The Monsoon

MONSOON IS THE WRITER’S SEASON; the time to stay indoors, awed by Nature’s glorious majesty, focus on one’s own thoughts and put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.

Writers have been savouring the monsoon for millennia. Its rains are lifegiving and life-affirming, as Kalidasa’s lovely lines about the monsoon attest — “a source of fascination to amorous women, the constant friend to trees, shrubs and creepers, the very life and breath of all living beings, this season of rains”.

More than a quarter of a century ago, the Scottish writer Alexander Frater travelled to Kerala to witness the beginning of the monsoon, and then travelled north, tracing its path across the length and breadth of India. His Chasing the Monsoon remains a classic and his monsoon route well worth emulating by the intrepid traveller.

Of course, Kerala does not have the wettest place on earth – that’s in Assam – or even host the wettest place in south India (which is in Karnataka), but it offers the earliest, and arguably the most intense, onset of the monsoon. It also receives a great deal of rain, with spectacular floods causing major devastation in 1924, 2018, and 2019.