According to lore, the first lines Rabindranath Tagore ever wrote were, “Jol pore, pata nore” – water falls, leaves tremble. It is a simple observation, almost childlike, yet it contains an entire philosophy of rain. Rain is never merely an event of the sky, it is a stirring of the earth, a movement of memory. And nowhere is this truer than in Kolkata. Here, the monsoon first touches the thick dark green pine forests, misty mountains and old hill towns of North Bengal before making its way to Kolkata. It seeps into the city’s cracks and memories, returning through songs half remembered, through windows flung open to the scent of wet earth, through old loves, old streets and old selves who come back for a fleeting visit. The rain falls. The city trembles.
Darjeeling in the rain
| Photo Credit:
Shreya Banerjee
Santadeep Dey, a journalist with Sportstar magazine, recollects, “I wish I could say the rains smell of home (Barrackpore, Kolkata) . They don’t. At least in Chennai, they don’t. At home, that smell of wet earth and lying under a cool blanket listening to the radio was something else entirely. Now there’s no radio either, and home is very far away. Even now, on rainy days, if I hear the sound of a cooker somewhere, I feel like my mom has called saying she has made khichuri (rice and lentils), come eat,” says Santadeep.He looks back to his childhood when, “The most fun thing was, in heavy rain, holding kaka’s (uncle’s) hand, with an umbrella over our heads, going out to get aloor chop (potato fritters). We would all sit together and eat them. All of these are just memories now. Kaka is also no more.”
