In the remote village where I grew up, we knew the weather when it hit us on the head. This was thirty years before and five hundred miles away from where that airplane swung low over the angry Bay of Bengal in July 1979. In Mirdha, a tiny outpost not far from the Nepalese border, there were no radios, no newspapers, no books. Our calendar was the seasons; our clock was the sun.
Our understanding of the weather might have been primitive, but our relationship with it was intimate, deep, and ancient. There was hardly a moment of our lives when the weather was not our most conspicuous companion. Sometimes, it was a joyful host, inviting us to lie in swaying fields under puffy white clouds. Other times, it was a wrathful parent, punishing us with drought or fearsome heat. But either way the weather was always in charge.
Without sturdy kerosene lamps, we endured stormy evenings in darkness. Depending on the weather’s fickle moods, my primary school education took place beneath the spidery branches of a banyan tree or, when it rained, on the hay-strewn floor of the cowshed. On frigid winter mornings, while the adults did their chores, we children raced outside, placed our backs against the east wall of the house, and lifted our chins to the sky. Dhoop kha rahe hain – we were, in the literal translation, eating the sun’s rays. During the dry months that preceded the monsoon, we watched for the dust devils – massive walls of dust that blotted out the sun – approaching the village with the roar of a cavalry. Almost everyone in the village rushed inside to escape the storms, which were powerful enough to knock over trees and snatch roofs from houses. But for the young boys, it was a rite of passage to brave the chaos of wind and debris in the relative refuge of the mango grove, where a victory over the kali andhi – the black storm – was celebrated with stolen fruit, our theft concealed by thick plumes of dust.
The happiest, most consequential moment of every year was the day the monsoon rains began to fall. In the weeks leading up to the first storm, villagers exchanged predictions like stockbrokers, their guesses based solely on the ephemeral: Evocative breezes. Migrating birds. The smell of something damp. A priest in a nearby village owned a panchang (kind of like a Hindu farmers’ almanac) that contained its own monsoon forecasts based on the positions of heavenly bodies; sometimes rumors of those predictions made it to Mirdha via a visitor in an oxcart.
The rest of us simply trained our gaze on the sky and waited. Especially the farmers, who stood at the ready; that first drop of rain was like a starting gun, and when it fell, they would race to the fields and sow the rice seeds their livelihoods depended on. Often, there were false alarms, a big storm and then ... nothing. To fall for this deception was ruinous – no rice for your family, no money to buy more – so many stood with one eye on the clouds, one eye on the most experienced farmer in town.
The wait was torturous. Locusts scavenged what was left of the fields. Flowers slumped over in defeat. The trees rattled their empty branches. The whole world fell silent.
When the skies finally opened, when the first fat kerplunk of rain smacked the chapped red earth, there was only one thing to do. Go outside and get completely, joyfully, gloriously wet! While my friends and I jumped in ever-widening puddles, the world around us changed in an instant. Birdsong blared from every direction and swarms of mosquitoes materialised from thin air. Walking paths and hillsides washed away as mud and muck and mire and swamp seeped across the land. Soon, everything that was brown became green, and seedlings of rice shot up in rows. Our wells once again brimmed with water.
Eventually, the novelty of all that rain wore off; endless storms swept through the village until it seemed like our bare feet would never be dry again. And the monsoon we’d waited for, hoped for, prayed for became the guest that overstayed its welcome. Now we waited, hoped, and prayed for it to end. We were eager for the dry season and its holiday festivals.
Worse, though, were the years the monsoon rains did not come no matter how many prayers were offered to the rain gods, no matter how much we watched the sky, willing it to turn black with thunder-clouds. Sukha, sukha was all anyone said. Dry, so dry. The whole world was thirsty, the ground full of gaping crevasses, desperate for a drink. Joy and sorrow, pain and comfort – everything depended on the weather, and the weather yielded to no one. It was a god on earth, as powerful as it was inexplicable.
Excerpted with permission from A Billion Butterflies: A Life in Climate and Chaos Theory, Jagadish Shukla, PanMacmillan India.
