Monsoon time again!

It's monsoon season and out come the dusty umbrellas, the raincoats and the old gumboots from the closets. Eulogized in numerous songs and ballads, the Indian monsoon brings relief to a baking subcontinent after the travails of summer and is the mainstay of the agricultural industry, not to mention the major source of hydel power.
It's raining and you know what they say - it never rains but it pours! And pour it does, reducing roads to slush with evil looking puddles and traffic to an impossibly entangled snarl. Damp clothes, musty homes, late maid-servants, crotchety auto drivers add to all the other woes of the season. On the bright side, however, the garden raises it's weary head and begins to look green and healthy again. When the harsh summer sun leaches the plants of the will to live, they grow depressingly yellow and sickly. The rain brings all the dramatic color back and you can almost see the plants perk up and decide that life's good after all! The patch of no-man's land behind my house is now a confused green tangle of growth with purple Ipomoea dotting it here and there - very colorful!
And when the sun comes out after a bout of heavy rain, everything looks newly washed - even the sky! My pigeons don't care too much about the rain but they look so bedraggled and wet that I wonder what they do when it rains continuously for three days - a rather common occurrence during the Indian monsoon.
Rainy days are also time for warm cookies, puffs or cakes , crisp pakoras or vegetable frittata and cups of steaming tea! Warm razais to snuggle under and a suitably spine-chilling mystery to read - aaahhhh, Heaven!

Of Different Tongues.... Continued

[Apologies for the long hiatus - I was a little busy with wrapping up work. I'm on a break from work - maybe for a very long time!]

"Acchi baat, amma," the fruit vendor says in reply to my order. In chaste Hindi, that phrase doesn't even exist. It's a Telugu phrase, meaning 'Very well'. And in the true spirit of Hyderabad, it's been appropriated and put to use in a different language.
When my daughter was two years old, she hadn't begun speaking yet and that was a cause of concern for my husband and me. Wherever we went, we heard about the prodigious verbal output of her peers and wondered why our child was so silent. My mother came up with a reason and I'm not sure she wasn't right - we spoke to her in three langauges, can you blame the child for being confused? It's then that we realized that we tended to slip into Hindi, Telugu and English with equal ease while expressing ourselves. And so does my daughter now - it's a reflection of the melange of languages we hear around us.

Bagaar annam, sataainchinaadu .... just a few words that have both a Hindi and Telugu root and are common currency. Temple bells, the Venkateswara Suprabhatam at dawn and the aroma of roasting kebab and biriyani - can any place in the world compare to my Hyderabad?