The Monsoon Rhapsody
Kerala is fortunate in being the gateway for the monsoon to the Indian skies.
Rains are beautiful and mysterious everywhere, but in Kerala, we have developed a special relationship with the monsoons. Maybe because in our collective subconscious we realise that monsoons have really made Kerala with all its beauty and blessings. Monsoons have been giving gentle admonitions that the environmental distortions we cause could play havoc with the natural rhythms that brings the rains to this part of the earth. Kerala is fortunate in being the gateway for the monsoon to the Indian skies. Mother Earth has translated this abundance into magnificent rivers, a string of lakes and lagoons, fertile paddy fields and resplendent vegetation. The specially sculpted undulating topography of Kerala ensures optimal distribution of this elixir of life. Over millennia, a special relationship of dependence and gratitude has evolved between Kerala and the monsoons.
For a society that was primarily dependent on agriculture, rains hold the key to existence. The exultation of the poets on the arrival of the rainclouds is indeed the primordial longing of the people for well-being and prosperity. With all the 44 rivers being rainfed, monsoons naturally herald the cycle of fertility. Writers and filmmakers have invested the rains with special magic. Rains have been a favourite backdrop for several writers of fiction to bring together the hero and heroine into intimate contact. The rain serves as a dynamic curtain creating a sense of privacy. Sometimes the rains and the consequent flooding have offered highly insightful situations like the well-known short story ‘Vellappokkathil’ (in the flood) by Thakazhy, that portrays the plight of an abandoned dog while Kuttanad is inundated. The evocative quality of the rains has made many a poet opening the nostalgic doors of memory. Like the peacock that dances in ecstasy on seeing the gathering rainclouds, several poets have looked at the darkling skies in the fond hope of rain.
For the filmmaker, rains always offered diverse opportunities. From the scope for sensuous visuals with drenched garments outlining body contours, rains have been used to augment the visual effects and add rawness to violence. (How many blood- drenched heroes in a fit of rage and revenge have stood in the rain wielding deadly weapons!). However, it remains the most preferred season for a pair in love as if love emboldens them to completely get soaked in a proclamation of abandon and freedom that love alone could grant (in movies!). With several such instances in novels and films, rains have made the modern Malayalis more romantic than their predecessors, who were more worried whether their crops would be damaged or a bund would breach. Having moved away from being a producing society to a consuming society, such concerns do not make any sense to the younger urban generation. For them the life-giving aspect of rains is only a theoretical abstraction while its romance is real.
I often think that the same rain speaks different languages to different landscapes. In the forests, rains speak a language of foreboding grandeur. One hardly deciphers what it really means. On the hills and slopes with a clearer vision of the sky, rain sings a more jovial song. On the plains with abundant vegetation it is more playful to the point of being erotic. The accompanying gusts of wind makes the rain resemble a lusty lover. On the waterbodies they are muted as if uttering some soliloquy. In fact, more than the magic quality of the rains, it is how the earth reacts that makes the rains meaningful and irresistibly beautiful. Rains tell us in the alphabet of greenery what benediction this great earth is capable of. Monsoon is a reminder of this latent beauty and bounty. The bonding between the earth and the rain is perhaps the most ideal and productive relationship; the highest pitch to which any love can aspire. Not surprisingly, the most preferred rain raga has been named amruthavarshini; shower of amrut.
Romantic engagement with the rains is covetable if everything else is all right. But everything is seldom all right. Rains are also the breeding time for several pathogens causing many an illness. To enjoy the bounty of rains, it is necessary that the physical environment is kept clean and the natural systems are left uninterrupted. There is a price to pay for the compulsive tinkering with natural water courses with constructions and the insane use and disposal of clogging materials like plastics and the callous polluting of the environment. And that price is our practical distractions and inability to enjoy this mysterious showering of elixir from the heavens creating magic on earth. It is a pity that we have to miss the poetry of the rains in the prevailing prosaicness of existence.
(The writer is a poet and former Chief Secretary)