For a change, it was a dark and stormy day. But like so many thick, intense monsoon days in India, it had all the glamour, sensuality and restless excitement of the night. Going past the woods and the wilderness, one could imagine Kalidasa’s nayikas tiptoeing to meet their lovers on ‘paths revealed by flashes of lightning’. Many centuries later, the heroines of Kangra miniature paintings did the same, braving snakes and lurking dangers for a tryst with something much better than destiny.
We were in the Nimad plains of Madhya Pradesh, a vast flat stretch of landscape, on which small plateaux rose to level table-top surfaces. The famous citadel of Mandu sprawled on one such plateau. If you persisted till its southern edge the land would abruptly finish, falling steeply down to the plains below, stretching to apparent infinity, thrilling to the knowledge of the Narmada flowing some 30 km below the line of sight. Clinging precariously to this edge stood the palace of Rani Rupamati. A shepherdess from the lands near the Narmada, she had caught the eye of ruler Baz Bahadur who brought her to Mandu. It is said that she asked for a palace right at the edge of Mandu so she could gaze at her beloved Narmada.
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It was a melancholy thought, and we were sitting at the edge of the plateau, wishing Rupamati had remained a shepherdess. What we were actually doing was waiting for the Southwest Monsoon to hit Mandu.
At this southern edge, in an open pavilion of Rupamati’s palace, we had placed ourselves firmly in its majestic juggernauty path. We had read that Mandu was the most romantic place in the monsoon and were keen to see what this meant. Now, three days past the predicted date, the monsoon was yet to arrive but it had become cloudy, dark and windy. We were hopeful it would arrive today.
Suddenly, even as we felt the wind quicken, we saw a presence in the distance. It was indescribable. It was gargantuan, all-consuming, heavy, but afloat. It was a too-dark-to-be-grey, an autonomous black which improbably contained softnesses and silvers. It spread across the thirsty theatre of Nimad from side to side, rolling contours and all. And it was coming towards us, too calm to feel threatening. It was a force of nature. We realised with our pulse caught in our throats that we could point at it and say: this is the Monsoon.
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Slowly, the plains below us vanished as it came nearer. We forgot to breathe. Strong gusts came in advance of it, rocking us. At some moment, we were all enveloped in not exactly rain but pure moisture.
We couldn’t see each other any more and dissolved in laughter, relief, pleasure, exhilaration. The next few days, like in so much of India, the greens of Mandu started sparkling with innate radiance. Its waterbodies started brimming. It rained and rained and rained.
A love affair
In Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava , Parvati has a very different experience of the first rain. She is meditating to win the love of Shiva when it happens. “The first drop of rain stayed momentarily on her eyelids, dropped on her lips, shattered on her hard breasts and trickled down the triple fold of her stomach, and after a long time disappeared in her navel.”
The leisurely enchanting description indicates much of how we in the subcontinent relate to the monsoon — there is beauty, eroticism, voluptuousness, poetry and a promise of approaching fulfilment.
In the subcontinent’s literature, rain was almost wholly given over to lovers. Before the rains began, merchant husbands of Prakrit poetry returned home from their travels to waiting wives. Lovers profited from the inability to venture out.
Radha asked Krishna to call her by knocking on the wall of her hut such that the sound merged with the thunder from the sky. Meghdoot’s exiled Yaksha took the cloud into confidence, asking it to carry his message to his pining wife. “Is it or is it not/ the cold monsoon/ bearing the shape/ of my dark lord,” asked saint-poet Nammalvar.
Tagore’s rain came to us in so many forms: in onomatopoeic words ( gurgur meghe ), indicating a magical force that created life in stones; or as a ‘chira-birahini’ (the heroine forever separated in love); as an indefinable restlessness; as a force that seemed to obliterate the cosmos making us feel a transcendental ecstasy. Faiz declared: “Let there be clouds, let there be wine/ After that it doesn’t matter what calamity comes.”
“Take away my wealth and fame but return my childhood monsoon to me,” pleaded Sudarshan Faakir in the song immortalised by Jagjit Singh. Gulzar, his pen forever dipped in moonlight and rain, might call this a bheega-bheega, seela-seela essay.
But he expanded the definition of monsoon as well as poetry in this three-line verse from the early 70s: Why is this newspaper so wet?/ Change the hawker from tomorrow!/ Five hundred villages washed away this year .
Rain chased
Grand, complex, whimsical and mysterious, the intricate system of wind, pressure and rain called the monsoon (from the Arabic ‘Mausim’) gathers its own local specificity in the Indian subcontinent. Here, it appears in two branches, from the south west (Arabian Sea) and the south east (Bay of Bengal), and is shaped by a symphony orchestra of phenomena as varied as the heating of the Tibetan plateau, trade winds of the southern hemisphere, and the spinning of the earth.
One of the most fitting acts of worship at the altar of the Indian monsoon was performed by Alexander Frater in his book Chasing the Monsoon (1990). Frater welcomed the arrival of the Southwest Monsoon in Kovalam (‘the advent of the burst is an event of imperial dimensions’), and Goa (‘Indians exposing themselves adoringly to the rains... called to each other like children’), moved on to Bombay (‘roiling waves threw up chimerical spouts of black foam which kept getting vaporized by hurricane-force winds’), Deeg, and Calcutta (‘the key to the spell — the colours, the moods, the scents, the subtle mysterious light, the poet, the heightened expectations, the kind of beauty that made the heart miss a beat — well, that remained the monsoon’), and romanced it all the way to Cherrapunji (‘That awesome citadel of Meghalaya cumulus sat over a range of hills so unimaginably green they seemed radioactive’), en route meeting meteorologists, rain-makers and flooded slum-dwellers.
It only rains in Kerala
Personally, the most intense and heart-breaking meteorologist I ever met was Francis, our ever-smiling Malayali canteen god at university. Giggly youngsters, we would enter his canteen dripping from Delhi’s intermittent showers, soaked in the heady new-found freedom of young adulthood. Fresh from sighting a peacock on a Sintex tank of our hostel roof, we would shine at him from amid milkshakes and dosas: It’s raining.
Francis would not be impressed. As far as he was concerned, it only rained in Kerala. His smile would now struggle with the business of articulation in a painstakingly learned language, his eyes becoming a faraway landscape. “This is not rain. In Kerala, it rains so much the trees keep dripping water for long after. In Kerala, it keeps raining for half an hour after it has stopped raining.”
It’s only words
To get a rain conversation started, I ask friends on Facebook to tell me the words for rain in their languages. The response is overwhelming, not just in the number of words we collect but in the sheer emotional response the query generates.
Salman remembers that his mother, back home in Meerut, would describe a light drizzle as flour falling through a fine sieve. My namesake Juhi, the IAS officer, determinedly ignores an upcoming meeting to give me the words not just in Bangla but also in Punjabi (Meenh) and Mizo (the beautiful Ruahsur). Words break the dams and come flooding into our consciousness: the drizzle of tip-tipva (Banaras), tapur-tupur (Bangla), chirchri (Konkani) and thooral (Tamil).
The heaviness of the Hindi chappad-phaad (roof-tearing) rain, moosalaadhaar (like the falling of the moosal, a heavy farmer’s instrument to grind grains), and the Bangla akash-bhenge (sky-breaking) brishti.
Words pitter-patter on my roof in Meiteilon, Tangkhul, Khasi, Kurukh, Kashmiri, Kullu-vi and Bodo. Manidipa lists 23 different Bangla phrases to describe different kinds of rain. Prakash, the poetry lover, adds the Persian word ‘Baraan’, while Jacob, his wife of Chinese ethnicity, sends the Mandarin word ‘Yu’.
A rain-crumble
Sreela sends a Bangla poem that invokes the poetic conceit of ‘Ilshe Guri’, (literally, Hilsa fish crumble), very fine rain associated with the time of the monsoons when Hilsa fish breed. So, perfectly apt for Bengal, a rain-crumble in which Hilsas breed! Meanwhile, Navneet promises to bring a special ittr created by the traditional fragrance makers of Sawai Madhopur which smells just like sondhi mitti, rain-damped earth. Everyone becomes a bit feverish at the mention of damp earth, an emotion, we all agree, not at all captured in the word ‘petrichor’.
Those of us who lived through the 80s get nostalgic remembering the All India Radio forecast phrase: ‘Garaj ke saath chheente padenge’ (a translation of ‘Light showers with thunder,’ its effect would have been better conveyed as ‘Accompanied by thunderous sounds, water will pour from the sky!’).
We remember the progress of the Akaashvani monsoon not through politically or linguistically determined States but cultural-geographic regions: Vidarbha, Marathwada, Konkan, Rayalseema. The only time the monsoon itself takes a temporary backseat is when Tamils cannot decide whether to render the word for rain as ‘mazhai’, or as ‘malai’ for the benefit of northerners!
It’s always green at home
Every few comments someone sighs about how much they miss childhood. Most of us are migrants from small towns to big-city earning fields. In our hands the rain mutates from Kalidasa’s erotic weather to a migrant’s canvas of childhood memories. Someone starts posting old rain songs. Lata Mangeshkar’s voice and Salil Choudhary’s tune takes over like a moisture-laden cloud from the sea, showering benediction: O Sajna, Barkha Bahaar Aayi.
After I shifted to Delhi from Dehradun, every year in May, I’d become a tense peacock, yearning and filling the sky with haunted cries for rain. Like the Chaatak of the Mahabharata — the pied crested cuckoo, which migrates to India seasonally and is said to be the harbinger of rains — I too sat with my beak opened incessantly towards the sky, waiting “in earnest expectation of a shower.” The only reason I wanted a son was so I could name him Ashaadh. For the longest time my password was Baarish.
It always rained earlier back home in Dehradun. The thought of those moss-covered walls and sumptuous trees, that fat grass and unashamed greenery, haunted me. I would try to capture some of the romance in long-distance calls. Describe it to me, I’d demand of my mother. She would bring me down to earth, laughing: “Yes, yes, it is very beautiful, saawan has come, barkha-bahaar is here, the house is full of the smell of wet dogs.”
I could remember that generous cold rain, the water falling, flowing and seeping its way to the dried river bed down the road, to subterranean aquifers, to the soil under the lawn making earthworms and snails crawl out, to my father’s shivery skin, to the family’s desire for pakodas and hot tea, to this catch in my voice.
A wet geography
It is now a late, deep midnight as I write this letter to you, my fellow rain-haunted. All day today we looked eastwards and saw the dark skies with a contentment that was rich with anticipation. The monsoon brings us not just rain, sensual enjoyment, the pleasure of memories (and the undeniable pleasure of melancholy sighing), but also the romance of geography.
We looked eastwards because we knew the rain would come to Delhi from that direction, after the monsoon clouds had bounced off the Himalayas in the north-east and started travelling along that great orographic barrier.
We know this rain would not be caused by the ‘western disturbances’ that bring showers to Delhi at other times. It would come borne on the ‘Purvai’, the easterly wind of Uttar Pradesh’s folk songs. That is why we have been looking east.
So, it is now a late, deep midnight as I write this letter to you and it is raining. Even a DDA flat’s balcony, with its laundry stand and wet broom, has to bow to the mystical romance of the moment. And, since midnight makes one unafraid of atishyokti (literary hyperbole), this lavishly moisture-laden air approaches, carried by the winds to my laptop. It hits the landscape of my desire and rises. It sees the passion of my friends and expands joyously, cooling in the process. It then pours its heart out on our windward side. And as you finish reading this, it will start raining in you.
The Delhi-based writer and photographer likes to end her bio-note a bit hopefully with the information that her blog is called The Laughter Memoirs.