Monsoon, The Phenomenon:

As temperature begins to climb after spring is bullied out hurriedly by the approaching summer, thoughts of the monsoon begin to stir somewhere at the recess of the mind. These thoughts are always there, though at a very subconscious level as people go about their daily lives. The countdown to the arrival of the rain bearing clouds begins in earnest when the thermostat moves beyond 40 degrees C in large parts of the country.

India is not defined by its searing summers, as many would think. Rather, the annual seasonal reversal of wind patterns that bring some of the heaviest rains in the world, it’s the power of the monsoon that leaves nobody untouched, connecting all our souls in a strangely sublime way. Despair that it’s too strong or too weak, anguish that it didn’t arrive on time, the jagged anticipation of the dark clouds, the visceral fear of flood or famine, the relief, joy and effervescence, the romance and poetry, the moodiness and constant wetness, the festivities…..the emotions around the monsoon are just as many as the number of people in this country.

Monsoon in Mandu: Image - Bipasha M

During my childhood in Bihar, monsoon meant wearing shin length raincoats and plastic shoes to school which we would deliberately take off while coming home giving us an excuse for getting wet. It also meant wading through stagnant waters to get to the bus stand, making paper boats, and pushing them across these waters to compete whose boat went the farthest. It meant school holidays during days of incessant rains when we would tuck ourselves under covers and read storybooks through the day or sit on the windowsill and day-dream as the rain drizzled outside steadily. On days when the sky would stay dark and rain refused to stop, worry lines would creep in on the faces of our parents and elders. Discussions would veer towards the rising levels of Ganga, and a time when the river breached her banks during the dark of the night drowning people in their sleep and destroying properties.

In the first phase of my stay in Delhi, the crisp autumn and clear blue skies during the peak of winter held sway over my thoughts and emotions. Oh, I did love the rains, but it was in a dramatic, nostalgic, angst-ridden way that younger years tend to elicit, full of longing for things hard to define, and a love for life that can be expressed only when the world around gets washed off all its dreariness. But in all this, for me, the monsoon remained a season which heralded the approach of autumn and winter.

Fourteen years ago, when I landed at Mumbai’s airport, it was a typical grey day with a steady drizzle and sleek wet roads. That was my first brush with the monsoon in the city and which continued to define all the years of my stay there. For this is the land where I understood the glory and the power of the phenomenon, what it means to live for four months with grey skies and continuous wet conditions, of having walls and clothes covered in moss, of carrying a change of clothes every time you stepped outside, of getting totally drenched due to the force of the rain despite all your measures to stay covered. And this is also the place where I understood what unadulterated joy is when the first drops of rain begin to fall after months of heart-numbing and physically-draining mugginess, when this joy is reflected in everybody’s faces around you, when “poush aala” rings out from everywhere, when the city suddenly comes back to life.

Monsoon in Maharashtra coast. Image: Bipasha M

Some of my defining monsoon moments though have been in places outside of Mumbai – at the sea coasts when we watched the rains arrive on darkest clouds across the sea and cover us swiftly, within minutes, with a force that was almost like a physical blow; or amongst the fluorescent green hills of the Western Ghats shrouded in clouds and mist with numerous waterfalls rolling down the mossy rock face. It was during these moments and places that I could intimately witness the magical sway the monsoon has over this country.

Last year, the monsoon made an extremely short and bipolar appearance in Delhi leaving us to deal with a rather sizzling and long summer. This year, post an unprecedented thunderstorms season that lasted most of summer, the monsoon arrived sooner than usual and then weakened. As it continues to gathers strength, and the air here grows thick with heat and heavy moisture, my gaze is fixed eastwards waiting impatiently for the full arrival of the monsoon clouds.