EVERY time it rains now, I get paranoid. A rush of anxiety flows through my spine up to my mind as the dark clouds gather above and around me and the sound of distant thunder and the flash of lightning intrude my solitude and peace. 

I am sure some of you, especially those who commute to work daily, feel the same. Climate change has arrived big time in Malaysia and it is not as if we weren’t warned. 

Experts and pundits have been raising the alarm for years leading up to the central Malaysian floods (as Google Maps described it) when I found myself stuck in Shah Alam in December last year.

Of course, since then, the skies have been generous with its bounty and whenever it pours, I’m sure to go straight to Twitter to check on the latest trending word, hashtag or video, which will give me a far closer to live report on the latest downpour. 

Kuala Lumpur has been bearing the brunt of the recent rains with almost consistent flooding that seems etched into its branding for 2022. 

Even the suburbs are not spared from rising waters or flash floods since the year began. 

Afternoons and evenings are now spent looking at the skies and my Rain Alarm app (get it, it’s really helpful), planning ahead Plan Bs, Plan Cs or Plan Ds if I might find myself potentially stuck from leaving wherever I am. 

This, however, was not always the case. 

I actually love the rain – I used to consider 1990s alt-rock supergroup Garbage’s song Only Happy When It Rains one of the anthems of my angsty 20s.

When grunge bands were all the rage and Seattle was the centre of rock and popular culture, the rain represented my fantasy grunge experience in my naive post-teenage revelry.

Nothing beats dragging a cigarette in the cool air of a morning drizzle and a cup of freshly brewed coffee indoors (which was still hard to find in the 1990s except posh neighbourhoods or DeliFrance and Dunkin Donuts outlets). 

There’s always the fragrant smell that hot pavements emit when the late afternoon rain hits and the ensuing sounds of tyres whizzing past on the wet streets. 

These were some of the little mundane everyday joys I revelled in the simpler world that seems to be losing its bearings, although at times I do catch my older self-ruminating such thoughts just because I have, well, aged. We all do. Now I’m a jaded rain lover. 

I also loved movies that depicted the rain not as just an environmental condition but a character that looms over the film like in David Fincher’s films.

The rain represents a cooling down of sorts to me, especially in the sweltering humid tropical life we lead in these parts and also how there’s a certain rhythm and cadence to the sound of rain hitting roofs that just cannot be replicated. 

Puddles of rain on a night street too look poignant and arty when neon and car lights reflect on them, elements that make the everyday cinematic yet most of us fail to take time to notice. 

Metaphorically speaking, the rain is such an overused metaphor for gloom and doom since, well, the conditions it precipitates are equally cumbersome and dreary – low light, wetness, thunder, cold, floods – in the direct binary opposite of the sun – sunshine, life, the living, warmth, the pastoral. 

I always found weather updates in our nightly news on television redundant since we don’t really have a “weather” until climate change crashed the party. 

Either the sun is blazing relentlessly or it rains sideways in the past – now, we have floods to add to the family. 

Since this is our present reality, we should somehow embrace it since our national dealers (not “leaders”, remember) seem clueless or choose to shut one eye and carry on with their comfortable lives. 

So, now the song that aptly captures the present sentiment would be Scottish band Travis’ hit Why Does It Always Rain On Me? – the rain, both life-giver and destroyer.

The irony is not lost on us that during the floods that have plagued Selangor recently, the state was also constantly facing water cuts and shortages. 

Maybe one sensible way to look at it is that we have always been at the mercy of water because we are made of it – after all, the earth is about 71% water and the human body is about 60% water. 

It doesn’t so much rain on us but it returns to our terrestrial selves. As fearful as the recent floods have been, I guess we should attempt to listen to the rhythm of the falling rain for some drip of wisdom for nature has no malice unlike human nature. – April 29, 2022.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.