By Ravisankar KV
Petrichor – the pleasant fragrance that comes after the first drop of rain touches the parched mud in our village house’s courtyard during the last phase of scorching summer is always nostalgic. The dark clouds accompanied with cool breeze and ethereal downpour that follows and the sweet petrichor have forever been the highlight of rain in India.
Monsoon is India’s annual miracle and has a unique sentiment of joy, rejuvenation and hope in mind, body and soul, all across the sub continent. Anywhere else in the world, nobody can understand the real sense of perception what the monsoon rain means for India, until they experience it themselves. After two to three months of scorching tropical summer, the Indian monsoon is a time of relief for everyone. It’s a time to rejoice and prosper.
India’s Monsoon showers that arrive in the middle of the year has been extensively covered and chronicled by many foreign writers. The beauty and majesty of the rainy season has always attracted foreign travellers and traders to our country. Their narration about torrential rain in India encompasses expressions ranging from dismay and terror to delight and desire.
The modern tourism of India is indebted to one travel journalist, who travelled across the subcontinent to fulfill his father’s dream of visiting Cherrapunji in Meghalaya during the rainy season. Alexander Frater, the British-Australian travel writer wrote his first book on Indian monsoon titled “ Chasing the Monsoon: A modern pilgrimage through India”, published by Penguin books in 1990.This book and the following many features in various international newspapers and television documentaries by BBC, CNN, DW German TV and National Geographic contributed much in launching and boosting tourism in India in the early 1990s.
During his early childhood in the mid-twentieth century at Vanuatu in the South West Pacific Islands, Alexander Frater, son of a Scottish doctor had been enamored by the idea of Indian rains through the stories he heard from his father. After primary school, Frater was sent to Scotch College in Melbourne, and later attended the University of Melbourne as an undergraduate in the late 1950s. He married Marlis and in 1962 the couple moved to the UK to pursue a career in journalism. Years later, in London, Frater became the chief travel correspondent of “The Observer” and won numerous prestigious awards for travel writing. Finally in 1987, to fulfill his childhood dreams, he visited India to trace the Indian monsoons from Kerala to Cherrapunji, and produced “Chasing the Monsoon”. He also penned, “Beyond the Blue Horizon”.
Frater has beautifully narrated his encounter with rain and people while capturing India’s emotion filled response to this fantastic natural phenomenon. There are paragraphs that leave you feeling drenched and free. What an amazing journey this book takes through the heart and soul of India!
Frater decided to set out on a journey to India on the spur of the moment in a hospital in the UK where he was receiving treatment for neck pain. Meeting an enthusiastic Indian couple from Goa at the hospital tickled his fascination with the monsoon buried in his subconscious. That became the first line of the book:
The first sounds I ever heard were those of falling rain. It was tropical, the kind that seems to possess a metallic weight and mass…
The prologue that sets the tone of the book depicts a vivid bond with the tropics, a keen interest in the weather inspired by his father, a spirit of adventure, observations about people and an innate bond with the rain. He writes in detail about Kerala, Goa, Mumbai, Delhi, Varanasi, Kolkata, Shillong and Cherrapunji.
“I spent more than a year to come up with the first line. That is always the most difficult line of the book. I was writing about such a huge, complex subject. But once I had got that line, I finished writing the book within six months,” he says in an interview.Frater’s writing has an honest ring to it, and makes no effort to overly glamorize or condemn – a common pitfall when it comes to travelogues centred on India.
“My father had a great interest in the weather science. From my childhood onwards, he always tried to describe and teach me the natural wonder called Monsoon in the Indian subcontinent. He used to exchange letters with a friend from Cherrapunji Meteorological Station. He always dreamed and used to talk about visiting the wettest place on Earth. I remember we had a landscape picture in our room, the rain set in Cherrapunji with mesmerizing waterfall.” The picture was so much a part of Frater’s memory that it could pull him out of his “bouts of homesickness” in Australia.
The journey in 1987 was not a one-time fascination for Frater. He has made the journey thrice. He has made a documentary on monsoon in India for the BBC in 1991 (World of Discovery – Chasing India’s Monsoon) and this film became a real time hit across the globe, and later many National Television channels including DW German TV and Netherlands broadcasting corporation made films on Monsoon in the early 1990s.
With exceptional sensitivity and wit, Frater uses facts, impressions and anecdotes to vividly describe his own experience of the monsoon while also illustrating the towering influence of nature over the lives of Indians. He narrates, “In Kovalam, you actually see this entity coming. At least 40-50 people make a chain, holding hands and welcoming the monsoon! It is sent to nourish India. The sheer joy of watching the advancing monsoon! It is an event.”
“This is the only season that has moods. It can have wonderfully sublime moods. Sometimes it is grumpy, sometimes it is happy. And it is the same monsoon.” Fratersounds absolutely convinced about the excitement the rainy season offers. Several anecdotes in the book confirm that he takes much pleasure in exploring the myths and stories about music and prayers that compel the rain gods to oblige.
Moreover, theories about the healing qualities of rain also manage to get his attention: “Seasons in temperate climate are quite boring. Here, it is such a huge phenomenon. As nature recoups with the rains, it is rejuvenation time for humans too. According to Ayurveda, monsoon is the best season for rejuvenation therapies. During the monsoon season, the atmosphere remains dust-free and cool, opening the pores of the body to the maximum, making it most receptive to herbal oils and therapy”.
He celebrates the quirks of a simply-crazy-about-the-rains country in his writing .The harsh facts of deforestation, landslides, environmental hazards, floods, population pressures and death all stay as well.”There is romance in the Monsoon season but there is a reverse side as well — floods, death and deprivation”.
Frater’s account moves from being a blissful longing for the torrential rains he had heard so much about to the emotion of awe on facing the deluge which he considered to be a “roaring cataract of falling, foaming water.” There were moments when he greeted the first rains, like that in Cochin, and then there were others when he just missed them, like that in Goa.
“At 1 p.m. the serious cloud build-up started. Two hours fifty minutes later racing cumulus extinguished the sun and left everything washed in an inky violet light. At 4.50, announced by deafening ground-level thunderclaps, the monsoon finally rode into Cochin. The cloud-base blew through the trees like smoke; rain foamed on the hotel’s harbor side lawn and produced a bank of hanging mist opaque as hill fog. In the coffee shop the waiters rushed to the windows, clapping and yelling, their customers forgotten. One, emerging from the kitchen bearing a teapot destined for the conference room, glimpsed the magniloquent spectacle outside, banged the teapot down on my table and ran to join them crying, ‘Ho! Ho! Ho!,” wrote Frater about the arrival of monsoons in Cochin.
For Frater, the monsoons in India remained the ideal romantic phenomenon that was the key to the country’s charm despite its impoverishment. “As a romantic ideal, turbulent, impoverished India could still weave its spell, and the key to it all – the colours, the moods, the scents, the subtle, mysterious light, the poetry, the heightened expectations, the kind of beauty that made your heart miss a beat – well, that remained the monsoon,” writes Frater. “I made the journey for both of us, to fulfill my father’s dream”.
