Rain in the urban daytime

Where I live in Chennai, living space is quickly running out. Because buildings have been squeezed into the smallest of spaces, the municipality has prohibited builders from constructing anything more than six floors or so. What we have now is nothing short of a "shopping hamlet": the city's busiest shopping venue, South Usman Road, is a few steps from my door, and every day, millions of people drive in via small tributary veins to reach the shops and hundreds of houses surrounding it.

[caption id="attachment_21162" align="aligncenter" width="476" caption="Soacha, near Bogota (Where I live, the houses form a hive and the walls are painted anything from nauseating grey to blinding pink)"][/caption]

My house is positionally the backward-most: there are many more residences above mine, beside mine, ahead of mine, and more are coming up behind mine. Compound walls rise and fall at awkward locations; at one point, it disappears for about five feet before showing up again. The section, I hear, was knocked out because it is a popular spot for playing cricket, with each half of the pitch on either sides of the wall. Clotheslines are suspended from one window on the second floor of one building to a parapet on the fourth floor of another building. Those on the third floor whose "view" stood obscured took revenge by flicking the better-looking shirts.

Smack in the middle of this chaos is a large Azadirachta indica, a neem tree of the mahogany family, taking up a small section of land that pushed the parking slots around it into a bulge. Instead, bikes are now propped up against stairways, windows, the doors of houses whose people have gone on vacation (someone's always on vacation), and in drainage pools that have run dry.

The only thing all of this changes is the sound of rain. When it's pouring, no matter how hard I strain my ears, I can't hear the telltale white noise, the cacophonous medley of a million droplets crashing down on mud and grass and rock. I can't spot a droplet against the dark grey skies and trace it all the way down to its demise, and I can't aspire to watch rivulets gather strength and join a meandering boa of dirtied freshwater on the road.



But this is a universe I enjoy living in. I'm not going to root for a rollback of faster urbanization because I know that houses matter more than the sound of rain, and I know that urbanization itself isn't the problem as much as the growing need for such houses. This is rain in the urban daytime, where the best sound is when I hear the water from the open terrace drain through a pipe provided for just that, pouring out loudly on the neighbour's doorstep.

I'm not saying the sound of rain is a luxury. In fact, I'm saying the sound of rain is just not that: it's a mundane fact that doesn't make a difference in my life. The sounds and sights of this world are sounds and sights because we deemed them so. Now, the times are changing, there are different problems that demand solving, lifestyles that demand different thinking. This change in the way we think essentially is a change of our environmental consciousness.

The sparrows didn't fly away because my demand for a house lead to the manufacture of an asbestos sheet for a makeshift roof, a motorcycle whose parts were flown in from Germany or Japan, a plot of land cleared and the dust whipped into the air, or a hundred litres of petrol that had to be drawn out of an Arabian oil-field, shipped to India and distributed in Chennai so I could drive to work. They didn't fly away because my presence in the city demanded all these necessities but because such are the necessities I can demand at all.

If I'm going to do my bit for the environment, I'm not going to do it so I can bring back the sparrows, reclaim the dense green foliage or see squirrels jump on the clotheslines. If going to do my bit for the environment, I'm going to have to live in a city, chase away the sparrows, build clotheslines that confuse squirrels, know it's raining by looking at the sky and then the drain-pipe, and meet all my needs, and then, once I'm equipped with knowledge and resource, set out to do something constructive. I'm part of the problem by default because I have to partake of its advantageous collateral.

Everyone likes to take capitalism to town when it comes to how it's messed up the environment, but capitalism has nothing to do with it. Whoever is the cause of a problem will find himself in the best position to solve it, and that holds true even in this case: the one most equipped to bring the sparrows back is not me, and it most definitely is not my need of a motorcycle. The one most equipped is the maker of the motorcycle. Only at the conception is any thought meted out to implication: I have not created a demand for motorcycles but one of transportation, and giving me the choice - "take the bus or buy a scooter" - doesn't mean I have assumed the burden, too.

I quite enjoy the rain like this, no longer allowed an open air of passage. This way, it doesn't get everywhere, but only where it is allowed to go - into pipes, down slopes, through slits and grills, slowed over ridges, coursing down flutes, collected into depressions and let out into a sanctuary where it won't encourage moss-gathering or rust-forming. It is a controlled and utilitarian environment not because I hate the rain but because it is the only place where, if I slip and fall, I won't fall over a wall, against a clothesline, on a motorcycle, or through the window of the house next door.