The wet Embrace
Clouds roll overhead. At the time of writing, the monsoon, having made its turnaround northeastwards over Bangla country, is extended as far as western Nepal. Before long, it will have taken in the two Punjabs and Sindhs, completing the conquest of the Subcontinent.
The respite from the sun and heat is real, and the hassle of floods is yet some time away
People of South Asia love the arrival of the Monsoon/Barkha/ Barsaat/Sawan/Srawan. Someone go tell the television weather wo/men of CNN and the BBC that. We LOVE clouds down here. We do not care that there is that "bit of good weather" coming our way if it means a "patch of sunshine". You can move that patch over to your part of the world, and we ask you not to transport your cultural weather wise predisposition to us 1.4 billion over here.
Floods, you say? You mean we should hate the rains because they bring floods? And landslides? The causality is irrelevant, actually, or, in other words, the good and the bad on this score are more than balanced out. The rains are life giving, floods enrich the topsoil, landslides have always happened in their 'dynamic' mountains. Whatever is extra in modern times is manmade— embankments, which raise the flood level all over, badly aligned roads, and so on. So don't blame the water from the sky.
The monsoon evolved with the geology of the land, over the hundreds of million years that it took the Himalaya to be born at the union of the Asian and Indian plates. In a yearly love duet that is as old as the continents, the courtship starts with distanced eye contact while the moisture is still brewing down in the Sea of Arabia. Cutting northeasterly across peninsular India, the Monsoon makes as if to head across to the Hengduan mountains of southern China. Over Guwahati, it decides to go with the Himalaya instead, and, aided by the spin of the earth, abruptly changes course and heads east. This is when the embrace of the Monsoon over South Asia is complete.
This is when the clouds gather and water pours down in subcontinental ecstasy. Children frolick, the raindrops pattern the ponds in the plains, as captured by Satyajit Ray in Pather Panchali. The hills, meanwhile, are alive with the sound of water, water which comes down in a variety of onomatopoeic expressions caught splendidly in the Nepali language—from the simsim of light rain to the gandyangundung of a gorged river.
The Monsoon rains evolved with geology, but humans evolved with the rains. The Monsoon is part of being South Asian, this yearly spell that has us reaching up to meet the drops on our face. The green of paddies and darkness of the luscious vegetation are burned into the South Asian's psyche. The clouds permeate our minds.
Sure we like sun, but only because it creates clouds. Whether it is the thundering cumuli towering over the plains, or the soft touch of the fog on the mosses of the cloud forest of the Himalayan midhills, this is what helps makes us, us.