by Nair, Anita
‘Maybe I should get up there tonight.’
‘Through a great barrage of rain and wind? No one would take you. My advice is to wait and watch its arrival here. And the best place for that will be out at Kovalam beach. It should be quite a spectacle.’
His secretary, wearing a burst-day sari of rain-cloud-coloured silk, called to him. Delhi was on the line! Mr Joseph sighed and hurried away.
I set off for the florist’s shop in Mahatma Gandhi Road, noting that an electric mood had come over the city. People stood in groups on street corners, talking animatedly and looking at the sky. The traffic moved faster and more eccentrically than usual, and the thin wheeping sound of police whistles filled the air. Then, on impulse, I asked the trishaw driver to take me to a hospital. ‘A traditional hospital,’ I added. ‘South Indian.’
He nodded, unsurprised. ‘We go to Ayurvedic Teaching,’ he said.
The matter of the watch still puzzled me. Now, following that and almost as weird, the stiffness in my neck and hands had been replaced by a faint tingling sensation. It was pleasant, even exhilarating, providing the kind of lift you might get from tiny cardiac implants dispensing cold gin. These two factors had to be connected. Perhaps they pointed to a course of treatment, even a cure.
The hospital stood in a tree-filled garden, a large, airy building suffused with the heady smells of a spice bazaar. A friendly woman in a white coat sat at the reception desk. She listened to my tale of whiplashed necks, stiff hands and fast watches without ceasing to smile, though I noted a little tension appearing behind the eyes. I was asked to take a seat. One of the doctors would see me shortly. The corridors were full of stunningly pretty trainee nurses and lounging male patients wearing nothing but breechclouts, their heavily oiled skins gleaming like varnished mahogany. The heavily oiled women, presumably, had remained in the seclusion of their wards.
Several battered Ayurvedic medical journals lay on a nearby table. I leafed through them, learning that victims of cholera or acute gastroenteritis were given intravenous drips of coconut milk. Powdered seeds of bastard teak could, if eaten daily with gooseberry juice, ghee and honey, turn an old man into a youth.
A 22-year-old college student had been cured of chronic headaches by being purged with gandharva hastadi castor oil, then, each day before lunch, swallowing an ounce of pippalyadi arishtam. He took a tablespoon of chavana prasa and a cup of milk before bed and, on rising, had unconcentrated ksheerabala oil applied to the head; on twenty-one occasions the oil had also been administered nasally.
I saw how these head applications were done. A shiny, well-built young man came by in a wheelchair, pushed by one of those flashing-eye child nurses, a small leather crown set atop his shaven scalp. The receptionist said he suffered from migraines.
‘The hat contains a tank which we are filling daily with oils of cider and concentrated milk extracts. The mixture is absorbed naturally and, quite soon, he will be getting better.’
The doctor who saw me was a busy, plump, middle-aged lady with beautiful skin. Though interested in the accelerating watch—‘I heard of town hall clock that once chimed thirteen times during monsoon burst’—she offered little comfort.
‘I am not denying there may be force fields and charged particles in the atmosphere today,’ she said briskly. ‘Only a physicist could tell us that. And if such things exist it is possible they may be affecting you. But I doubt they could help us make you better. Perhaps we could ease the symptoms, but our methods are very slow. Take pain, for instance. We don’t treat pain, we treat only the cause. This can take many weeks. Even we Ayurvedic doctors sometimes suffer pain ourselves and would gladly kill for an aspirin! We too become impatient. But nothing must be allowed to interfere with the natural healing process. So you will need plenty of time.’
‘I must go to Cochin tomorrow,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘You Westerners! Always demanding instant results. Look, I am trying to tell you, we work in different areas. Factors like the time of your birth, the influence of your father and mother, are important to us. You would consult holy men as well as doctors. We use leeches for blood-letting. This is not Harley Street, or your famous National Health Service.’ She glanced pointedly at her watch.
I stood. ‘Is it gaining much?’ I asked.
She gave a small, gurgling laugh, unexpectedly sexy but, by the time I had reached the door, was already calling for her next patient.
At the flower shop Babu, in a state of some excitement, asked if I would like to meet Kamala Das. He had called her and she was prepared to see me at 5 p.m. ‘We must take flowers, but what kind would she like?’
I stared at him. ‘Babu, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Anyway, I’ll be out at Kovalam watching the burst.’
He looked dismayed. ‘Kamala is one of India’s greatest poets. In 1984 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature and she lives here, in Trivandrum. She understands better than most what the monsoon means to us. And I thought it might be interesting for you to sit and talk while the first rains are falling.’
‘My word!’ I said.
He smiled. ‘Come back after your burst. We will go together. Meanwhile, I shall sit and ponder the matter of the bouquet.’
A line of spectators had formed behind the Kovalam beach road. They were dressed with surprising formality, many of the men wearing ties and the women fine saris which streamed and snapped in the wind. Their excitement was shared and sharply focussed, like that of a committee preparing to greet a celebrated spiritual leader, or a victorious general who would come riding up the beach on an elephant; all they lacked was welcoming garlands of marigolds. As I joined them they greeted me with smiles, a late guest arriving at their function. The sky was black, the sea white. Foaming like champagne it surged over the road to within a few feet of where we stood. Blown spume stung our faces. It was not hard to imagine why medieval Arabs thought winds came from the ocean floor, surging upwards and making the surface waters boil as they burst into the atmosphere.
We stood rocking in the blast, clinging to each other amid scenes of great merriment. A tall, pale-skinned man next to me shouted, ‘Sir, where are you from?’
‘England!’ I yelled.
The information became a small diminishing chord as, snatched and abbreviated by the elements, it was passed on to his neighbours.
‘And what brings you here?’
‘This!’
‘Sir, us also! We are holiday-makers! I myself am from Delhi. This lady beside me is from Bangalore and we too have come to see the show!’ He laughed. ‘I have seen it many times but always I come back for more!’
The Bangalore woman cried, ‘Yesterday there were dragonflies in our hotel garden. They are a sign. We knew monsoon was coming soon!’ She beamed at me. ‘It gives me true sense of wonder!’
More holiday-makers were joining the line. The imbroglio of inky cloud swirling overhead contained nimbostratus, cumulonimbus and Lord knows what else, all riven by updraughts, downdraughts and vertical wind shear. Thunder boomed. Lightning went zapping into the sea, the leader stroke of one strike passing the ascending return stroke of the last so that the whole roaring edifice seemed supported on pillars of fire. Then, beyond the cumuliform anvils and soaring castellanus turrets, we saw a broad, ragged ban of luminous indigo heading slowly inshore. Lesser clouds suspended beneath it like flapping curtains reached right down to the sea.
‘The rains!’ everyone sang.
The wind struck us with a force that made our line bend and waver. Everyone shrieked and grabbed at each other. The woman on my right had a plump round face and dark eyes. Her streaming pink sari left her smooth brown tummy bare. We held hands much more tightly than was necessary and, for a fleeting moment, I understood why Indians traditionally regard the monsoon as a period of torrid sexuality.
The deluge began.
She relinquished her grip and went scampering back into the trees, chiding her clerky husband for not raising his u
mbrella fast enough. The umbrella, raised, almost lifted him off his feet before being blown inside out. The rain hissed on the sea and fell on us with a buzzing, swarming noise. The air was suddenly fluid and fizzing. As a child in the islands I once attempted to walk across the lip of a waterfall. I slipped midway over and the plunge to the pool below seemed to take for ever; the sensation I felt then, of being cocooned inside a roaring cataract of falling, foaming water, was very similar to the one I felt now.
Elated, I made my way slowly back to the hotel. Water sheeted off the hillside, a rippling red tide carrying the summer’s dust down to the sea. I changed and persuaded a taxi driver to take me to the flower shop. He muttered and sighed and asked for many rupees. But passing through Kovalam I spotted a place offering traditional Ayurvedic massages and, on the spur of the moment, asked the driver to wait.
The masseur, a lugubrious brahmin with small, muscular hands, bade me strip and lie on a table. For twenty minutes he rubbed me down with thick, spicy gingili oil, pausing every few minutes to walk to the window and spit into the streaming rain. The procedure was soothing and faintly soporific and, afterwards, I felt an inexplicable sense of well-being. The masseur, though, remained wary when questioned about this. All he would say was, ‘There are three places on body you cannot massage—gent’s penis’ (he called it ‘pennies’), ‘lady’s chests and face of both sex; face massage make muscles go slack and give wrinkles.’
Babu, wearing a tie, his hair combed for Kamala Das, awaited me with purple orchids in a basket. The axle of his car had been repaired and we set off through flooded, gurgling streets strewn with flamboyant and flame-of-the-forest blossoms knocked down by the rain. Some were carried along in the gutters, making them resplendent, more lay heaped and scattered across the pavements; beneath their shiny umbrellas the passers-by moved across this glowing, lambent surface like fire-walkers. Many shops and offices had closed, their workers awarding themselves an unofficial public holiday.
I told Babu about the massage. ‘Yes, I know of that man,’ he said. ‘He is quite good. But did he bless the oil before he rubbed it on?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said.
‘He is supposed to hold each application cupped in his hand for a few seconds while he offers it to the gods. With you being a foreigner, though, he probably didn’t bother. If an Indian had caught him just pouring and slapping it on he would have complained.’
He handed me Volume I of Kamala Das’s Collected Poems and I leafed through it in the waning light. The poems were moving and very fine, with the monsoon a recurring symbol of, it seemed to me, sadness, wistful regret and tenderness. In ‘The Time of the Drought’ she had written:
When every night my littlest child awakes and
Limpets to my side, I am heavy with unshed tears,
I am the grey black monsoon sky
Just before the rain …
And, in ‘A Souvenir of Bone’:
How often
Have I wished as a child to peel the night like old
Wallpaper and burn it, to hold at monsoon time
The wounded wind in my arms, to lull it back to sleep.
But when, half an hour later, I put the sadness theory to her she crisply dismissed it. ‘Nonsense!’ she said. ‘It’s the most beautiful time! It means rejuvenation, greenery, new growth. It’s nothing less than the reaffirmation of life.’
We sat drinking tea in a lofty blue room piled with books. The house was rambling and comfortable, the sounds of the dripping garden audible through the open shutters. A small, bespectacled woman with a teenager’s complexion, Kamala Das wore a vivid blue sari with great panache and I reflected that she must have been a great beauty.
She continued, ‘The monsoon’s arrival is quite magnificent. It comes towards you like an orchestra and, not surprisingly, has inspired some of our loveliest music, ragas which evoke distant thunder and falling rain. For centuries our artists have painted monsoon pictures and our poets serenaded the monsoon; I am simply in that tradition.’ She smiled and said, ‘What I would really like to talk about, however, is the forests—or, rather, the lack of them. Some friends will be joining us shortly. They share my concern and I hope you will listen to them. The problem is inextricably linked with the monsoon so should be relevant to your researches.’ She gave me a keen, questing look. ‘I gather you plan to travel up India in its company?’
‘That’s the idea,’ I said.
‘You may find it an unreliable, even treacherous, companion. These days it has become very elusive. It is often late. Deforestation is one of the reasons for this. Trees help to make rain. Forests seed the passing clouds. Before they cut them down the monsoon was always scrupulously punctual. My grandmother planned everything around it—washing the clothes, drying the grain, visiting relatives in the certain expectation that it would arrive on the appointed day. The rains were heavier then. Within minutes of the burst small rivers had formed around our houses in which we children sailed paper boats. The monsoon was part of our lives, like sleep. We watched the world being reborn around us while the rain seeped into the house’s foundations, making it creak and wobble. In the last two weeks of July we picked ten sacred herbs that grew in the puddles, took them inside and blessed them.’
‘It was always the morning we went back to school after the long Ramadan holiday,’ said Babu. ‘My parents made a terrible fuss. They were scared of chills and implored me to stay out of the rain. But how could I?’
‘Parents are much more enlightened now,’ said Mrs Das. ‘Children are encouraged to go out into the rain to enjoy this “gift from heaven”. Also on a practical note, it helps them build up a resistance to monsoon complaints.’ She cocked an eye at him. ‘But morning? I distinctly remember it coming during the early afternoon, at about two. We always had an early lunch and hurried through the washing-up so that we could enjoy the spectacle. And when it arrived each villager would crack a raw egg, swallow the contents, fill the empty shell with sweet oil and swallow that too. They believed it did them a power of good.’ To me she said, ‘One aspect you should look into is health. The monsoon cure is big business in Kerala these days.’
I told her of my attempt to find a cure that morning. I also told her about my watch.
‘Your watch may have been accurate. Perhaps we have all gained eight minutes without realizing it. As for your cure, I would send you to a place near here where your physician prays before an oil lamp and shrine dedicated to Dhanwanthari, the god of medicine; occasionally mantras are chanted also, the chief reason being that the sound is beneficial to the patient. Then his four assistants place you in a large wooden tub filled with warm medicated oil. Different types may be prescribed. Women wanting shiny skin, for example, have a particular red oil with a very sweet smell. The assistants massage you for an hour. (A curious thing about the massage is that it improves the vision; half blind old men have been known to throw away their spectacles.) You get only bland food, to cool the system, and you may not go into the sun. This goes on for twenty-one days and takes years off your age. My father had it regularly because he wanted to stay young. He died at eighty-four and, apart from his white hair, he had the appearance of a forty-year-old.’
To me Babu said, ‘But you must always do exactly what the doctors tell you.’
‘Oh, goodness, yes,’ said Mrs Das. ‘Last year two rich socialite girl friends of mine flew down from Bombay for the monsoon cure. But each evening, as soon as their physician left them, they came over here to carouse. They’d sit with me, chain-smoking and drinking scotch until dawn (they were a damned nuisance, actually), then sneak back to be in their rooms when the physician returned at 9 a.m. But after twenty-one days a terrible thing happened. They began to age. They became wrinkled old hags, their youth and beauty gone for ever. When I last heard they were at home in Bombay awaiting plastic surgery.’
Mrs Das’s anti-deforestation committee arrived, shaking and furling their umbrellas, half a dozen courteous young people a
nd an intense, middle-aged man referred to as the doctor. They took tea and before commencing their meeting, put the problem into perspective for me.
They said India was once a sylvan country. When Alexander the Great invaded in 327 BC he encountered dense, close-canopied, almost impenetrable forests. But peasants were already pursuing a slash-and-burn policy and, after the Emperor Ashoka came to power, the reforms proposed in his Rock Edicts included the planting of ‘useful trees’ along roads and on military camping grounds. The Marathas and Gonds planted mangoes beside their marching routes.
Trees play a crucial role in the monsoon cycle. By seeding clouds they encourage the rain to fall; by trapping it they help recharge the aquifers and hold groundwater in store for the common good. Some water, rising with the cell sap, is returned to the sky by transpiration through the leaves. A well-stocked teak forest gives off the equivalent of 1,000 mm of precipitation. Great rain forests act on the atmosphere like tropical seas; they supply it with water vapour and help replenish the rains.
By and large India is a natural tree-bearing country. Though it has five million hectares of eternal snow, most of its soil groups will support something—oaks and conifers in slightly acidic higher-altitude soils, sandalwood in coarse, shallow soils, casuarina in deep coastal sands, rosewood on riverine alluvium, babul, neem and palas in alkaline soils, bamboos just about anywhere.
Many Indians, though, have never visited a forest and are perhaps unaware that ever widening man-made gaps in the canopy will allow heavy rains to wash away the herbs, grasses and leaf-mould carpeting the floor. Then the soil itself is washed away, leaving the underlying rock exposed. Silting and flooding follow. Some of India’s most tragic floods have been caused by denudation of forests once so thick that tigers lived in them.
‘We have reached the stage now,’ said Mrs Das, ‘where only four per cent of the state of Kerala lies under forest. Within a short time, due to private greed and public indifference, we could be another Ethiopia. So I go to the villages and hold sapling-planting seminars, mostly with the women. I start with a prayer—one should always do that in India—and then I say a few words about the hardness and injustice of life and we have a little cry, and then I get on to the subject of trees. And they understand. They really do.’