Monsoon Season, Curiously

I. Rain

First, as a little background, we are currently experiencing a rainstorm here. Nothing like the Mumbai monsoon rains of 2005, but still, a lot of rain.
Last night, on my way to a yoga workshop on headstands (turns out I'm terrible at headstands and last night's efforts seem to have bruised my cranium, which I'm sure bodes well for taking the LSAT in a couple of weeks) in Kailash Colony, a neighborhood near here, the sky was dark grey and looking and feeling almost literally like it was about to burst. It was during rush hour, when already bone-jarring traffic becomes almost intractable and drivers begin to lean constantly on their horns. Suddenly, while we (me+autorickshaw) were wedged in a non-lane between two Tata trucks and a man on a bicycle rickshaw ladden with cardboard scrap, the rain came down. And down. And down. Drivers, unable to see and thus unable to drive, gave longer, drawn-out honks instead while the water pooled up around their tires.
The man on the bicycle rickshaw pulling sodden cardboard (that had by now swelled and doubled in size and no doubt weight) produced a small plastic baggie from his pocket and fixed it on his head like a skullcap and kept riding, apparently content that at least four square inches of his body were protected while at least a quarter of his lower half was underwater. A woman walking in a sari along the side of the road held a leaf over her head. I mean, a leaf? Meanwhile, I, white lady in rickshaw, had both a rainjacket and umbrella and was successfully barricading myself in a waterproof fort.

This is the thing I find so curious about a country that experiences monsoon, oh, say, 3.5 months of every year: I have yet to see a single Indian sporting a rainjacket or umbrella. I have seen a few old, fat ladies carrying umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun, but when the weather turns, the umbrellas disappear and they stand staring at the sky in sodden clothing as though it were a freak occurence that they had never seen and were thus unable to prepare for (the fact that it rained yesterday evening, and the evening before that, and before that, and well, come to think of it, every evening since late June not being adequate advanced notice), aside from grabbing the nearest Ziplock snack pack or 4" scrap of flora. Maybe they don't mind the acid rain as much as I do?

II. Cooking

This morning, feeling a little homesick, I thought I'd take a break from the dal, rice, and chappati business and make some poached eggs and toast. We'd ordered organic eggs from a farm run by a Frenchman south of Delhi and accidentally ended up with three whole trout in addition to a dozen eggs, and I thought I could at least make good use of the eggs (anyone have a recipe for 4 lbs of trout?). That's where the fun started. The kitchen roof apparently leaks. I wouldn't have known this aside from the fact that the kitchen floor was covered in 1/2" of water. The socket that the toaster oven (which, I might add, until recently had a large spider living in it---I confess that I couldn't get him out and resorted to toasting him to death) connects to is not grounded, so touching the toaster when it's on, to, for example,take the toast out, means you get a little zing. Combine the two scenarios and I'm having bit of a pavlovian aversion to making toast ever again.

Furthermore, for some reason we currently have no running water in our kitchen, which meant I couldn't wash any dishes to put said electrified toast and eggs on, unless I used the water pouring through the ceiling, I guess, which seemed too disgusting even for current standards given that our roof is what one might euphemistically call 'biodiverse'. Maybe getting a cook to come won't be so bad afterall.

I leave you with the above photo of a goat we encountered while looking (with minimal success and with maximum effort, like all things in India) for our Hindi school the other day.