MONSOONAL MUSINGS

AS I begin writing this piece on the 15th of Joishta—the 29th of May—the monsoon is officially still somewhere in the Indian Ocean, no doubt winding its inscrutable and insistent way towards our part of the world.  I imagine it will be a fortnight before it makes landfall and yet I am already quite excited about its arrival. In fact, this morning, I could actually feel the monsoons coming. It was such a pleasing morning—the heat that oppressed so yesterday afternoon had apparently been dispersed by overnight rain-bearing clouds; a few raindrops fell on me softly as I biked and walked for almost an hour as I tend to do at this time of the day; everything around me in our still lovely University of Dhaka campus looked serene, moist and ever so green! Indeed, there were innumerable shades of green on view—brilliantly bright to somber dark—almost as many hues as there are words for rain in Bengali. The wet, meandering air and the murmuring of leaves, too, seemed to swirl my thoughts. Moreover, the ripe mangoes that kept dropping every once in a while as I followed the circular route that I pursue in my early morning perambulations was a pleasant reminder that our season of mellow fruitfulness was already with us.
And yet the coming of the rainy season would rarely excite me when I was a mere child. During the seemingly monotonous monsoonal days of my childhood, my siblings and I would feel cooped up in our crowded flat in Dhaka's Ram Krishna Mission Road. The dampness—intensified by the wet clothes hung to dry indoors—the soggy, clammy walls, the smell of wet, humid earth, the intermittent stink of the overflowing drains of the neighborhood felt all too much after the initial excitement of the first showers and the occasional drama of the thunderous outbursts that preceded them had dissipated. True, my mother did her best to keep our spirits high by cooking egg curry and khichuri as often as she could and we tried to while away time by playing game after a game of ludo or carom, but sooner or later we would start complaining about this or that and inevitably start breathing down each other's neck. In a week or so, the novelty of the initial showers having become a distant memory, we would be complaining about the dismal weather. Spirits cramped and outdoor plans for the summer holidays clearly frustrated, we would start wishing for the rain to go away to some other and distant plain!
However, when I grew older, or when my mother felt I was big enough to look after myself, I began to enjoy the rainy season ever so often. One constant source of fun was playing football in the rain-filled field. The slush and the wet patches that made every move forward an adventure, the unpredictable movement of the ball that would skid and swerve in a part of the field and suddenly stop in another, and the sheer pleasure of raindrops that kept falling incessantly over our heads, made us boys wild with delight; some primeval kind of pleasure drove us into frenzied playing then. Or when we swam in the Ram Krishna Mission pond, the pitter patter of the cool rain drops that fell on our heads as we dipped in the still warm pond or relaxed on a pond side even in a downpour gave us the feeling of complete abandonment—no school, no parental shushing, nothing to deter us from indulging in primal delight. Or when in the summer vacations my siblings and I went to our Nanabari in Feni, knowing that in our grandparents' home my mother would lose some of her authority because of their benign supervision of their grandchildren, we could indulge once more in the feeling of complete abandonment that the rainy season unmistakably induced in us. (Years later, I remember as I write this, my pleasure at the sight of the sheer ecstasy that the first monsoonal downpour had brought about in my students when after taking a class in the University of Dhaka's IBA campus I saw them dancing in the rain, unfazed by the wet clothes sticking to their body).  
However, as the years went by in bourgeoning Dhaka, the monsoonal rain appeared to be more a hindrance than a delight. Travelling to and from work in the increasingly waterlogged city and finding a rickshaw or a “tempo” would often prove impossible. When I began driving to work after a while, traffic invariably seemed to snarl up in the driving rain.  Doing any chore such as shopping for groceries in our kitchen markets would appear to be a formidable task.  Cancelling my tennis game in the late afternoon was another cause of irritation. As in childhood, I would keep wondering in this phase of my life: why doesn't the rain go away from us and fall in another plain?
At the turn of the century though, most people suddenly seemed to wake up and take notice of a distressing development: a drastic change was increasingly evident in our annual seasonal calendar and in the behaviour of the seasons. The monsoons were now regularly arriving later than their due time. Many a year, the first day of the Bengali month of Asadh (when the rainy season is supposed to officially begin) turned out to be a dry day. And when the monsoon finally arrived, it seemed to be a much diminished force in every way. Unlike in childhood, when the rainy days appeared endless, and when occasionally a whole day would be deluged by the streaming rain, the rain now fell sporadically and with much less intensity than before. The villain, we were being told was global warming and the consequent climate change. Now we realized what we would miss if things went this way—the relief from the heat that the monsoons bring, the melody of fallen rain, the sense of renewal of life brought by the ceaseless showers, the re-greening of the environment and the revival of our rivers after every monsoon.
By this time, I had discovered another source that has made the season precious to me now as never before: Rabindra Sangeet. I had grown up in a house where Rabindranath's songs were being aired on the radio or sung by one sibling or the other almost every day, but for the first time in my life I was paying close attention to the words as well as the tunes. How beautifully and soulfully Rabindranath's lyrics articulate what I have come to appreciate in the late autumnal maturing of my mind and what I apprehend we might lose if global warming further diminishes our monsoonal showers:
Asadh, how delicately threaded are your
jeweled thunderbolts!
Your dark beauty is set off by lightning
flashes.
Your spells have the power to melt stones
and sprout crops
On your winged feet you carry from
sandy wastes a garland of flowers,
On withered leaves you come in torre
tial and triumphant showers.
Your clouds resound like tom-toms in
festive abandon
In your deluge of delicious green, revive
the parched earth,
But keep away your awesome, life
threatening floods. (My translation)
Not only in scores of songs but also in his lovely Chinnopotro letters and meditative prose does Rabindranath articulate, as no one else can, the message that the monsoons bring for us. Here, for example, is the opening paragraph of his immensely thoughtful 1937 essay, “Hindus and Muslims” where he juxtaposes the unnatural clashes being fomented by dark forces in his India with nature's restlessness and ability to sweep away barriers created by fratricidal man:
The rain has been streaming down. That must be why my mind has been sweeping across the fences erected by hundreds of years of human history and be roaming freely. Like the wind and the wave flowing across the open spaces of the sky and the ocean, the pulse beat and memories of generations have been playing the strains of the Meghmallar raga in me… Only the poet has managed to hold on to something of his primeval self. I feel such excitement stirring in me… (my translation)
Now I realize why the monsoons once again stir me so and why we must treasure them and welcome them every year: the monsoons are a means of reawakening our primeval self, an immense source of renewal, and an inspiration as we learn to overcome man-made barriers we create in our paths, Like Shelley's west wind a “destroyer and preserver”, the rainy season has the power to sweep away the debris of recklessly industrializing and colonizing man and remind him that he has it in him to learn from nature and pay renewed attention to the beauty of the world and its self-renewing strength. That is why nature's overwhelming downpour manifested annually for us in our rainy season is so compelling a spectacle for the contemplative mind.  And so let the monsoon come on us in its full force this season, fluttering the leaves and making our souls stir again and again in excitement and anticipation, but without its life-threatening floods...

Fakrul Alam is Professor of English at the University of Dhaka and the Editor of “Six Seasons Review”.