02. Games for a Rainy Day

a cyclone's mother-tongue...

A cyclone hit the Western Ghats yesterday. In the Indian subcontinent, cyclones that emerge in the Bay of Bengal, that is to the east of the Indian peninsula, are more frequent and more intense than the ones that emerge in the Arabian Sea, to the west of the peninsula. The reasons behind this lay in the geographical specificities of the region, although recent climactic trends point towards cyclones becoming more potent in the Arabian Sea as compared to the ones that have made landfall in the western coast in the past.

Every year during the peak summer months of May-June, the temperate lands in the north just below the Himalayan belt become extremely dry with barely any sign of precipitation. However, an occasional cyclone in the Arabian sea riding up the windward side of the western ghats and (I imagine) aided by the Aravalli range whose northern tip lies just below Delhi, brings a rare sight in the capital.

Some data: in the city of Gurgaon (part of the NCR; my current city of residence) the amount of precipitation recorded for the 20th of May is 25.4mm. The wettest month of the year for Gurgaon is July (as measured with respect to the average amount of precipitation; with respect to average number of rainy days, it is August - but our concern here is with precipitation quantities). The total precipitation in July as recorded in 2020 was 252.3mm with an average of 22 days of rainfall. That gives us an average of 11.46mm of rainfall per day in July, 2020. Given that rainfall in May 2020 had been nil (May, for any given year, is a dry month), it can be said that compared to the daily average of the wettest month in Gurgaon (July), this cyclonic rainfall is a 121.64% increase in daily average rainfall. This number is certainly a fascinating way of reading a phenomenon which is pretty rare in this region.

There is still another way of reading this, one which is comparative and built on associations. Analogies, after all, are the building blocks of human cognition. (For a fun lecture on analogies check out this lecture by Douglas Hofstadter.)

The setting: Low-hanging stratiform clouds (like, the nimbostratus), days of endless rain, cold winds, and a distinct quality of daylight - diffused, tacit, filled with character (melancholic?). It is a sight that encroaches upon the sentimental territory of memories. It pulls into the northern view, an image of the soaring Bay of Bengal - swelling, tumultuous, rogue. There, as winds lift off the sea and send it across in circles of catastrophe, a thunderous sound seems to reprimand the Sun, which seems to have hid itself underground. A fragment of this theatre is invoked in the capital today, with the entrance of this rare, albeit well-mannered, western cousin. To quote a favourite novelist, this is the ‘madeleine moment’, the Proustian kingdom of ‘involuntary memory’.

Growing up in Bhubaneswar (Odisha), the tail end of summer was synonymous with monsoon updates coming on a day-to-day basis. The day the meteorological offices would announce that the south-west monsoon winds have hit Kerala, we would heave a sigh of relief - it meant that the rainy season was only a fortnight away from us. Textbook words describing the Indian monsoons like ‘torrential’ and ‘erratic’ are indeed, not best intuitively experienced in the northern temperate lands. The joie de vivre of these words, so to speak, lies in the coasts - undoubtedly most in the western coast, but the eastern coast experience is truly tropical, a world different from the aridity of capital life. In any case, I have always enjoyed lessons learnt intuitively. Learning is fun when textbook axioms come to life in day-to-day realities. Therefore, it so happened that high-school monsoon maps came to be associated for me with a number of things. And those things, or rather the essence of those things, have acquired a plasticity that has ultimately made them resemble the very essence of rain. In my mind, they make rain - and rain makes them.

In those days monsoon rains seemed to seep into everything else I liked. Rainy days became loaded with atmospheres borrowed from books, songs and films. Over time it seemed to me as if, initially the power with which each of these things transported me to their worlds - that power was somehow transferred upon the rainy day itself. This meant that the world of stories could now open to me when it started to rain, even if the story itself is unavailable to me. Over the years these things have, consequently, informed and qualified my memory of the coast and the monsoon experience there. They are the knots around which my monsoon memory-complex is organised.

It would, indeed, be an interesting exercise to distill through a process of abstraction the specific threads of association between rainfall and each of these things in order to see why and how - exactly why and how rain on the one hand, sits in the same train as each of these different things. What in the world of Ideas (as Plato would understand it) is same about rain (a rainy day) and a poem? Yet, that is an exercise for another time. For this study, here are some things that - let’s put it this way - I enjoy on a rainy day…

Stories:

1. “The Night Train at Deoli” by Ruskin Bond

2. “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

3. “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away” by Stephen King

4. “Malvern Hills” by Kazuo Ishiguro

Poems:

1. “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats (preferably audio of a good recitation).

2. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot (good recitation).

3. “O Me! O Life!” by Walt Whitman

4. “A Valediction - Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne

5. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” by Emily Dickinson

Music:

1. “Wild is the Wind” by Cat Power

2. “Bitter Sweet Symphony” by The Verve

3. “He’s Alive” by Adam Taylor (for The Handmaid’s Tale)

Films:

1. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her (Ned Benson)

2. Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen brothers)

3. Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino)

4. Under the Tuscan Sun (Audrey Wells)

5. Melancholia (Lars von Trier)

Books:

1. Any Murakami book

2. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

3. Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

4. False Papers by Andre Aciman

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This list does not have my ‘favourites’; nor does it exhaust the list of things I like on a rainy day. This list is what, as Aciman would say, I have remembered to remember…