Here in the ‘city of strangers’

‘The clouds were pregnant with rain, as the sun descended past the horizon, leaving in its wake a stormy sea and an ominous night.’ I rote-learnt this sentence, along with 30 other boys in my class, for my English O-Levels. It contained just the right mix of allegorical value and abstracted adjectives. So, thought my teacher. Oh and big adult words like ‘pregnant’. So, thought I.

Recently, this sentence came back to me for I finally saw it. A sky pregnant with rain, in the waning light of the setting sun. In the distance, were the rumblings of a stormy sea.

It was a night of power-outages and leaky window-frames. The roaring sound of the rain was so loud that it rendered the city quiet. This then was the scene on what was my first night alone in the ‘City of Strangers’.

Growing up in Lahore, your body gets used to the patterns of barsaat. After a downpour at night you expect in the morning to be greeted by the smell of wet earth. The puddles from the night – filled with wiggling worms – simmer into vapour, and the gentle morning breeze carries far and wide the scent of the land. It is as memorable as the rains themselves.

Here in the ‘City of Strangers’ I woke up the morning after the rain and stepped out with a cup of hot tea in hand. On the narrow perch that I call my balcony I faced the city, expectant.

A most understated and docile, yet unnerving shock overcame me, such that I jerked my head back, squinted my eyes and grimaced my lips. It had rained the night before, but the much expected and delightful fragrance that is the morning after was completely absent.

When I moved they had told me it would be different — urbane, cosmopolitan, teeming with people and life. But no one told me the smell of the morning after the rain would be so removed, so stunted, from what my body had come to expect.

It was strange you see. It was strange because it was new. With the cup of tea in hand, which had suddenly lost all flavour, I wondered what all they hadn’t told me about this ‘City of Strangers’.