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Monsoons in Lahore

 

After I left Lahore, all I wanted to do was go back. I missed the people, my father’s 

surreptitious singing, my mother’s crow calls to the sabzi-wallah, the sound of bed linens 

rustling as my sisters moved in their sleep, but mostly, my body constricted with an ache for 

the monsoons. Rain in California, when it comes, is so temperate and courteous like 

Americans who smile at everyone on the street. It patters on the asphalt that always looks 

like it was poured yesterday and slides right off. In Lahore, the monsoons were 

stereotypically Punjabi. My father would shake his head at the beastly rains ripping through 

his bougainvillea and sigh, “Chor machaye shor,” this burglar makes a noise. The earthy 

wind whipped across our faces as rain fell in thick massive droplets over tin roofs and 

cement terraces. My sisters and I ran upstairs to greet the rain. Sometimes we even sang in 

the rain. Our mother went looking for us in the rain after she noticed the unscheduled 

silence. We grinned at each other with blue lips and chattering teeth, raising our eyebrows – 

a pact to dance in the rain again as soon as we could get Mama out of the house.

 

All year, water receded from the River Ravi, fishermen fretted, couples walked farther along 

the riverbank to find a canoe for their moonlit wedding sail. And then the monsoons 

descended, tearing across Punjab. Cities tolerated the rain stolidly – once or twice, we heard 

about a motorcyclist driving right into an open manhole and dying, but for the most part, we 

simply saw vehicles filling with water and breaking down in the middle of Mall Road, 

nothing serious. Ravi swelled with surging waters once again. A dam in some remote village 

crumbled. Scores of farms and families washed away. Safe, but shaken in Lahore, 

neighborhood aunties gathered around hawkers and their donkey-carts at the Sunday 

bazaar. They lamented the use of adulterated material in the construction of the doomed 

dam – it was all over the papers – and broke apart ginger root in their hands to examine it 

from the inside. Days later, bloated babies were unearthed from the mud, mosquitoes started 

breeding in the standing water, and the poor began to die all over again, lined up outside 

government hospitals, their blood infested with dengue or malaria or Hep C – too many 

poisons for a poor man in this country. Builders and politicians made pledges toward the 

flood relief effort, curling their bureaucratic mustaches, rubbing their fat bellies, choking 

stacks of rupees in their congested leather wallets, and sipping bottled water from long-

stemmed glasses at charity benefits for victims of the flood with their prim wives who no 

longer loved them.

 

Still, I missed those rains, the full-throated thunder, the insensitive winds, and the clarity of 

the morning after – a few raindrops shedding from freshly picked jasmine, earthworms 

slithering on the garage floor, ghee sputtering in a wok on the stove, Mama making samosas 

because an abrasive draught had whistled through the iron window panes all night, and we 

needed fried comfort food to quell our restive spirits. She fished them out with a slotted 

spoon and placed them on newspapers to dry. The grease seeped into the headlines to 

occlude the number of corpses discovered by rescue workers.