in its tidal triumph in the polls, was cringing with a crop wipeout, water cuts, the nastiest spike in prices in recent memory, and the economy making a less-than-Complanlike (just about 6 per cent) growth claim. It's started raining again at the tail end. Last week in Delhi, Sachin Pilot told me this might not help grow grains we eat, but it would at least ensure steady meals for cattle late rains fill the fields with chara, or fodder. A healthy livestock may just stop some of our farmers from drinking pesticide this year.
Much rhythm and blues away from the grim hinterland, I tweet the video link of Dylan's unfinished, unreleased outtake from the Blonde on Blonde sessions, 'On a rainy afternoon', a heartbreak song which brings back smithereens of relationships past. Many, including Dylan himself, rate Blonde on Blonde his best work ever. "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my head... that thin, that wild-mercury sound," he had said.
I hear all of it, all over again.
Outside, one could hear Mumbai's roads and shabby infrastructure unraveling by the pouring minute, weakening its politicians' right to ask for votes in little over a month. Will the world's worst-governed metropolis ever get good administrators?
By evening, Mumbai's last Sunday rain had settled in uncertain little puddles, muck flying off them every now and then from passing car and autos. With a late flourish, monsoon is leaving us in the twilight of gloom and expectation.
From Dylan, I switch to Himesh Reshammiya's 'Maan ka Radio'. Sublime to the radio-culous, one would say. Surprise: the guy's nasal twang is gone! There's hope. | 
