Indian monsoon lasts longer than usual. During October and sometimes even in November, moss and mushrooms reign over old apartment fences. The charade of migrated birds marks the break of dawn, each one speaking of the obtrusive nature of the cities. In their distinctive chirp, they complain of the tall glass buildings with entangled cable wires messily hanging about. The birds speak of their hindering existence in our shared world. The rain frequently arrives, most days without warning, and the land yields without protests like one who meets a mercurial lover after an indefinite period of longing. If you travel through the Indian subcontinent, you will observe similar weather in a different combination of cultures with their unique food and humidity level. Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Maldives, and India - the entire subcontinent knows that we are not different people, we only tend to differ from one another. We speak in different tongues, but the sound of our prayer-filled sighs is the same. We sigh with relief when the monsoon calms the treacherous heat, we sigh with gratitude when it spares us the horrors of flash floods, and we sigh in surrender when it finally fills our wells for the next season of irrigation and renders our soil fertile. The Motherland replenishes her abundant reserves while the monsoon dances about in this part of the world - a sacred union of elements. 

Like our prayers, our languages too, have common characteristics. If you look closely these languages are essentially not languages at all. They are practices and collective habits morphed in different forms and sounds. These languages are translated into the same fragrance of fried spices and tea penetrating the morning air wherever you go. From the pristine mangroves of the Deccan peninsula to the steep ridges of Himalayan foothills, the taste of monsoon morning is always filled with filter coffee and masala chai. The tea remains consistent, but the spices change. The footpaths remain the same, but the sceneries change. Friendship remains the same, even though people change. I grew up looking at the similarities rather than the differences. Diversity makes one tolerant in more ways than imaginable. It inspires empathy and belonging to people whose identities might be different, but humanity remains the same.

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The Arrival

While the whole world is cradled in labyrinths of dreams, the sweet longing for release stirrers in wombs of heat-laden earth. The atmosphere gets pregnant with zappy music made by croaking frogs and chirping crickets. It swells and dampens before readily giving way to the agents of regeneration - the monsoon rain. If the rain betrays its schedule, the Earth responds in a fury of intense heat waves that will ensure that the late monsoon stays longer than usual. One such monsoon found us last year here in the Deccan, where I am currently at. The monsoon lasted till the first week of December. We almost had no autumn at all last year. We transitioned to winter directly from an everlasting monsoon. 

The monsoon announces its beginning in creative displays across the country. It rises from its long slumber of hot summer months, slowly and then all at once. It feels different depending on which part of India you are in. In the Eastern ghats, it metamorphizes from a looming grey presence above the stretches of paddy fields to threatening claps of thunder and angry torrential rains. It rises, almost always in the Bay of Bengal, and travels through the ghats in capricious capacities. Sometimes raging through plains and valleys, sweeping several villages away, and at other times more forgiving.

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Knee Deep in Nostalgia 

Water has power over me like no other element of nature. Ocean, rain, sweat, and tear - water has a gravity of its own. It moves me from within like an invisible puppet master pulling at all the emotional strings at once. Water inherently has the ability for both destruction and creation, and it only manifests in ways we encourage it. Whenever I encounter water manifested as a force of nature, arrested in awe I worship its beauty and power. I believe, among many things, humans are primarily the only part of nature that can experience its horrors and wonders as we do. Therefore, when reverence is due, we must make the payment with full attention and admiration. 

The pallid grey sky takes me back to the yesteryears of careless procrastination, the youth of hopeful surrender that life would work itself out in one way or another. Over the years, an inexplicable love for the rains has burgeoned in me, especially those of the mountains that have been my steady companion in those dreaded forlorn years of young adulthood. Like the sporadic showers of the mountains, my inquiry about the self deepened in those years. My curiosity made me use my restless heart for more than just wasting away on arrogant men. I yearned for love, but my yearning extended beyond the premises of my flesh. I lusted for a kiss or an earnest poem I knew not. Perhaps I felt more understood in the company of the dead poets than in the company of naive lovers. Perhaps, a quality I could ultimately attribute to my aged soul. I fancied myself as a writer, desk beside a window overlooking a sleeping cityscape interrupted at one end of its ambitious spread by the vertically growing pines on folds of Himalayan foothills. A room where rain washes over the panes, where at arms reach there is a dose of inspiration, where I could summon my imagination at will. That was long before I realized it takes more than a room with a pretty view to become a writer. Writing is an act of continuity, so naturally, I am not a writer if I am not writing.  

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Life in this part of the world assumes a form around all the seasons, especially the monsoon. This force of nature is particularly unforgiving and unpredictable with each turn of the year. As a child too, I remember having confronted the power of monsoon more than once. I distinctly remember this one time when my mother did not wake me up for my early morning school bus because the whole neighborhood was drowning. When I woke up to the clock striking a definitive 8 o’clock, I was taken aback by this realization, because then I had to study for the entire day at home. I cried bitterly at my mother’s betrayal, to which she giggled the whole morning at random intervals seeing my angry puffy eyes. The only comfort came from her monsoon special hot pot lunch of lentil and rice porridge. She slow-cooked it with french beans, pumpkin, eggplant, and other seasonal vegetables and finished it with a splatter of a ghee-fried mixture of green Indian chilies, cumin seeds, and asafoetida powder. Usually served with a side dish of finger-sized deep-fried potatoes and spicy mango pickles softened after steeping in mustard oil the whole summer. As I relished my comfort meal, the monsoon ravaged our town because of its badly planned drainage system. Soon news came in, that all small and big concrete cities flooded ubiquitously across the country. Thus the joy and betrayal of the monsoon became an essential part of Indian childhood. 

On another side of the country, my Dida (maternal grandmother) had more nuisances to deal with in addition to her unruly grandchildren with the onset of early monsoon. Hers was an old house on a low-lying plain, built in the ’70s beside a pond. Some of the houses around were so low that their roofs were only a few inches higher than the boulevard. When the monsoon hit, the whole area became waterlogged. I still remember my legs were swollen with mosquito bite infection, so my uncle, who lived in a separate house in the same courtyard, carried me on his back from his door to Dida’s so that I won’t have to waddle through the murky water. I remember Dida frantically running around with empty jute bags and bricks to stop the water from entering the veranda. That tiny old woman had an absurd amount of energy and strength. Even with this regular seasonal disruption, she was never deterred from keeping that place intact. She said she wanted to take her last breath in the house within which she built her entire family with her husband. Decades after my grandfather’s death, her voice still quivered and her heart still broke at the mention of his name. Her stubborn love for him was unfazed by a hundred wuthering storms or a thousand lashing monsoon. After all these years, I still wonder if that little house was made of her relentlessness instead of bricks and mortar. 

The Departure 

With its departure, the monsoon closes the doors of mystery, wonder, and nostalgia that it left ajar while it was here. Now the dream-like state deepens as the land retires into a restful sleep. The trees which were till now, bearing fruits of the fertile Earth are now indicating an end of the production cycle. The crops are now ready for harvest after a year-long hard work. Nature knows what we need, and it always gives us enough to be content. But human ambition knows no contentment. We deem ourselves bigger than this bountiful mother. We think we can surpass her in abundance, innovation, symmetry, and magnificence. We often forget our place in relation to this world, and if that is not tragic enough, we press on with our need to outdo our ancestors in ignorance. Even with thousands of years of evolution, we have employed very little human ingenuity at work when it comes to conservation and wise use of resources. We unleash indelible cruelty on whichever species we fancy, just to caress our obtrusive egos. Nature’s miraculously balanced cycles are blessings that we are so adamant to overthrow. In our arrogance to treat with deliberate callousness what we think we own, we have undone all the love Mother Earth invested in our existence. 

Monsoon tethers my soul to the wildness of existing as a part of nature, it reminds me of balance and the consequence of disrupting it. The life-giving aspect of water molecules can turn against its nature when provoked by the inconsistency of our species. Since we understand how the cycle of monsoon works, it is also imperative to be aware of how our actions affect it. Monsoon also takes me on a spiritual journey inwards and teaches me to flow and ebb in response to the world’s misgivings and criticism, and to persist no matter the cost. Monsoon will soon leave the motherland, but for now, it is still here in my soul, and I hope it stays a little longer. As the day grows shorter with each full moon and with the beginning of the end of this year, I am still holding on to the innocence of the first rain of monsoon, it reminds me of what it is like to be young, soft, and demanding.