When they say, “It’s a bright and sunny day,” children in our part of the world take it to mean that it’s a warm morning. And when they sing, “Rain, rain, go to Spain,” it sounds so silly. Rain is a break in the continuous spell of long summers and should be counted as a blessing — baraan-i-rehmat.

The word baarish in Turkish language means peace. It indeed is both a blessing and peace in the aftermath of a long spell of heat.

Our poetry and music revolve around monsoon rains: Sawan ke baadilo/ Un say jaa kar mera salaam kehna and Aye mausam rangeelay suhaanay, for instance. Although Babur, in his memoir, Tuzuk-i-Babari, criticised everything in this country, he greatly appreciated the monsoon season during which he enjoyed riding a horse in particular.

The hot spell this year has been a really tortuous one. Though there were mild drizzles during Ramazan, they did not quite screen out the blazing sun. NANNA once said that I should carry with me an umbrella when rain is forecast, but those days all weather forecasts were taken from the weather-clock hoisted over a Jail Road building that was home to the Met Office. For the last so many days, rains have been predicted so many times only to boost our morale. Or, so it seems.

During the long spell of heat, trees have remained covered with dust and soot, which is nature’s way of arresting the particulate matter, or pollution. The flora struggled to survive, and fauna risked dehydration. Many people filled earthen pots with water for the birds, which was also shared by the squirrels and porcupines in far-off farmhouses. By doing so, they were only helping the nature to sustain. Local vegetation has the highest tolerance level. Not many local trees dry out in this kind of intense heat. The imported ornamental types, however, have to be protected with green plastic gauze and wrapped with jute and continually watered. Yet, many of these costly palms die anyway.

This is a riverine country and an agrarian society that depends on water from pre-historic times. When it rains, the water, which is called blue gold, should be harvested and used to replenish the groundwater. But it simply finds its way into polluted drains, and floods the settlements and agricultural fields alike. Thus, the long expected/ desired rainy season turns into a menace in the city and the countryside alike. In the cities, after every two-inch rain, the roads are flooded which makes it difficult for pedestrians and vehicular traffic to wade through.

Only the children enjoy the rains, the elders are mostly left worrying about a looming disaster.

Every year, the metropolitan corporations of many cities issue lists of endangered buildings that need to be repaired or knocked down. Because of the divided ownership and poor economic condition of the occupants, nothing is done. The governments too cannot and do not spare the funds to repair the dilapidated structures many of which are of historical value and need to be put on the protected list. All that the poor occupants can do in this situation is to inspect the drainpipes over the parapets to ensure that no water accumulates in the roofs traditionally coated with thick layers of clay to combat the fierce summer heat.

The old houses, built in pre-electricity days, were designed with prominent projections to cast deep shadows over the façades and to make the rainwater fall away. But this water eventually finds its way into the already inundate foundations. An experiment, conducted by the World Bank in the 1980s, of covering the drains in Mohalla Kakkayzayyian backfired. Initially, it looked cleaner and the value of the property rose, but the water in the blocked drains leaking into the foundations could not be detected in time and the old houses developed live cracks. The culprit was the increasingly used plastic bags. Hence, the open drain system had to be readopted.

The only solace is that the Walled City has been built on a man-made mound whose drainage system, developed over the course of centuries, is very efficient. As pointed out earlier, the old city has virtually no trees or open grounds to serve as soaking pits. Yet, no matter how much it rains, water finds its way down the sloping drains and eventually joins the now polluted Ravi.

Water never accumulates in any part of the old city. The real problem is outside the walls. When Charles Riwaz was supervising the building of roads outside the city, including The Mall, local trees were generously planted and green areas kept deeper or lower than the asphalt as well as dirt roads. Any excess water was absorbed and replenished the water table. Earlier housing schemes like the Model Town, the older parts of Gulberg, Wahdat Road government quarters and Samanabad had doongi grounds. The later trend to build raised greenbelts, especially over the dividers, blocks the excess water which then finds it difficult to flow down in order to maintain its level.

The plight of trapped water can best be studied immediately after a shower. Solutions can be easily formulated then. Even where deep grounds exist, raised footpaths do not allow surplus water to flow into these. The ground of the University of the Punjab’s New Campus is a case in point. If the continuous dividers on the double roads were provided little breaks, excess water would escape to the lower levels.

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Folk history has it that every seven years there are heavy rains, and every hundred years, the records are broken. Late Ustad Latif Chughtai once told me that in 1904, boats navigated the streets of Old Lahore, which he witnessed as a child from his jharoka that faced the shrine of Shah Abul Mu’ali.

Rains are a natural phenomenon, but man is contributing to climate change. Thanks to poor planning by concerned authorities and corporate greed, the blessing is becoming more of a baraan-i-zehmat. The behaviour of water over the roads remains unpredictable. There is no concept of water treatment plants, though one occasionally hears of it. All the water from industrial and municipal waste is mercilessly mixed into the once excellent fishing and boating water bodies.

Concretising of the sprawling city has squeezed the charm out of the yearly monsoons. The reasons are not much difficult to find out. Shanty towns being developed by unscrupulous land grabbers have no civic amenities. The increasing distances cannot be covered by the type of transport available to hapless commuters. Land, air, and water — that is, the whole environment — have been put under dangerous levels of stress. Any solace in the form of green cover is under the radar of bad entrepreneurs who always begin by felling the trees.

Given this context, the beleaguered citizens may agree that “bright and sunny” days are better, and they may wish the rains to “go to Spain.”

(This dispatch is dedicated to Fauzia Qureshi, an architect)

The writer is a painter, a founding member of Lahore Conservation Society and Punjab Artists Association, and a former director of NCA Art Gallery.

He can be reached at ajazart@brain.net.pk