As I write this, the monsoon is raging. And I mean RAGING. By all accounts the monsoon was late to arrive this year, by about three weeks. And when it did finally arrive it brought with it a force that we already know was too much for our window frames but which also turns out to be too much for the local school system.
Jasper has had two monsoon days off school so far, and we aren’t even a quarter of the way through the season. When I first heard that his school was going to be closed, I felt a flurry of excitement, as I might have done whenever I heard that rare and precious term ‘snow day’ when I lived in London. That is, until I realised that a monsoon day here doesn’t mean that I can spend the morning being paid to watch movies in bed before skating on over to the pub at opening time: it means I have to parent. At least until Jasper’s nanny manages to fight her way onto and out of a crowded, delayed train.
School closures here are announced by the state government. The news tends to spread online at around 10 or 11pm, attached to an alert of either Amber or Red severity status, and then it is the responsibility of each school to relay the message to their students, or in the case of students as young as Jasper, to the parents of their students. While the whole city is under alert, it’s only schools that close, sadly. Dylan doesn’t get a duvet day because of some heavy rain. He continues to dig holes and pour concrete. (Not actually, of course. He sits in a nice, dry office and watches someone else dig holes and pour concrete.) There are a few reasons that they close schools: many students take the school bus each day and the government doesn’t want to be blamed for a flotilla of school buses bobbing around the streets of Mumbai with the students trapped inside; many of the teachers live on the outskirts of Mumbai where the flooding is far worse than in the city centre and so they struggle to make it to work; the roads turn to rivers after a very heavy downpour and uncapped manholes become unseen deathtraps under the fast-flowing, chai-coloured water. One news article I saw asked for people to stop stealing the grids from the top of manholes; an act as mysterious as it is sadistic. Apparently, the government didn’t come up with the initiative to close schools all by themselves - a tragic day some ten odd years ago when as many as a thousand people (not all students) died, many trapped in stranded, waterborne cars, taught them to take precautions rather than relive that day.
The joke here is that the surest way to guarantee a sunny day is for the government to close the schools. The first time the school closure happened, this held true. But yesterday, when Jasper enjoyed his second rainy day off, we sprung another new leak in our living room, so the risk was rightly assessed. Whatever ‘fix’ they made the last time it monsooned indoors appears to have simply shifted the problem across by one window. And not only that, but there is also now a waterfall on many of our windows where the raindrops used to gather. It’s very atmospheric when it’s the window right in front of my desk and I am sure some people would pay a lot of money for an eternal waterfall feature but, for me, it mostly reminds me why we are increasingly excited about moving out.
This monsoon is undoubtedly worse than last year’s: last year Jasper didn’t have a single day of school closure; last year the wind didn’t howl round the tower as angrily as it is right now; last year Dylan didn’t get trapped at the shopping mall. OK, so the last one isn’t entirely the fault of the monsoon. It’s the fault of Dylan and I finally acting upon our 2023 New Year’s Resolution, in July, on the exact same day the monsoon arrived. What was our New Year’s Resolution, you might well ask. To go out for a dinner date. That’s it. I think we considered stipulating a frequency like ‘once a month’, or even a very ambitious ‘once a week’, but we settled on simply trying to go out for dinner. And until July, we had done fabulously badly and had not been out for any meals at all besides when Tony was visiting in January. We returned from Jersey full of enthusiasm for dinners out and determination to make a go of our resolution.
I booked a nearby hotspot called Bastian. Most restaurants here will do two seatings per night and the earlier one is considerably easier to book than the later one. Naturally, we went for the early one. Once you book a table at a suitably popular restaurant, they call you every couple of days to remind you to be on time: on pain of death. OK, maybe not quite on pain of death but they do tell you they will give away your table if you don’t materialise within 15 minutes of the booking time. This is entirely reasonable to me, but by Indian standards and to people running on IST (Indian Standard Time - on which a bride and groom are all but expected to show up a full three hours late to their own wedding), this is downright cruel. We witnessed one party being shooed away from their reservation having missed it by more than half an hour and the hangry spokesperson for the group was most put out. Anyone who knows Dylan and me will know that we are never late. If anything, we are annoyingly early. If I am not the first person through the door anywhere here in India I consider myself late. I enjoy the calls reminding me to be on time and proudly accept the raised eyebrows and ‘oh, you’re here already’ expression on the maitre d’s face when we show up ten minutes early.
On the occasion in question, when Dylan got trapped at the mall, Dylan and I had been enjoying a day of pampering: well-earned by him, less so by me, perhaps. After our 90 minute Thai foot massage, Dylan headed for a long-overdue haircut. I left him at the mall and went home to change for dinner, expecting to see his face (all of it and even his ears, for the first time in weeks) an hour later. But in that hour, Mumbai turned from dustbucket to mud bath. Even if he had remembered an umbrella, or could have purchased a shower cap to protect his newly coiffed hair, Dylan would have been hard pushed to make it home without swimming. The skies opened and dumped the extra three weeks worth of greedily hoarded rain onto Mumbai. Down and down it came, round and round it swirled: down and round and round and down. The winds picked up and joined the rumpus, ripping make-shift scaffolding from the sides of buildings and tearing down precarious tree branches.
While this was happening, I was merrily drying my hair and pondering my cocktail order, ignorant to Dylan’s increasingly exasperated phone calls. Seven missed calls later, I picked up my phone and, at the same time, took in the meteorological mayhem outside the window. There is no romance in monsoon dating when the date in question is someone who you would quite happily sit next to on the sofa in your PJs for the foreseeable future. But neither Dylan nor I wanted to be the one to cancel our long-awaited date: we had lined up Jasper’s nanny to stay late, I had already prepared his dinner, done my make-up and dried my hair. Dylan, on the other hand, was huddled under the awning of a shopping centre, looking a million dollars up top with his fancy new hair do while the rain soaked upwards towards his knees from the bottom of his trousers. Whichever way we looked at it, he needed to leave the mall. And we also needed to have something for dinner. So I gathered some clothes for him, asked the driver to pick me up ten minutes earlier than originally planned and set off to scoop up my soggy date on the way to the restaurant.
Dylan is a master of the backseat outfit change, I will give him that. I doubt anyone at the restaurant would have noticed his damp socks and I hoped that my sequin trousers would have deflected attention from both our slightly pained ‘I really just want to be at home’ expressions. We took our seats, didn’t complain when they then moved us to a different table so that our initial perch could be offered up to a heavily groomed gloss of hairdos we can only assume have higher social standing than a couple of bedraggled westerners, and finished eating and drinking well before our allotted two hour slot came to an end. We headed home and assumed our preferred positions: on the sofa, in our PJs, both fully aligned to the fact that our plan to start going on date nights in the middle of the monsoon was a very bad one.
Still, that didn’t stop us trying again the following weekend. This time, we chose a speakeasy-style place, also not far from our home, called Slink and Bardot. It sells itself as a ‘kitchen and craft cocktail bar’ offering ‘flavours without borders’ and the photos made it look like a suitably cosy spot (read: no windows) to hide from the monsoon which, on this occasion, appeared to have taken the night off. As we directed our driver towards the Coast Guard, the nearest landmark to our destination, he grew increasingly nervous and increasingly unwilling to follow our instructions. ‘Are you sure you want to go here?’ he asked at first. And then when we nodded an excited ‘yes, just a bit further that way’, he followed up with a more forceful ‘We can’t drive down here. The road is not good and the area is not good. It is a fishing area, the people are not good, it’s very dangerous. When I was a taxi driver we were not allowed to drive inside this area.’
I’ll admit, I didn’t get all dressed up to be shanghai’d onto a fishing boat, but the map was definitely sending us towards the very same area that appeared to be giving our driver quite the attack of the heebie-jeebies. We double checked the map and then called the restaurant. Sure enough, we were in the right place. Tucked inside what looked like a warehouse on the corner of what can only be described as a slum, was Slink and Bardot. The driver still refused to drive right up to it, for fear of getting stuck on a one-way road surrounded by fishermen, so we walked the last few strides under the watchful eyes of the security guards, and no doubt, to the complete indifference of the fishing community.
I was immediately seduced by the ambiance: flickering, moody candle-effect lighting, velvet upholstery, cuban rhythms and jungle motifs on dark painted walls behind oversized rattan chairs. It was a world away from the neighbourhood outside: a world rich in delicious food and spectacular drinks. It was so impressive that we couldn’t help but wonder why on earth they chose such a polarising location. Perhaps the dangers lurking outside made the food taste better inside. Or perhaps our driver was just being excessively cautious. We only know that we enjoyed it, and that we overdid it in the bread department. Luckily we had already wolfed down our ceviches and salads before hitting the beautiful, doughy challah, but we were defeated by a lobster roll. Having been warned as we sat down, ten minutes before our 7pm booking time, that our table would be needed back at 10pm, we politely paid up and waddled out at just after 8:30pm.
Monsoon or no monsoon, we weren’t designed for Mumbai’s late night culture.
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