Messages

Last night, at 3.05am, I woke up to the sound of an explosion. I know it was 3.05am because within moments of registering I was awake because of a noise that still seemed to be making the walls of my room vibrate, I looked up “bomb blast Mumbai” on Google and Twitter. Just to be doubly sure that China hadn’t found its way to our Western coast from Ladakh, to bomb Carter Road sea face — it’s 2020. Anything can happen — I double checked, but “bomb blast Bandra” on my phone’s window yielded no explanations. However, the other window by my bed did. 

Without warning, the whole room lit up for a second and a thick, white whip of lightning struck the sky. And then it came — thunder. To call what I heard last night ‘a clap of thunder’ is ridiculous. This was an eruption of sound, a sonic volcano that made every nerve in the body twang. The window panes rattled, the walls seemed to brace themselves. It was like thunder had got drunk and been let loose upon the sky.

First came the impossibly deep and loud crack and boom. Then, a low rumble as thunder rippled across the cloudy sky, chasing the shining edge of lightning. As the sound of thunder rippled away from me, I imagined lightning and thunder gathering to crack open the sky over someone else’s sleep. For a few moments, there was nothing but the white noise of rain. And then they returned — lightning that ripped the sky to pieces, thunder that exploded like a bomb. 

From my window, which looks on to other windows, I saw people waking up as I had. One, two, three, more… dark windows lit up, as though a sequence had been fired on an electric board. Some windows stayed dark. Through one, I thought I could see the faint blue glow of a phone’s screen. Silhouettes appeared in some windows as a few people peered out. Were they afraid? Awestruck? Did they think of old texts from different faiths that spoke of worshipping thunder, of god speaking through the natural elements? Did they remember songs from old Bollywood films that incorporated thunder into their tunes?

[image error] Nicked from journalist Jigar Shah’s twitter.

Watching the shadowy forms in the windows facing mine, I wrote on my phone, “The curious intimacy of living in a congested city, where strangers become witness to intimate, solitary moments.”       

Another brilliant strike of lightning, another explosion of thunder.

I thought to myself that standing here, looking at the sky, these windows, these shadows, waiting for lightning, bracing for thunder — this was magic. I looked up. It was as though the sky had dipped lower so that the old gods could roar their fury at us. 

“It’s only rain,” someone says to someone else, their yell reduced to a whisper by the storm around us.

And then, it was over. The thunder kept rolling away. The lightning disappeared. The sky returned to a dull darkness. All that drama and the end-of-the-world feels … for 20 minutes. If that thunder-and-lightning extravaganza was a message from the gods, then them gods are even more easily distracted than we internet-addled mortals are. 

Yet, for all its briefness, it was beautiful. For those few minutes, if you were awake, you also felt like every cell in your body crackling with the quiet, still energy of a bubble that refuses to pop. You noticed things. You felt things. You breathed deeper. The headache receded, the body felt light, the heart hummed.

(And then you realised it was 3.30 in the morning and you have to be on a call in less than six hours.)

(Or you just slept through it all.)

Unrelated to any of this, I gave a talk on beauty in Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings, which is now available on YouTube. It’s much longer than 20 minutes.