Monsoon Musings..

 

It's coming to the end of Monsoon here in Banaras and you can notice the change in the air. It's only my second monsoon here in India and so maybe I'm mistaken, but it feels like it's been fairly light on with the rains this time round. We had plenty of flooding in the city but the overwhelming majority of that was coming from upstream and so whilst there were times when you could literally sit and watch the flood water rising before your very eyes, we hadn't seen more than a few drops of rain in over a week.

On those days where the rains did set in you really hoped and prayed that you didn't have to brave the flooding roads and go anywhere till tomorrow but instead could just sit and enjoy cool shift from inside your house. Unless you're one of our kids, in which case you couldn't wait to get outside and get as wet and as muddy as possible.

 

And of course, once the rains were done you had those joyous playgrounds known as Puddles.

Yes, that is a Papad/Papadum in Little Feather's hand.. what else could you possibly want to chew on while splashing about in puddles in India.

I love letting her loose in the puddles to enjoy what I'm thinking should be a universally required part of childhood.

And I must admit I also enjoy the look on my neighbour's faces! Cleanliness is a highly prized virtue around these parts and so the idea of letting your child play in the muddy puddles is probably something akin to child abuse, or more likely something that would bring great embarrassment upon yourself and your family. And being an Australian (coupled with an inability to curb the driftings towards those more quietly subversive parts of my nature), I'm often more than happy than not to get out there and get wet with the little ones.

When my sweet neighbours - often with eyes wide as dinner plates - inform me that my daughter is getting wet (usually around 15-20 minutes since we've started playing in the rain and are both thoroughly resembling drowned rats) I've learned to simply reply in Hindi "No No, it's Ok! She's Australian!" I feel like this has the dual outcome of both educating my neighours that not everyone in the world feels this way about kids playing in puddles, but also that is confuses them long enough for Little Feather to make her escape to the other end of the path to keep on kicking them puddles! Viva la Puddle Revolución!!