Me, Monsoon and my misadventures

As I walked out of the bank today, I had an uncanny feeling. The humidity levels were high. The sun was out with a little drizzle around. It felt as if the Monsoon had arrived. As the afternoon unfolded around 3:30 in the afternoon I heard the splatter of rain on my window. This splatter with in a few minutes became very heavy banging as if it was trying to tell something, was it that the Monsoon has arrived? We had a good 2 to 3 hours of heavy rain.

Monsoon evokes different responses from different people. Every possible emotion that we can imagine, it generates that in a human being. Nevertheless, in India everyone prays for it. Everyone deep down knows what it means to this country. It has been the same way for eternity.

It changes everything around us. The trees look greener; the sun shines brighter, the earth breaths easy as if to say ‘Oh, I was thirsty for such a long time’. Indian summer saps energy out of everyone and Monsoon is ‘Gatorade’ of India.

Alexander reached the plains of Punjab in India in this season. He had encountered Monsoons for the first time. No one had ever told him what to expect and historians have written that he got scared of it. He had never seen rain continuously falling for days at a stretch. Some of his soldiers thought that this was a curse from God and started to pray. His chariots became useless; he had to invent a new strategy of taking those horses out and using them as cavalry. There is a famous incident when he crossed the swelling Jhelum river. He crossed it in the night during heavy rains to fight his famous battle against King Pourus (or ‘Puru’). This was the end of his eastward march. From here on, he started to move south and gave up on the idea of conquering whole of India.

Similarly, when an English soldier landed in India his colleagues used to brief him on Monsoons. Many English soldiers used to die in this season due to local diseases like Malaria. The English were so impressed and scared by it that they still call heavy rains as ‘It’s raining like Indian Monsoon’.

Monsoon technically is big slow moving seasonal wind. They move from Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea into Indian subcontinent from the southwest and it brings heavy rains. The world over such kind of rains are sometimes termed as Monsoon. However, its origin is from Indian Subcontinent and its still most prominent here. It is the biggest moving storm.

Today monsoon reached Indore and it has always evoked great feeling. I still remember my school days. The advent of monsoon always coincided with new school year. I can still feel the smell of new books and new copies (as we used to call our pads). Everyday getting up in the morning I used to pray for heavy rains so that I do not have to go to school. We even wrote essays on ‘Rainy day Holiday’. It actually sounds so funny now. New classes had new friends, new challenges, and new things to discover. We packed our Cricket kits and there came out our soccer balls.

MHOW was a small town and suddenly started to look so much more cleaner and nicer. Shrub and tree overgrew. The parched grounds became full of patchy grass. The feeling of soggy ground beneath our feet had its own feeling.

One day it must have around 6 in the evening, we had just finished playing and we all were standing in a circle. It was a gloomy evening and as it normally happens around the dusk that light is not sufficient for anything. Puneet, my friend was tossing up a coin in his hand. Suddenly during one of the tosses, he missed catching it and it fell to the ground. He bent down to pick it up but instead of picking up the coin, he ran like a wind and was standing in his verandah. We all looked at each other puzzled for some seconds but our senses told us that there was something wrong. Therefore, within next few seconds we all 4 or 5 people were also standing next to him. When we asked him what had happened he told us that right in the center of our circle there was a big snake and the coin had landed right on it. When he bent down to pick it up the snake was looking at him. We suddenly realized how close we were to that snake and it still gives me chills and laughs at the same time.

Where we lived in MHOW there was vegetation all around us. Thick bushes made it safe heaven for the most dreaded crawler in India, the Cobra. In my growing up days, I have seen a lot snakes around me. Fortunately, we never had any tragic incident though there were many funny episodes like the one above.

In this season snakes used to climb up the trees to eat eggs. Every time we heard big commotion of birds on a tree we knew that it would be snake causing it. I remember one day on a Sunday all my uncles and aunts were home. We heard the same commotion on a ‘Peepal’ tree in front of our home. We all came out and saw a real big Cobra on one of the branches crawling towards a nest. All the birds were making real cacophony of noises. Somehow, all kinds of birds become one big group as they see a predator approaching. Some of the birds like Crows are daring and they even hit the snake with there beaks on its body. Youngest uncle (Pappu Mama) has always had different and deep insight on such things. He said that if ever a snake is chasing you you should drop a piece of clothing behind you. This distracts the snake and it actually tries to get to that dropped cloth instead of chasing you. I really don’t know that works or not but it sounded very logical to me. Hence, my uncle’s friend (Sherry Mama) and me took two towels in our hand and decided to be audience of this commotion from close quarters. As we started to approach, the tree the first thing we saw was that the snake was pretty close to the nest but was on a very thin branch. Suddenly we see a few crows came at hit the snake with their beaks on its body. This suddenly made the snake loose it balance and now was hanging upside down on that branch. This branch must have been around 20 feet high and we must have been around 30 feet away from the hanging snake. Now, Snake started it’s ordeal to climb back. But, as more than half of its body was hanging and its head was at the bottom it wasn’t happening. In the mean time, the crows had become more and more adventures and were giving the snake body blows. The snake kept sliding down until it was hanging with around half an inch of its tail. What we saw was an amazing sight. The snake must have been around 8 to 10 feet long hanging from a branch just by an inch of its tail, 20 feet up in the air. Suddenly a crow came and hit it again right at the tip. The snake came crashing down to the ground and our towels came down at the same instant. We did not look back and ran like crazy towards our home. I guess, the snake also ran towards its home. Fortunately in a different directions, but no worries for us as we had thrown our towel in front of that magnificent creature.

Another incident that comes to mind is once me, my brother and my cousin (Sidhartha / Monu) were playing, and I hit the ball into the garden of the house in front of our driveway. It was a lovely Parsi house, which we called ‘Appu’s bunglow’. As we were about to retrieve our ball I saw a snake eating a frog around 30 feet away. I could only see its head coming out of an old fountain. It was filled with water because of the rains and I guess the snake had just caught the frog. The frog was still alive as we could see it hind legs flapping around as the snake was swallowing it. Somehow, thinking that I should save the frog, I picked up a stone and threw it that little head of snake that I could see. As luck would have it, I had turned into Jonty Rhodes that day or maybe I was the chosen saviour of that frog. Hit the head of that snake from 30 feet away. The snake suddenly loosened its grip and the frog ran away. Unfortunately, it didn’t even thank me.

However, the most amazing sight that I saw was mating of two snakes. When snakes mate its very difficult for them as their genitals are at the base of their tail. Therefore, they align themselves and then rise up from the ground. What I saw was two cobras mating and they were almost 3 to 4 feet of the ground. I can never forget that sight.

This is more than enough on my misadventures with snakes, now back to our topic of monsoon.

Many people have written a lot of stuff about Monsoon but none of them comes close to Kalidas’s ‘Meghdut’ or ‘Meghdootam’. Kalidas lived around 100 BC and is considered probably the greatest Sanskrit poet or maybe even the greatest Indian poet of all time. His dramas have their own place in Sanskrit literature but his Meghduta stands apart. Many scholars have put him in the same level as Milton. Even Rabindra Nath Tagore himself wrote a poem in admiration of Kalidas.

Did you not have joy and sorrow, hope and despair, even like ourselves,
O immortal poet?
Were not there always the intrigues of a royal court, the stabbing in the back?
Did you never suffer humiliation, affront, distrust, injustice, want, hard and pitiless?
Did you never pass a sleepless night of poignant agony?
Yet above them all, unconcerned pure, has flowered your poem - a lotus of beauty
Opening to the sun any sign of sorrow, affliction, evil times.
Churning the sea of life you drank the poison,
& The nectar that arose you gave away!

--- Rabindra Nath Tagore

Meghduta is a story of a young ‘Yaksha’ has a newly wedded wife. Due to circumstances he is banished from his kingdom which is somewhere in the Himalayas. Now stationed in central India he asks the monsoon cloud to take his message to his beloved. The poem not only describes the beauty of the lands that the clouds will see in the process of reaching the ‘wife’ but also it describes the importance of that cloud to the people and things in the journey.

I will try to put the Sanskrit version and English translation in my next blog.