Monsoon & Asian people
Monsoon rains and floods continue to wreak havoc in flood-affected regions, displacing thousands of people, destroying thousands of homes, damaging thousands of acres of ready-to-harvest crops and orchards, and destroying connecting roads and bridges.
A monsoon is a seasonal shift in the direction of a region’s prevailing winds or strongest winds. Throughout most of the tropics, monsoons create rainy and dry seasons. The Indian Ocean is most commonly linked with monsoons. Monsoons always go from cold to warm areas.
Every year The Pakistan Meteorological Department issued a high alert in the wake of expected widespread heavy rain and flood in the Monsoon. It does seem worse than the months-long lockdown, not least because the Covid-19 pandemic has not yet ended. The images and videos of what the rain did to the low-lying regions (and it appears like Karachi is one huge low-lying area) show people urgently trying to bail water out of their houses. In one such video, a guy was in tears as he struggled to get his hands on a tiny pump that would suck the water out of his house. Everything the family had saved for a daughter’s dowry was damaged or destroyed.
Every time rain devastates the city, this weird song of denial is sung with regularity; for every anchor or morning show presenter who sings it, a dozen more echo the chorus, a parody of love and pakoras against the backdrop of complete disaster. And it’s total destruction. The rain poured, and the lives of people in the city that were already fragile, held up by bits of cardboard or scrap metal, fell, and then flowed away in the poisonous combination of industrial effluent, raw sewage, and rainfall that had crept into every nook and corner.
There is no one to aid, not even the government. When similar instances occur in Clifton and the Defense Housing Authority, local authorities who normally turn up to check and interview shopkeepers and business owners for even the tiniest building alteration vanish. Also, unseen are the cops, municipal employees, and politicians. To summarize, they have fled in a rush, much like the people of Pompeii who received prior notice of Mount Vesuvius’ impending explosion. It was not their problem if the folks who remained behind suffered and perished.
Some people are considering suing the itinerant cantonment boards and housing authorities. In my opinion, the impact of such a lawsuit is merely to make the weak feel somewhat strong for a brief period of time. It will wilt and decay after that, just like everything else in this city of rain and romance.
People who are safe from the wrath of deadly rains and doom; listen and sing romantic songs in the rainy weather out of the stereotype of rain being the symbol of romance and enjoyment. In Asian (Pakistani & Indian) homes, Pakoray and Monsoons go hand in hand, people in their rooms thinking back, can almost smell the dusty humidity outside, joined open their bedroom window to be greeted by warm monsoon raindrops falling on their face, gracing the space with a breeze alive and therefore the aroma rising from the kitchen below — of pakoras and tea aka “chai”. The time of the year, when the Heavens’ descends and that we finally have what Pakistanis prefer to call beautiful weather. The smell of rain, thunder and lightning are almost synonymous therewith with vegetable pakoras and a brew of strong tea. this can be truly a match made in heaven.
In this weather, the poor suffer the foremost. Those with the parable of rain of romance are unlikely to be able to help Pakistan’s drowning cities, but they will spare everyone living there the misery of getting to pretend that these cruelties wrought upon them must be worn as a badge of honour. The hardship endured once or perhaps twice produces resilience; the relegation of 1 of the most important cities within the world to yearly destruction produces only despair. If you’re trying to find that, then the town has large stores of it, awaiting distribution and disbursement to all or any of those lucky Pakistanis who get to eat pakoras and be romantic when water pours from the sky.
It is time to dropping of this myth of rain and romance. The inhabitants of a dying and devastated city don’t have any time for such pretensions. And since myth-busting is that the call of the instant, allow us to also eliminate the word ‘resilient’ in any sentence or the rest associated with Pakistan and its doom because of the monsoon.