From Duckback raincoats to the 2005 deluge: Author Jerry Pinto’s love letter to Mumbai’s monsoon

5 min readJul 18, 2026 09:48 AM IST

First published on: Jul 18, 2026 at 09:30 AM IST

It was 1980; my friend Mehlli Gobhai, the painter, was to have his first group show at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York, curated by Madeleine Burnside and Jeanette Ingberman. He wanted to be there, of course, but he also was reluctant to miss what he called the melodrama of the monsoon, the grey clouds piling up over the horizon and then sweeping imperiously into the city, changing everything from gold and grit to grey and moss.

“I kept changing my ticket,” he told me. “And my mother kept warning me. I replied: ‘Well, if billionaires can beat jet lag and time zones and sign multimillion-dollar deals, I can turn up on the day of the opening’.”