Chapter 16: Monsoon

The monsoon arrives on the second of June, which is three days earlier than the meteorological department predicted and exactly on time by Mumbai's own calendar — Mumbai's calendar being: not a document but a feeling, the feeling that the air has been holding its breath for weeks and that the breath is about to be: released.

I'm at the gym when it starts. Studio A, 6 PM yoga, Sunaina guiding us through a sequence that she's titled "Surrender" — the word that I would have resisted three months ago (surrender was what I'd done for twenty-seven years; I didn't need more practice) but that I now understand differently. Sunaina's surrender is not: giving up. It's: giving in. To the pose. To the breath. To the body's knowledge of what it needs, which is always: more than the mind thinks it does.

We're in savasana — the final resting pose, the pose where you lie on your back and do: nothing, the nothing being the hardest thing you'll do all class because nothing requires you to stop performing, stop achieving, stop being: useful, and just: exist — when the first thunder arrives.

Not distant thunder. Mumbai thunder — the thunder that doesn't warn, that arrives fully formed, the sound equivalent of a door slamming in a cathedral. The sound shakes the studio windows. Someone in the back row gasps. Sunaina doesn't flinch. "Breathe with it," she says. "The storm is: practice."

And then: the rain.

Mumbai rain is not like other rain. Other cities have rain that falls. Mumbai has rain that: arrives. The rain is not weather — the rain is an event, the event that transforms the city from its dry, dusty, heat-ravaged self into something: different. Something that smells of wet earth and relief and the particular petrichor that Mumbai produces when three months of accumulated heat meets: water from the Arabian Sea.

The smell enters the studio through the ventilation. Petrichor — the word I learned from Chetan, who told me it comes from the Greek for "stone" and "blood of the gods," which is: the most accurate description of that smell I've ever heard. The blood of the gods. The divine fluid that the earth releases when the earth is: grateful for rain.

Class ends. We roll up our mats. We walk to the lobby. And we stop.

The lobby has glass doors, and through the glass doors we can see: the monsoon. Not rain but: a wall. A wall of water that has been dropped on Bandra with the subtlety of a tsunami and the persistence of a mother-in-law. The street outside Seaside Fitness is: a river. The auto-rickshaws are: boats. The pedestrians who were caught outside are: swimming, or wading, or standing under shop awnings with the resigned patience of people who have lived through this before and who know that the only response to Mumbai monsoon is: wait.

"Bahar nahi ja sakte," Vandana says. We can't go out.

"Obviously," Jaya says. "Unless you want to swim to Carter Road."

"I can't swim."

"Then we wait."

We wait. The waiting that the monsoon forces — the waiting that is: Mumbai's gift to its residents, because Mumbai moves at a speed that doesn't allow for waiting except when the monsoon says: stop. And when the monsoon says stop, everyone stops. The city that never sleeps is forced to: nap.

We sit in the lobby — the full group, all of us, because the monsoon has trapped us together the way a playwright traps characters in a room and forces them to: talk. Vandana. Jaya. Sunaina (who's staying because her apartment in Khar is unreachable by any vehicle short of a submarine). Aditi (who's trying to text her colleague about the deployment situation but whose phone has: no signal, the monsoon having opinions about: telecommunications). Cheryl (who's wearing Doug's Hawaiian shirt under her gym jacket and who looks: unbothered, because a Connecticut woman who survived Doug's death can certainly survive: weather). Jai (who appeared from the weight section with the same neutral expression he wears for everything — weights, weather, existence). And me.

"This is nice," Cheryl says.

"This is: trapped," Jaya corrects.

"Trapped and nice are not: mutually exclusive. Some of the best moments of my life happened when I was trapped. Doug and I were stuck in a train between Vashi and Panvel for four hours once. Power outage. No AC. We played Twenty Questions for three hours and I learned things about that man I hadn't learned in thirty years of marriage."

"Like what?" Aditi asks.

"Like he'd always wanted to learn the tabla. And that his first kiss was with his best friend's sister, which he'd never told me because the best friend later became his business partner. And that he once ate an entire kilogram of jalebi on a dare when he was twenty-two and was sick for three days."

"One kilo of jalebi?" Vandana's eyes widen with the expression of someone who is simultaneously horrified and calculating whether she could match this feat.

"One kilo. He said it was the proudest and most disgusting moment of his life."

The laughter fills the lobby. The laughter of seven people stuck in a gym while Mumbai drowns outside — the laughter that trapped people produce when trapped people have decided to make the trapping: good.

"Okay," Jaya says. "If we're doing this. Confessions. One thing nobody in this room knows about you. Go."

Silence. The silence of people being offered vulnerability and deciding whether to: accept.

Vandana goes first — because Vandana always goes first, because Vandana's relationship with silence is: antagonistic. "I've been married three times. Not twice, which is what I told everyone. Three times. The first marriage lasted: eleven months. I was nineteen. He was twenty-two. We got married in Arya Samaj because his parents didn't approve and my parents didn't know. It ended when he moved to Dubai and didn't take me with him. I don't count it because eleven months is: not a marriage. It's: a mistake with a certificate."

The room absorbs this. Not with shock (we're past shock; this group has been absorbing each other's truths for months) but with: recalibration. The recalibration that happens when someone you think you know reveals a layer you didn't expect.

Jaya: "I've been writing Doosri Innings for four years. Twelve thousand followers. And sometimes — sometimes I write entries that are fiction. Not about real people. Made up. And I don't tell the readers which ones are real and which are fiction because the point of the blog is: truth, and sometimes fiction is more true than reality."

Sunaina: "I almost quit yoga. Last year. I was teaching six classes a day and I hadn't done my own practice in months. I was: performing yoga without practising yoga. And the difference between performing and practising is: the difference between being alive and being: on display."

Aditi: "I said no to the proposal because I felt nothing. That's what I told everyone. The truth is: I felt something. I felt: relief. Relief that he'd proposed because it meant the waiting was over. And then I felt: horror, that the thing I'd been waiting for produced relief instead of joy, and the horror of misplaced relief is what made me say no."

Cheryl: "After Doug died, I went to a grief counsellor in Bandra. She was terrible. She kept saying 'he's in a better place.' And one day I said, 'He's in Sewri Cemetery, which is not a better place by any definition, and I'd like to stop paying you three thousand rupees an hour to be lied to.' And then I came to this gym. And this gym was: better therapy than therapy."

Jai: "The photograph I showed Mar — the woman's hands in Varanasi. That's my mother. I went to Varanasi to photograph strangers and the person I ended up photographing was: my mother, making diyas at the ghat the way she made them every morning of her life. I didn't recognise her hands at first. I photographed them because they were beautiful. And then I recognised them and I — I couldn't stop crying. Because my mother's hands were: beautiful, and I'd never noticed until I saw them through a lens."

The room is quiet. The quiet that follows confessions — not uncomfortable silence but: full silence. The silence that contains everything that's been said and holds it with: care.

"Mar?" Jaya says.

My turn.

"Harsh had an affair," I say. "That's why I filed for divorce. I found out because his phone buzzed during dinner and the message was: not from a colleague. He'd been seeing someone for two years. A woman from his office. I confronted him. He didn't deny it. He said: 'Main tujhse pyaar karna bhool gaya.' I forgot how to love you. And the worst part was — I believed him. Not that it justified the affair. But that it was: true. He'd forgotten how to love me because I'd forgotten how to be: loveable. Because I'd become: the role. And the role is not: a person you love. The role is: a function you use."

I forgot how to love you.

The rain continues. The lobby holds seven people who have just given each other: the truth. Not the curated truth of Instagram or the diplomatic truth of dinner parties. The real truth. The truth that the monsoon extracts from people the way the monsoon extracts petrichor from the earth — by force, by pressure, by the understanding that some things can only emerge when the normal systems are: overwhelmed.

"I need vada pav," Vandana says.

"The stall is underwater," Jaya says.

"Then someone needs to swim."

Nobody swims. Instead, we order Swiggy — seven vada pavs, delivered by a delivery rider who arrives soaking wet and grinning because delivery riders in monsoon Mumbai are: heroes, the heroes who bring food through floods with the determination of a species that refuses to let weather interrupt: hunger.

We eat vada pav in the lobby of Seaside Fitness while the monsoon rages outside. The chutney stains our fingers green. The pav is soft. The potato is hot. And we are: together, which is all we've ever needed and the last thing any of us expected to find at a gym.