Kerala and the Rain - 19th June 2010

I woke up today to the strong smell of rain outside and for a second I thought I was home, where I come from that is. I don’t have particularly fond memories of Kerala, at least not of the people there. My good memories of ‘Gods own land’ consists of exactly that, the land. Staring out of the window as we traveled back and forth from our house in Pala, it often occurred to me that the place that I so detested, the place where I spent two and a half months of my summer vacations every year simply because I was forced to by my parents and not by choice, it often occurred to me that the place was actually beautiful.
And then I felt at home. I felt strangely honoured to come from a place that was as green and as peaceful, if you were in the right place in Kerala that is. I mean, take a ride through Kottayam town and you could smell the combination of vehicle and industrial pollution in the air. A smell so strong, you risked choking to death or at least you are haunted for a second by that ridiculous fear that sometime in the future you would be told in a doctor’s office that you shockingly have lung cancer and two months left to live and at that moment sitting there, you think that you will think back to the day you rode through Kottayam town in an ambassador car, eating up the pollution in its fullest. But this thought is quickly brushed from your mind. Point being, you find yourself in the right place in Kerala and thoughts of tiny paradise fill you up like coconut water and you start thinking romantic thoughts about a nadan chekan that does not exist… or maybe he does, but then that’s another story.
The rain, nothing soaked through me as much as the rain in Kerala. The smell of wet grass and mud, the sound of the thunder, the cool nights, waking up after an endless night of rain to a faint morning that refused to let the sun shine. The rain in Kuwait where I spent the rest of the year, in our 3 room apartment was just not the same. It felt more like a shower switched on. But this rain felt almost mystical. Every time it rained in Kerala, it was as if it was a message from someone else, a sign of good hope. Maybe it was just a little way of feeling special, but I felt connected to another soul who stared out of his or her window at that exact moment, thinking exactly the same thoughts.
The rain in Kerala had the most hypnotizing effect on me and my sisters. I could stare for ages at it pouring outside our window. Just after completing another session of complaining to our mother of how much we hated it here, it would rain, and then we would be quite…