Monsoon!

Today at 2 p.m. dark clouds loomed high in the sky and everything was a little still. Then the wind whipped up suddenly, the trees and grasses waved around orgiastically, there was thunder and lightning. Within 20 minutes the sky turned dark as night and the rain lashed everything. At the time I was eating lunch with Manoj, my colleague at the Centre for Peace Research. We hurried to his motorbike and flew back to the Centre while the rain pelted and stung. The monsoon began a little late this year and has ended a little late as well, so I'm able to see the tail end of it. This is the third big rain since I arrived (one was in Delhi and caught me on the way to my plane here). It's a wonderful thing, this transformation of what is punishingly hot into the cool and soothing, at least if you have a dry place to be. Through the wind and mist, I saw a lone Indian woman in her saree holding an infant close under a tree to shelter from it.

The monsoon is an occasion for everyone to empty out of the building and stand around under the portico entrance enjoying it. Everyone relaxes and smiles and laughs at the people who got caught in it. Now the rain is steady but unrelenting. Looking out the window is like looking at the landscape from underwater, which it of course is. The field outside is becoming a series of lake archipelagos and the wind sweeps the rain in sheets. In town it will be flooding dangerously in the streets, halting and snarling traffic, which is likely to stay snarled even after it stops. It puts a damper on my plans to go to one of the oldest and most important ghats in the city tonight to see the first big night of public Durga festivals. It will be impossible to get through the city, and possibly dangerous (not from the people, from the flooding). Last time we lost power for hours. (Then everyone comes out into the hall as well and socializes and watches the rain.) ht now, we have it, fingers crossed. But there goes my appointment to have the satellite tv and printer installed at my flat this afternoon....

Today gives a small inkling of what it must have been like for thousands of years for the dry, hot, awful weather of the earlier part of the summer to finally break. With the coming of the monsoon there would be water for the crops (agriculture commands the greatest number of Indian workers still), and for the people after a long period of deprivation. The monsoon was critical to the very continuation of Indian civilization, but it was not without its own evils, for all the pleasurea of fertility and coolness it brought. If the monsoon was not plentiful enough, the crops would fail. If it was too much (and even if it wasn't) buildings and homes and people would wash away in the floods. Every years in Varanasi, Ganga climbs up the steps of the ghat and washes away buildings and a part of a temple or two.

The now ongoing autumn festival, perhaps the most important of the ritual year, lasts nine nights and celebrates Durga, the warrior aspect of the Goddess, whom we met in an earlier post, and who comes home this time of year to visit her parents. Durga puja marks the seasonal transition from the fierce monsoon to the mild weather of the autumn and its harvest. Now that the monsoon has come to a close (nearly!), this is the time to enjoy its fruits.

Alas, I won't be able to go into town because of the flooding, though I'm hoping to attend the celebration at a specially constructed pandal on campus, which I watchede folks put the finishing touches on last night. A pandal is something like a Mummer's float, but stationary. The one on campus is commercially sponsored, but communities traditionally construct and sponsor pandals and vie to make the best one. There are 175, Manoj says, in the city, and the papers are full of how the pandal committeess are always violating construction regulations and the police don't do a thing! The one I saw last night is a wildly decorated tableau of ten-armed Durga slaying the demon Mahishasur, who comes out of the mouth of the lion that later becomes her vehicle (each god's chosen form of transportwhat the gods tool around on). At her side are her daughters by Shiva, Saraswati (the brainy one), Lakshmi (the wealthy one), and her sons Ganesh (the scholarly one) and Kartiikeya (the leader of warriors). Also present are Ganesh's pet rat, Kartikeya's peacock and somebody's eagle. I'll have to fill in more details later.