Torrents in the living room
Just wait until he breaks free, "warned Arun, our Indian landlord, referring to the monsoon." If you're not careful, torrents will soon be rushing through your living room! "I looked incredulously into the mumbles of Mumbai, which had not dropped a drop for nearly nine months, the sun was shining, there was no breeze, the Indian Ocean on our doorstep rested quietly. "Oh, a few showers do not bother us. Here in Hamburg it feels like it's raining 300 days a year, "I said casually, but when the big rain broke loose, I could not even see the dramatic cloud front: Arun had imposed on us Vishnu, a small wiry awning maker, who was all ours Vishnu constructed strange rainbeams made of bamboo piles and bricks and moored the storm sails on huge rusty nails.
If you're not careful, torrents will soon rush through your living room!
Monsoon, monsoon. The same gift every year. Throughout India, the natural spectacle is expected with excitement and joy. Because the big rain is vital. In the drought-stricken hinterland, the peasants go to prayer processions, in a Himalayan village women are said to have even danced naked and smeared with black paint in a trance to encourage the Hindu rain god to action. Also in our neighborhood you have prepared yourself. The fishermen on the beach at Juhu pulled boats garnished with garlands ashore. Very high, because of the expected spring tides. Our shoemaker, whose tin hut is over an open channel, reinforced the planks and built a plastic canopy. Underneath, he sits cross-legged, sewing, filing, hammering, and chewing betel, even as the sewage rises scarily under his habitation - proud, as though he lives on the Grand Canal.
So, 1.1 billion Indians are prepared - only the city administration of Mumbai is not. It displaces the monsoon like an annoying appointment for a dentist. After nine months of drought, she probably no longer knows what real monsoon fuses feel like in an 18 million city. When the water from the unclean sewage system, which dates back to the English colonial era, overflows and is waist-high in the streets. When cars are washed away, dwell apartments and even sink the red double decker buses in the mud man high. Mumbai is not built like Rome on seven hills, but on seven swamps.
The head of the Civil Protection Office sounded: "This time we are prepared." But nobody really believed that. More than 400 people drowned in the catastrophic flood on July 26, 2005, many of them drowning in their own car on their way home from work. And it would have been even worse if some slum dwellers had not bravely plunged into the floods and rescued their wealthier citizens and provided them with hot tea and biscuits.
Today we go to the diner in shorts.
My first monsoon rain fell on a Thursday, not particularly violent, but it did coincide with heavy flooding that pushed the Indian Ocean floods inland. That submerged the main street of Juhu, the neighborhood of the Bollywood stars. The traffic jammed for hours, I put on flip-flops and waded to my bank branch. Past the villa of movie star Amitabh Bachchan, sheltered from the rain by tent-like constructions. Inside, he was sitting in the dry, but at his door the water was knee-high.
On Friday, it was sailing all day long. Too much for the financial and film metropolis, after all, the most modern city in India. Tens of thousands of commuters waited in vain at the S-Bahn stations: the already chronically overcrowded trains were stuck on flooded tracks, because the railway administration had failed to liberate the Siele on the routes of garbage and plastic. A freshly tarred piece of access road on the highway crashed. Worst of all was the location at the airport. Because of poor visibility, a runway was closed because Mumbai has no ground radar.
The monsoon hit the bullseye - right into the city's Civil Protection Office
On Saturday, gale-force gusts swept the rain masses horizontally against our storm sails. In the evening we were invited to dinner with neighbors. My husband and I briefly inspected our wardrobe. But after looking at the puddles on our street, I said, "Today we go to the diner in shorts." Our friends received us like heroes from an action movie. Passed through!
On Sunday we did not go out at all. The monsoon hit the bullseye: right into the city's civil protection department. "The city can not even protect itself," mocked the daily "Times of India". Already on Thursday it had rained into the sixth floor of the authority.On Monday, the water stood up to the ankles, office furniture was destroyed, the files softened. "We learned about the leak three days ago," said an officer with disarming honesty, "but the engineer was out of the house, so we did not know what to do."
Three times we almost fell out of bed at night because Vishnus storm sails, which had been torn off the storm, slammed against the windows. Unhindered, the rain poured through the leaky frames and cracks in the walls. "Leak in the ship," my husband said stoically, trudging half-naked at the balcony to repair the damage with the flashlight between his teeth while I wiped towels inside.
Slowly, after ten weeks, I long for sun again, have enough of the damp bedding, muff and mold in the closets. And of flip flops as evening shoes. Yesterday fishermen sacrificed flower garlands and coconuts to stop the rain from biting and biting the fish again. And today the first tentative rays of sunlight shimmer through the sky.
