The Days of Real Rain

It is a bright sunny day in Karachi today. The grass is soggy no more from Thursday’s rain and the birds are back and flying across the sky they claim. The sky looks clean azure instead of grey again and the trees look more green and the roads less black than they did on Wednesday and before that.
Amma always used to say that the first rain of the monsoon was one not to bathe and play in but to wash away the smog accumulated all year round, specially the strong one that hung even after the feeble winter rain. Consequently, we were never allowed to bathe in that one but we never let our chance go for the rest. I remember rushing out to take my share of the monsoon along with my brothers and our maid, Fatima. We would go crazy; dancing, running, slipping, crying and like typical dheets as we were (and are), we would return when called a crybaby and one that does not appreciate the rain, even hates it. That would do it: we had quite a strong rain ego. Once I even penned down a silly little poem on rain haters. That was back then.
The pakora with chai would be the treat of the elders who would ‘not be babies’ and go crazy in the rain. But we always saw them stealing happy, furtive glances at us and the pounding drops. Or perhaps it was the scrumptious aftertaste of pakoras...
Times passed. We grew up. Fatima left to wed, perhaps. Her sister, Farzana replaced her but did not prove to be the nice playmate as Fatima. She went away and was replaced by sundry others over time.
Now the monsoons are largely taken as disturbances, to our underpasses cum transitory pools and various other structures they call development. We have stopped playing in the rain; we have homework and TV and computers to worry about and aren’t we now too old for all that immature stuff? Amma hardly makes pakoras these days; she fuels up on chai though.
And anyway, the rain coming now is all acid rain. The scientists say the pH will continue to drop. Gone are the real rain days.