Monsoon magic in Kerala
THE rains have their own rhythm. Every place has memories of the rainy season associated with it. My first posting as a civil servant was in Cochin (now Kochi). Coming from Shimla, which is known for its mercurial weather, I found Cochin’s weather much less dramatic, loyally sticking to a maximum temperature of 33°C and a minimum of 25°C, day in, day out. Humidity divided the year into three seasons — sticky, stickier and stickiest. But what stood out was the monsoon.
Monsoon in India is heralded by the announcement made by the Director of the Thiruvananthapuram station of the India Meteorological Department. It is keenly awaited across the country, but particularly so in Kerala.
It was nature playing a masterful symphony from a music sheet of liquid notations. Rain, heavy and frequent, was nothing new for a Shimlaite. But it would wax and wane in Shimla, now a torrent, then a drizzle, trickling to a stop before starting all over again. In Cochin, it was different. The monsoon clouds seemed tired of carting their load across the seas and were impatient to dump it at the first sight of land. Rain would come down in sheets, hour after hour, with incredible enthusiasm and stamina.
The onset of the monsoon could be based on predictions of weather scientists or a sudden shower or bird calls or planetary positions. People keen to watch its arrival went to the beaches in large numbers. Kovalam in Thiruvananthapuram was particularly prized, as it was close to ‘Land’s End’. I made that pilgrimage more than once. The day would start like any other, the sun beating down relentlessly. But a breeze would pick up from the sea around noon, refuse to go away, get cooler and gain strength to become a wind. In no time at all, the brow of the horizon would be furrowed by dark clouds massed like a great army on a relentless march over the sea. The grandeur of this stately procession hushed everybody. And then, the first big, slightly warm drops would start falling, becoming quicker and thicker until they became a drenching downpour. There could be no mistaking it — the monsoon had arrived.
Both my workplace and residence offered a grandstand view of the extravagance and energy of the Kerala monsoon. And it was very poetic, too, as long as you were dry and under a roof. But everyday life is lived in prose. Negotiating puddles in rubber shoes, arriving indoors with clingy, wet umbrellas and being showered by passing vehicles — all this made you lose the lyrics, rhyme and metre rather quickly.
And yet the Kerala monsoon had magic like little else. Many monsoons later, I heard Shubha Mudgal singing ‘Ab ke saawan aise barse’. It captures some of that magic and unfailingly transports me back to Cochin, bringing back memories of the five Kerala monsoons I was lucky to witness.
