Rain

by Cynthia Barnett

  I could hardly stay buried in my monsoon history after that. So I told her about my rainy mission. With a huge smile, she told me her name: Rimjhim.

  Assamese for rain.

  —

  Guwahati International is not the smallest airport I have ever seen. But it is the only one with cows wandering around the parking lot among the taxis. My driver, an affable Khasi named Shimborlang Nongrang, who goes by Shim, is here to meet me for a six-hour journey along rutted and sharp-winding roads into Meghalaya and the waterfall-draped Khasi Hills.

  Meghalaya is one of India’s so-called Seven Sisters, seven states that jut into the far northeast corner of the country, isolated from India’s diamond landmass by Bhutan and Bangladesh. Meghalaya happens to be shaped just like a cloud, its southern bottom spread across the northeastern top of Bangladesh. Its village of Cherrapunji, overlooking the Bangladeshi plains, holds the record for rainiest single spot in the world. Between August 1860 and July 1861, the British hill station here measured the greatest rainfall ever recorded, 1,042 inches in one year. More than a third of that came in July on the summer monsoons.

  In modern times, Cherrapunji and a neighboring village called Mawsynram vie for rainiest place, both averaging close to 470 inches a year. (Remember, the rainiest metro area in the United States, Mobile, Alabama, pulls in 65 inches annually.) Dozens of the tiny villages nestled in the bright green jungle on this side of the Khasi Hills are probably deserving of the honor. While the monsoons bring their rains to all of India, the intensity here is related to the lift of the winds coming off the Bay of Bengal. Packing the warm monsoons from the Indian Ocean, the clouds riding these winds draw more moisture as they cross the bay, and more heat as they overtake the Bangladeshi plains. As the clouds meet the Khasi Hills and rise over Cherrapunji, Mawsynram, and the neighboring villages perched on the southern slopes, they cool, condense, and drop their record-smashing rains.

  I could hardly wait to see cloud-shrouded Cherrapunji. Twenty-five years ago, when the travel writer Alexander Frater wrote his exquisitely rainy narrative of India, Chasing the Monsoon, foreigners were prohibited from visiting because of violence at the Indian-Bangladeshi border. Frater wrangled special permission to see the village for a few hours. But the locals were so hostile to outsiders that they wouldn’t even sell him an umbrella.

  In the quarter century since, the villagers have slowly welcomed eco-tourists who want to enjoy the dozens of falls here, such as Nohkalikai, the highest plunge in India at 1,100 feet, or trek to the area’s storied tree-root bridges. Over centuries, assisted by their soaking rains, the Khasis have coaxed the roots of banyan trees across the rivers, creating gnarled, living bridges that look like they belong in a fairy tale.

  I was about to experience all of this—amid the heaviest rains in the world. My biggest worry was whether I would be able to see anything in the deluges and cloud cover for which the region is known.

  Like many Khasis, Shim speaks the Queen’s English, along with Hindi and his native Khasi. “I think this must be your lucky day,” he says. It’s been an unusually dry June. But now, anvil clouds layered gray like natural stone have gathered to meet us at the Meghalaya border. A fine mist and sweater-worthy drop in temperature hint at rains to come.

  —

  I’ll spend my soggy week in Meghalaya at the Cherrapunjee Holiday Resort, a decision based on the exuberant appreciation for rain and the monsoons expressed on its website by the family that owns the place. The resort is twenty kilometers beyond Cherrapunji; the village proper is barren, its forest clear-cut and the limestone beneath its ground constantly gouged—rock trucks come and go like ants to a picnic.

  Denis Rayen and his wife, Carmela Shati, built their resort amid the well-watered jungle and tiny villages halfway between the rain competitors Cherrapunji and Mawsynram. Shati is a native Khasi who met Rayen when he visited Meghalaya as a field officer evaluating projects for an NGO. After they married, he became a successful banker, but he was ill-suited to the profession. As they followed his career around India, he fantasized about returning to Shati’s native village someday to open a hotel catering to monsoon tourism. “Everywhere we traveled, when people found out she was from Cherrapunji, they knew it as the rainiest place on Earth,” Rayen says. “Then, they would want to know if they could visit. But it wasn’t easy to visit.”

  During dry bank meetings, Rayen would doodle sketches of his wet resort, a place where families could venture out together on treks, and where he could market something unique in the world. “I didn’t want to sell hotel nights and I didn’t want to sell food,” Rayen tells me. “I wanted to sell rain.” He and Shati started looking for land.

  The Khasis are matrilineal, meaning the women own the land and pass it on to their daughters. (Not as good a deal as it sounds: The daughters who inherit the family’s property also inherit its misery—bearing full responsibility for aging parents; siblings who lose their jobs or spouses; down-on-their-luck in-laws; alcoholic or drug-addicted relatives; and other familial burdens.) In 1998, Rayen and Shati found their dream spot atop a steep hill in the village of Laitkynsew, with a view of the Khasi Hills and their plunging waterfalls to the north, the Bangladeshi plains to the south. The village doesn’t allow outsiders to own property, but as a native, Shati could buy it in her name. She stayed in Shillong with the couple’s small son and daughter while Rayen went to work building their resort in the rain.

  “Resort” is a relative term. My room is sparse, and unscreened windows mean sharing space with various jungle bugs and the lizards hunting them. The view, though, is rich. Awake at dawn the first morning, I step outside into a cauldron of clouds. It looks as if the entire sky has dropped to eye level. A white-gray mist swirls before me, and in the valley below. Only the peaks of the Khasi Hills are visible in the brew.

  By 8 a.m., the swirls begin to disappear. Bit by bit, they reveal a blue sky that soon takes over the day.

  —

  I am relieved to have one cloudless day in the rainiest place on Earth. To see rain’s colorful legacy requires a little time without. The sunshine also saves me some money. I’d planned to hire guides to trek through the Khasi Hills in the monsoon. But today’s visibility is such that I’ll be able to navigate the village and jungle footpaths with only a map.

  As I begin climbing down to the valley of the tree-root bridges from a village called Tyrna, I am reminded once again of the unfairness of rain’s gray reputation. The rainiest place on Earth throws off the greenest horizon I’ve ever seen. During the Raj, the homesick British dubbed the forested hill region “Scotland of the East.”

  Closer up, rain’s brush has trimmed the green jungle and villages in vivid primary colors. The villagers, who have erected their tiny houses on the slopes with a hodgepodge of materials, devote more square footage to flowers than floor space. Yellow trumpet flowers, which bloom on delicate vines in my part of the world, grow here into gnarled trunks that explode their sunny blossoms like fireworks. Roses thrive in the small yards under skinny coconut palms and thick jackfruit trees. As the village of Tyrna disappears behind me and the jungle opens ahead, the flowers increase in number, chaotic not cultivated, run amok as if drunk on rain. The magnified monsoons make this subtropical forest one of the wettest eco-regions in the world, and one of the richest botanical habitats in Asia. Scientists have identified 250 orchid species in this part of the Khasi Hills. Many of them bloom in June. The delicate ground orchids are easiest to see, voluptuous pink and purple petals calling attention from the forest floor. Clinging to trees, the larger epiphytes are harder to spot in the orgy of supersized leaves, shoots, bulbs, aroids, pipers, ferns, berries, nuts, and fruits familiar and strange. I spot figs as big as my fist and jackfruit larger than my head.

  The jungle bounty sustains Khasi culture and economy. The villagers have traditionally made their living cutting firewood, making charcoal, and trading an array of forest goods: bamboo shoots, wild vegetables, honey, mushrooms, areca, bete
l, other nuts, and a high-piled tropical fruit bowl. But the real nourishment for both forest and people is the rainwater that pours from the clouds, hangs in the air, dives from the waterfalls, rushes to the rivers, flows into clear pools, and fills the streams and rivulets that run through the villages, tapped by each family with its own Rube Goldberg arrangement of bamboo pipes and handmade filters.

  The rain also keeps the jungle and the villages cool; historical mean temperature for June, the warmest month, is 68.5 degrees Fahrenheit. This afternoon it is 80. That wouldn’t be so bad but for the humidity—and the fact that the stone footpath has turned to what feels like the longest staircase in the world. Two thousand narrow steps plunge before me, a direct drop into the valley. I’d trained for these stairs by hiking in hot, humid temperatures up and down my city’s anemic hills. It is not preparation enough for a sun-scorched afternoon in Cherrapunji. Halfway down the stairs, my shirt and backpack are so soaked I’m sure my water bottle has spilled. But it is only sweat.

  The tree-root bridge I’m looking for spans the Simtung River. I’m so hot by the time I find the bank that I jump onto a flat boulder and plunge my head into a waterfall-fed pool before I even see the bioengineered wonder. It is up the river, behind me. The living footbridge and its ropy handrails stretch ninety-five feet from bank to bank, handiwork of nature and people entwined. It’s like The Swiss Family Robinson come to life; I imagine the novel’s littlest boy, Franz, might race across at any moment.

  —

  The second morning that I awaken at the holiday resort, I learn that I am not the only journalist hanging around Cherrapunji, India, waiting for rain. An entire crew of TV weather personalities, storm chasers, and photographers from the BBC has arrived at the resort for their work on the children’s program Fierce Earth. Having produced episodes on extreme cold, extreme hot, tornadoes, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, hail, thunderstorms, tsunamis, volcanoes, and hurricanes, the team has come to Cherrapunji during the rainy season to film Fierce Earth: Monsoons, scheduled for the fall.

  By the looks of the sky, the only extreme footage likely today is for Fierce Earth: Sunburn.

  The resort’s rooms open to an octagon-shaped dining area where the guests sit together for meals and talk incessantly about the clouds, the weather forecast, and especially the prospects for rain. I wince to hear one of the storm chasers, an American, reveal that he doesn’t think humans are responsible for climate change. While the scientist in the group, British geologist Dougal Jerram, tries to set him straight, I wander off to find Denis Rayen.

  Rayen is at his computer screen, frowning at satellite images of cloud cover moving across southern Meghalaya. All month, the clouds have swept up from the Bay of Bengal as usual. But they seem to move on without bringing the rain. In an average year, Cherrapunji’s June rainfall is nearly 100 inches. June is half over, and only 23 inches have fallen.

  “I’m afraid it’s not going to rain again today,” Rayen tells me in his soft lilt. He seems almost too civilized to live in the jungle. Greeting his guests in the dress shirts, pressed pants, and leather shoes of a banker, he is not the type of resort owner to hang out in a pair of flip-flops.

  And he is perhaps the only one in the world so deeply troubled by the prospect of another sunny day in paradise.

  —

  I spend the morning at the small wooden desk I’ve pushed up against the window in my room, in turn writing and scouring the horizon for a promising cloud. The sky is pale blue, the field of vision so clear that I can see across the Bangladeshi plains to my left, the Khasi Hills to my right, and the village of Laitkynsew ahead, wee houses stacked on a hill in the distance.

  For the afternoon, I plan to hike in the hills around Laitkynsew, Sosarat, and Siej villages to meet more of the people who live in the rainiest place on Earth. Besides my water bottles and camera, I tuck my raincoat and rainpants wishfully into my backpack—along with rainproof notebook and all-weather pen.

  I set off in step with a piercing chorus of cicadas. They remind me of the dullest and most sweltering summer days of my childhood. Florida’s cicadas hum the loudest on the hottest, sunniest, and stillest afternoons. Now their Cherrapunji cousins are buzzing more intently with each step I take, as if to rub in the sunshine. It is not a sound I expected here; cicadas don’t like singing in the rain.

  The village circuit is hot and steep. But the people I pass in the road are refreshing like breezes, especially the children. Many of the women and girls hold umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun. Several are also hauling buckets and pots to the community water taps. As I saw on yesterday’s trek, most of the homes have water pipes rigged from small streams, pools, or waterfalls. The rainiest place on Earth is prone to increasingly severe water shortages during dry times.

  Soon my clothes and backpack are wringing wet again. Trudging up a steep incline in Siej, I meet a villager walking down, a pretty older woman with a thick black braid and a yellow umbrella. She asks me where I’m from. I tell her, and explain my trip to Meghalaya.

  “I hope it rains,” I say.

  “Oh! It’s going to rain!” she exclaims, pointing to the southern skies. The clouds still look gauzy. But they’ve dropped lower, and they seem to be dragging some friends behind.

  “When?” I ask her.

  “It’s going to rain last night!”

  —

  If not the grammar, the cloud-watching villager is right about the rain. At 1 a.m., I am awakened from a deep sleep by the sudden roar of rain on rooftop. It is as if every god worshipped in India (there are said to be millions) has turned on their heavenly spigots at once—all full-blast atop the head of little Cherrapunji. I jump from bed and pull my curtain to capture the moment my weather fortunes have changed. A Pluvius-worthy lightning strike spotlights the rain like the rock star it has become for those of us waiting at the resort.

  I hurry outside to stand under the front awning with other barefooted guests—a Mumbai petroleum engineer and his teenaged son, and part of the BBC crew. As drops bounce our way from puddles, I think of the orchids pollinated by rain splash, an evolutionary strategy known as ombrophily. The spattering feels cool, William Carlos Williams’s “certain unquenchable exaltation.”

  Within a disappointingly few minutes, though, the holy torrents lessen to mortal rainstorm. In twenty minutes, it has all moved on, rain, thunder, and lightning receding into the Khasi Hills like a dream.

  We learn in the morning that it was not a dream; old Jupiter’s lightning strike has knocked out some of Rayen’s transformers, including those responsible for the resort’s wi-fi, and the power in my room. But the day has dawned too beautifully—and too sunny—to stay indoors. I decide to head into Cherrapunji for market day, held once every eight days, rain or shine.

  In the octagonal dining room, the BBC team is mapping out a day trip to film at some of the region’s signature waterfalls. This is Plan B. The waterfalls will give them the sights and sounds of rushing water in the rainiest place on Earth in case of the unthinkable—a sunny June week in Cherrapunji.

  —

  Carmela Shati graciously lets me tag along on her regular trip to the Cherrapunji market. From a core block of permanent stalls, the market spreads into the sidewalks and streets of the city center in a colorful, crowded patchwork of vendors, most of them women sitting on plastic sheets and surrounded by artful heaps of produce. Jackfruit are piled like boulders. Tiny green and red peppers spill over from baskets. Familiar veggies have lyrical names—okra is lady’s finger, eggplant brinjal, bay leaf tezpatta. The rainbow of mangoes alone could fill a Western grocery’s produce section. Other corners of the market are devoted to meats, and to local crafts, which include the Khasis’ famous handmade locks, knives, and bows and arrows.

  Shati attended school here in Cherrapunji, five kilometers from home. This time of year, it rained so intensely and steadily that she and the other children could not walk home for weeks at a time. They bunked in the school’s hostel, w
aiting for a clear day to return to their families. “It was common to not see the sun for ten days or more,” Shati tells me.

  Such rains have been scarce since she and Rayen returned to Cherrapunji. “It used to rain steady, for days. If it rains now, it will be fierce all at once, and then this,” she says, pointing to the bright sky. The changed rain has changed the feel of summer. In the past, no one owned a fan, or opened umbrellas against the scorching sun. Both are necessities now.

  Once Shati’s bag is filled with cabbages, bulging peas, and bulbs of ginger for the resort’s kitchen, we take a walk to visit her friends, an elderly couple called the Elayaths who live atop a hill overlooking Cherrapunji. Even on this sunny day, their neat white house is surrounded by clouds. Raman Elayath is a retired beekeeping expert who came to Cherrapunji in 1964 to help jump-start the local honey industry. That year, he says, it rained 48 inches in a single day. In his first decades here, he never slept under a fan in summer like he did last night. He never went around in a sleeveless T-shirt like the one he’s wearing now.

  Like every other local I’ve met, the Elayaths have no doubt the climate is changing, and that humans are changing it. They are mystified that anyone anywhere else in the world thinks otherwise. “For us, it is not changing slowly,” Raman Elayath says. “It is changing rapidly.” Besides global warming that may be shifting Cherrapunji’s signature rains, Elayath has watched rampant water diversions, mining, and deforestation damage the landscape and the livelihood of his adopted home.

  On the drive back to the resort, I enjoy the cheesy yellow tourism signs that Rayen has posted at teasing intervals alongside the steep and curvy road:

  “Experience the monsoon.”

  “Romance in the rain.”

  I make up one of my own: Hike in the heat wave.

  —

  On the fourth morning I wake at 5 a.m.—to rain, but not nearly as much as my family is getting back home. Had I never left, I would have gotten to see the greatest Florida rains of my lifetime. Green moss has begun to grow on the side of our house, our rain-hating hound won’t step outside, and our car has developed a bizarre leak that sends rain into pools on the driver’s-side floorboard. Florida is drowning in the rainiest summer in state history while I lament the paltry precipitation in the rainiest place on Earth.