The other day, I saw this photo in a Flickr stream I look at occasionally. It was of the monsoons in Kerala, and brought to my mind the following lines from a Pablo Neruda's sonnet in "One Hundred Love Sonnets" :

The heavy rain of the south falls over Isla Negra like a solitary drop transparent and weighty: the sea opens its cool leaves to receive it: the earth learns the wet fate of the glass.

Neruda wrote movingly of rain in Chile in his excellent memoirs (also speaking of Neruda's memoirs, another related post that I should write in on the subject of Neruda's sense of alineation in Burma and Sri Lanka vs. Octavio Paz's intense engagement with India when they were consular officials there), and its near permanent impact on his poetry. The following is a small selection:

"I'll start out by saying this about the days and years of my childhood: the rain was the one unforgettable presence for me then. The great southern rain, coming down like a waterfall from the Pole, from the skies of Cape Horn to the frontier. On this frontiner, my country's Wild West, I first opened my eyes to life, the land, poetry, and the rain.

I have traveled a lot, and it seems that the art of raining, practised with a terrible but subtle power in my native Araucania, has now been lost. Sometimes it rained for a whole month, for a whole year. Threads of rain fell, like long needles of glass snapping off on the roofs or coming against the windows in transparent waves, and each house a ship struggling to make port in the ocean of winter."

As for rains of the monsoons in Kerala, Arundathi Roy's "God Of Small Things" (however over hyped that novel may have been, it nevertheless have some lovely writing) has some vivid descriptions, such as this one right at the beginning:

"But by early June the southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways.

It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose flashed across the leaf-strewn driveway."

As I was growing up in Hyderabad, the South West Monsoon that hits Kerala first, was mostly a hit & miss affair. It was much different in West Bengal, when I went away to college. There the walls of my first dorm room did indeed turn green with moss because of incessant rains, and books had to aired out to get rid of that musty smell. And one of my favored entertainments was drinking (or "khabo"ing in Bong) endless amount of chai as it rained outside, at Cheddis, water dripping from the thatched roof. Subsequently, during my brief sojourn through the extreme periphery of the maximum of maximum cities, Bombay, watching monsoon clouds make landfall from the Arabian Sea, and then endless white ribbons of water streaking down from the Western Ghats in the near distance as it began to rain, was one thing I took great comfort in. Perhaps this was what prevented that lovelorn younger me from quitting an inane debut job in software coding right at the end of the first week, and then jump into the sea at Marine Drive. During those five weeks of doubt, my pensive eyes were glued to the windows, endlessly staring into that endless monsoon rain looking for portents and omens of what the future held for me.

Anyway, here are few monsoon related Flickr sets for you to look at: Set 1, Set 2, and more disastrous Set 3

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It was drizzling here earlier this morning - a very welcome respite from the muggy heat of the past week. Of the many things, a person-in-transit like me will always notice where ever he goes, is the difference in the nature of rain between geographies. However, I might be able to recover the monsoon if I move to Bisbee, Arizona, a town that appears in these haunting Agha Shahid Ali's verses:

"And there was always thirst: a train taking me

swearing fidelity to anyone. Now there's only regret: I didn't send you my routes of Evanescence. You never wrote."

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Finally, if you can, pick up Chasing the Monsoon by Alexander Frater. It is a quick and informative read on this weather phenomenon, and its ageless connection to the Indian psyche.