Mumbai Monsoon Morning
Aug 18th, 2008 by Ashok
This is a slideshow of pics taken by me on one of my early morning walks with Willow on the Lokhandwala Back Road, near where I live.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not an early morning walker. I prefer to go to the gym to get my tri-weekly exercise, and for some reason, my body seems to respond better to resistance training–weight lifting with or without the use of machines–rather than just cardio to stay in shape. Or, well, as much in shape as I am at this point in my life. Which is fit bordering on fat, I guess!
But Willow loves her early morning walks. Well, she loves walks any time of the day. She gets walked at least thrice a day, in a round-robin arrangement between myself, Ayush, Yashka, and our maid. I usually get the early morning walks, and when I say early morning, I mean early.
These pics were taken at around 6:15 am on an August morning. I was actually out from 5:45, dropping Yashka off for her tuitions at Lokhandwala, and then, when Willow and I reached the back road, it was too dark and there were no other ‘friends’ around yet, so we drove for a while, with the windows down and 94.3 FM playing their usual early morning mix of western tracks and the usual Bollywood filmi songs.
The Lokhandwala Back Road is one of the reasons why I love living in this part of Mumbai. It’s very green. There’s a huge mangrove swamp skirting the coast, and even penetrating the land. I have some really cool pics of Willow and me exploring the labyrinthine innards of the mangrove ‘forest’ that’s outlying the back road–pretty creepy area, because there are still jackals roaming around there (though sadly, none of the monkeys, panthers, and wolves that once proliferated in Mumbai) as well as some packs of wild dogs and the area is pretty much a swamp-forest.
The are a LOT of trees on the main back road itself. And everytime we have a storm, which is almost every fortnight or so from mid-July to mid-September, a major branch or even a full tree comes crashing down. The day before these pics were taken, one came down, blocking one side of the road and destroying a Maruti Swift (or so I’m told, the car was gone) but nobody was around to get hurt, thankfully. It took them two days to clear the debris, because it meant cutting the fallen dead wood up into pieces small enough to truck away, and apparently they had only one power saw. So they called in the fire brigade who used axes to help clear the rest.
There was also a police van; oddly enough it was a van belonging to the Crimes Against Women and Senior Citizens task force. I suppose an old tree qualifies as a senior citizen so that makes sense in a way!
There are pics of the remnants of the debris at the end of the slideshow. Mostly they’re just pics of the long empty road, Willow walking. Willow climbing a massive pile of dirt that I think was surreptitiously dumped there by some unscrupulous construction site contractor on the side of the road–it was still there even a week later, so I guess they didn’t have big shovels either–and some of her near the car and in the car sitting in that lovable upright position enjoying the blast from the a/c. And an early morning delivery vendor (neither a doodhwala nor an andawala, and I didn’t see what he was carrying) cycling past. Willow got in a quick lick to his foot as he passed by, which made him wobble with surprise, but he survived. Yenna Rascala, she is!
We did meet many friends that morning, and other mornings, but I’ll post those pics separately.
