Rain, rain, rain, rain .... Beautiful rain

Sharon rang us on Skype yesterday morning from Mumbai, and I could hear the violent hissing of the first monsoon rains hitting the city in the background. She switched on video and we watched it teeming over her balcony and down into the street below. Took me straight back, in my memory, to those long hot days of late June in Pakistan when you were just gasping for air and longing for the monsoon rains to arrive.. Nothing moves. The sun seems to stand still in the heavens. The earth bakes. Just need some sweet refreshment from the intense heat.

And then came July, and the clouds began to gather (the monsoon arrives later in Pakistan than India) and, then, by about the second week of July, the skies grow heavy and thick, and eventually break, and then --- there was rain. Sweet refreshing rain.  Moistening the parched, hardened ground. Powerful, intense rain. Breaking bridges and causing landslides. The same rain can bring life and vitality, and can cause death and inconvenience. But, in the first instance, when it first arrives, it was always welcome.

Alexander Frater writes about the arrival of the monsoon, in "Chasing the Monsoon", a book I picked up some years ago - can’t remember where - probably in some second hand bookshop in Islamabad or Karachi. In it, he follows the course of the monsoon rains from the southern tip of the subcontinent to the north, and writes vividly about its effect on the land and the people.

Rain figures largely in a few examples of music I am listening to today. First in my list, there’s an electronic dance track by Armin van Burren, which cleverly expresses musically the incessant drumming of a constant downpour. Then, Ladysmith Black Mombasa, from South Africa, singing about the “rain, rain, rain, beautiful rain” falling on the dry African earth. Thirdly, any one of the countless expressions of  the “barsat kaa mausam” (Monsoon season) that appear in the musical genre of the Urdu ghazal (this one by Jaswinder Singh). And finally Misty Edwards, longing for the sweet rain of God’s presence with the track “Waiting for the rain". As the prophet Hosea says

“Let us acknowledge the Lord;
    
........let us press on to acknowledge him
As surely as the sun rises,
  he will appear;

........he will come to us like the winter rains,
    
like the spring rains that water the earth.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug7myED6nOk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pLWunYWWtQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFHn3wmkNAU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXcqPPsz4Q0

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chasing-Monsoon-Alexander-Frater/dp/0140105166