Going to Extremes

by Nick Middleton

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Rice liqueur,’ he whispered conspiratorially, closing the flap in his mac and gazing back into the downpour.

  Before I left him to his rain watching, I asked the man with the inner warmth what he did for a living. ‘I’m a sort of electrician,’ he said. ‘I repair power lines.’

  I sensed the lethargy in Mawsynram, but I also felt some rather less palatable effects of the rain. Manolin and Roy’s three-roomed house was a solid enough structure with wooden floors and panelling on the walls. The windows had no glass in them but they had shutters that could be closed when the wind got up to blow the rain horizontally. The wood for their fire was stored below the floor to keep it dry and every morning one of their six sons, a bright little lad named Venison, disappeared below the teak floorboards to grab the fuel for the day. The house had no running water (on the inside, that is) but an ingenious method had been set up to collect the rainwater that streamed off the corrugated iron roof. It consisted of a series of bamboo poles, split down the middle, which had been arranged to act like small gutters to channel the water through a window into the kitchen, where it was collected in a series of plastic buckets. The house was warm and snug, thanks both to the kitchen fire and a charcoal brazier that was always alight and surrounded by family members drying themselves off after a dash outside through the rain. I also used the brazier to dry out the pages of my notebook and the condensation that formed every day inside my watch.

  Apart from the fact that Khasi people tend to be rather short, and hence I was continually bumping my head on the beams, there was one other drawback to the house as far as I was concerned. The rain on the corrugated iron roof was very loud. It woke me up four times during my first night with a noise that sounded like huge waves crashing against a rocky shore. As the wind began to howl, they sounded more like tidal waves smashing against the roof. I surveyed the dark room from my position on the floor, expecting to see the two sons on the bed, Venison and Jefferson, equally wide awake thanks to the incredible racket. But they were sleeping like babies. I decided they must be deaf.

  They must also have had very strong bladders, because the other, rather less expected outcome of the sound of all this falling water was to make me want to go to the loo. Having no internal plumbing, the house was without toilet facilities. When I first arrived, I was told that the family relieved themselves in the forest nearby. But in the middle of the night, during a torrential rainstorm of Biblical proportions, there was no way I was going to dash the few hundred metres necessary. It wasn’t just the prospect of getting saturated, though that was bad enough since the charcoal brazier had burned itself out, but more the fear that the raindrops sounded so large I might be stoned to death. So every night I just lay there, crossing my legs, waiting in the vain hope for a let-up in the rain, until I drifted off to sleep again.

  The volume of water falling from the sky was truly astonishing. Every morning, I made my way out to the Public Works Department compound on the edge of the village to check my rain-gauge for the previous 24-hour period. The first morning’s reading was 468 mm, the next 515 mm. Mawsynram was averaging more than a foot and a half of rain a day. This was even more extraordinary when I compared it to the rainfall I was used to back home. Oxford only gets 642 mm in an average year.

  I was fortunate, in more than one sense, that this particular climatic extreme was so spectacular. The awe-inspiring measurements I was taking helped me to suppress the horror I felt at finally coming face-to-face with my first leeches. The short grass where I had set up my rain-gauge was infested with them and I soon became adept at reading my monitor while rubbing salt on the blood-sucking invaders (cigarettes were, of course, not an option in the torrential rain). To make matters worse, the little black stringy fiends seemed to sense my disgust and one morning I was confronted by a leech standing on the rim of the rain-gauge waving at me.

  In Western Europe we enjoy four seasons, but the Indian calendar consists of three: the cold season from October to December, the hot season from January to May, and the rains of the summer monsoon from June to September. The Indian Monsoon is one of the world’s great weather systems, affecting an area that extends from Tibet to the southern Indian Ocean and from eastern Africa to Malaysia. The rains are brought by warm, moist air flowing from the Indian Ocean over the Indian subcontinent, driven by differences in heating between land and sea. This differential heating is caused by contrasting energy responses of land and sea to incoming radiation from the sun. Water has a higher specific heat capacity than soil, so it is better able to disperse this heat away from its surface. Hence water does not warm up as much as land.

  Air in contact with the relatively warm land absorbs the heat and rises, causing an area of low pressure (a depression) at the surface. In contrast, air in contact with the colder ocean surface absorbs less solar energy and remains cooler. Less heat is conveyed upward through the atmosphere, which compared with that over the land sinks closer to the surface. This causes a region of high pressure (an anticyclone) to develop over the Indian Ocean. It is this contrast in pressure between land and sea that drives the monsoonal circulation. All sorts of other factors are also involved, such as the heating of the Tibetan Plateau to the north of India, which is fundamental to the onset and strength of the monsoon, but essentially the rain arrives because warm, moist air is pushed from high pressure over the sea to low pressure over the land.

  All of India receives most of its rainfall during the monsoon, but annual rainfall is particularly high in places where these moisture-laden monsoonal winds are forced to rise over mountains, thus cooling the air and promoting condensation of moisture to produce more rain. Hence India’s zones of highest annual rainfall occur over the Western Ghats, the foothills of the eastern Himalayas and, above all, here in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya. The zone of maximum rainfall occurs not on the mountain summits but in a relatively narrow strip on the windward side. The average annual rainfall at Mawsynram (altitude 1,401 metres) is 11,872 mm, or nearly 39 feet, making it the wettest town on Earth. Up the road in Shillong, which is just 110 metres higher in altitude than Mawsynram, they only receive an average of 2,415 mm a year.

  The reasons for such spectacularly high rainfall totals at Mawsynram are thus three-fold. First, the warm moist winds of the northward-moving air from the Bay of Bengal during the monsoon, which cover an extensive area but are forced to converge into a narrower zone over the Khasi Hills, thus concentrating their moisture. Secondly, the alignment of the Khasi Hills (east to west) means they lie directly in the path of the air flow from the Bay of Bengal, producing a significant uplift (plus cooling, further condensation and thus more rain). Thirdly, uplift over the Khasi Hills is virtually continuous in the monsoon period because the lifted air is constantly being pulled up by vigorous winds in the upper atmosphere; hence the rainfall is more or less continuous, as I’d seen.

  However, these same conditions also apply to the town of Cherrapunji, which was the proud holder of the record for wettest place in the world when I was at school. I remember grappling with the task of trying to draw comparative rainfall histograms that saw Cherrapunji’s column disappear off the top of the graph paper. But in 1994 the record for highest annual average rainfall passed to Mawsynram. I’d read several accounts that suggested Cherrapunji was rather upset about this. Rumours were started suggesting that Mawsynram’s meteorological station was sub-standard. Aspersions were cast on the quality of the equipment, and the fact that the Mawsynram observer was only a part-timer. It wasn’t like that at Cherrapunji, which had a proper, full-time meteorological office.

  When I asked people in Mawsynram about Cherrapunji’s claims, most were diplomatic, saying that it was wet in Mawsynram but wet in Cherrapunji, too. Only occasionally was anyone more definitive. A young man named Campbell told me, ‘the rain comes here first, then to Cherra further up the valley, so we get more and there’s not so much left for them. It’s a matter of record, Mawsynram
is the wettest.’

  ‘Valley?’ I said to Dulci later, ‘what valley?’

  ‘We’re up a valley here Nick, didn’t you know?’

  How could I have known when most of the time I couldn’t see further than the end of my arm?

  I wanted to look into the controversy myself, so I tried to make an appointment to meet Mawsynram’s resident meteorologist whose rain-gauge was situated close to where I’d set up mine in the Public Works Department compound. He was on holiday, but he had left the daily task of taking the measurements in the capable hands of the PWD cook. The man did his best in the appalling conditions, crouching beneath his umbrella to fill his measuring cylinder time after time as the rain bucketed down all around us. Although it stood in 6 inches of water, there was nothing wrong with the equipment that I could see. Almost as importantly, there didn’t appear to be any leeches. The site could just have done with a bit better drainage, that was all, but then it was in the wettest place in the world.

  Although Mawsynram currently holds the record for the highest annual average rainfall total, Cherrapunji does still hold several other world rainy records. These include the highest rainfall total ever recorded in a single year (26,461 mm, or 86 feet 9 inches) between August 1860 and July 1861, and two other world records that were set on the particularly wet day of 16 June 1995: the highest ever rainfall total in a 24-hour period (1,563 mm, or 5 feet) more than twice the amount of rain falling on lowland Britain in an average year, and the highest rainfall ever recorded in a single hour (420 mm, or 17 inches).

  So I decided to go to Cherrapunji. The evening before I left Mawsynram I attended a Khasi religious dance in the village hall where four young girls dressed in yellow and gold silk crept round the concrete floor in a shuffle-like motion, their feet inching forward with toes curling like caterpillars. They were laden with heavy jewellery, silver crowns on their heads and chunky coral necklaces, and encircled by men with chicken motifs on their shirts and silver quivers full of arrows on their backs. Musicians in turbans sat on the small stage and managed to triumph over the noise of the rain on the tin roof with their flutes and drums. After the dancing, there was a huge feast back at Roy’s house. He had slaughtered a pig for the occasion and villagers came and went in waves for sitting upon sitting of pork and rice. Everyone was in good spirits and for one evening, at least, the lethargy of the monsoon season was dispelled.

  Cherrapunji was just 16 kilometres away to the east, but it took us four hours to get there. This wasn’t because we drove at 4 kilometres an hour. Our Ambassador got up to at least 20 at one point, so I assumed it was because the road wound its way round to the other side of the valley that I’d never seen. I couldn’t confirm this like I normally would, with a map, because the Indian government are notoriously reluctant about making good maps available of its border areas. The reason always quoted is national security, but I found it difficult to imagine Bangladesh ever bothering to invade Meghalaya. They wouldn’t be able to see it for a start.

  But India has always been touchy about the north-east, a remote, sensitive border zone connected to the rest of the country only by a narrow corridor that threads its way between Bangladesh, Nepal, China and Bhutan. The north-east has also seen more than its fair share of riots, violence and terrorism aimed at the government in Delhi. The independence movement in Nagaland has long been one of India’s running sores, and Meghalaya, too, has a group of Khasi freedom fighters known as the Hyniewtrep National Liberation Council (HNLC).

  The name, Hyniewtrep, means seven huts or families, and derives from the legend of Khasi creation. The Creator sent 16 Khasi families down to inhabit the tummy button of the world, or Meghalaya as it is today, and established a golden tree so that they could commute back and forth to Heaven. (I guess this was so that they could go back and dry out every so often.) This was back in the days when people and animals spoke one and the same language, but the Khasis did something to upset the Creator who, in a fit of pique, felled the golden tree, so severing the link with Heaven forever. At the time that the tree was felled (some say it was a golden thread or a staircase, but it doesn’t really matter), there were nine families drying off in Heaven and seven, the Hyniewtrep, left on Earth.

  Indirectly, the HNLC probably also played a part in our slow progress between Mawsynram and Cherrapunji. A few miles after stopping at a petrol station, where the fuel had to be hand-pumped by the assistant in his knup because the electricity was off, the Ambassador began to splutter. Our driver stopped to check the engine, muttering something about adulterated petrol as he climbed back into his seat. Dulci said the HNLC had been accused of soliciting financial contributions under duress from businesses and that was why petrol was often watered down with kerosene. The HNLC denied the allegations, saying it was just crooks using their name, but attempted HNLC extortion had also been cited as the reason for the recent closure of Shillong’s premier Chinese restaurant. The management refused to pay up, and decided to leave town before their premises met with an accident.

  The fog cleared marginally as we ploughed on, revealing people wrapped in tartan shawls bent beneath their knups in paddy fields that seemed distinctly out of place surrounded by hills that looked as if they belonged with the shawls in Scotland. The mid-latitude feel was enhanced by apple and pear trees laden with fruit and cabbages growing in neat rows on a hillside. Just outside one village, a series of towering flat boulders stood upright on the moor, huge megaliths that could be seen all over the Khasi region if it wasn’t for the fog and rain, Dulci told me.

  Other than the adulterated petrol incident, we stopped only once, when the scenery had disappeared again into a haze of misty grey and we came upon a group of men wreathed in plastic sheets who were busy clearing the road of debris from a landslip. They were shovelling mud into a wooden handcart and levering large boulders off the track with long metal poles in the rain. They were a Public Works Department road maintenance team and for them the monsoon was the busiest time of the year, their supervisor told me. When they weren’t unblocking roads from the slips triggered by rain-soaked hillsides, they were busy clearing drains in the lower areas to prevent flooding.

  F I V E

  There was a different feel to Cherrapunji after Mawsynram. Cherra was much bigger for a start. Mawsynram had had an easy-going, village atmosphere, brought about both by its size and the position of all its houses perched up on the hillside. There was just one road through the village, where the bus station was located, and from there the rest of the settlement was only accessible by foot. It was possible to drive everywhere in Cherrapunji, which was spread out across a flat limestone plateau, a bustling town that could boast a parade of proper shops, in contrast to Mawsynram’s short line of permanent stalls draped in tarpaulins and plastic.

  Cherrapunji was the first British outpost in this part of India, becoming the official headquarters of the British Raj in the Khasi Hills after the arrival of David Scott, the political agent of the East India Company, in 1820. I could only discern its layout the day after my arrival because night had fallen by the time we drove in and the fog was the thickest I’d seen since entering the ‘Abode of the Clouds’. Dulci and I spent the night with a family who lived in a traditional Khasi house built almost entirely of bamboo, with a grass roof that provided perfect soundproofing against the rain. Its only drawback was its lack of a chimney, which meant that it generated its own internal smog, built up by a combination of the clouds drifting in through the doors (it had no windows) and the constant smoke from the open fire. Dulci said the lack of ventilation was deliberate, since the smoke kept away the mosquitoes.

  The next morning, I awoke to an unusual sight: the sky. It had stopped raining during the night to leave a heavy cover of menacing grey stratus clouds, but it was not total, so that here and there I could see fragments of blue peeping through. The base of the clouds was also well off the ground, enabling me to get the perspective that I had so sorely missed in Mawsynram. But the view only wen
t as far as the rim of the plateau, where my hosts’ bamboo house was situated. I stood at its edge and could just make out a hazy hillside far off in the distance. Between the hillside and me was a gulf, which I assumed to be a gorge or valley of some sort. I couldn’t be sure because although lying below me, it was full of clouds. They were dense, white fluffy cumulus that just sat there defying the usual arrangement of sky and earth.

  The rain had started again by the time I arrived at the Government of India Meteorological Department at Cherrapunji, where Mr M.P. Luitel was just leaving his office to take the rainfall measurement for the previous 24 hours. His ordinary rain-gauge was of the same design as that at Mawsynram, but his station was also equipped with a self-recording rain-gauge, as well as an anemometer to measure wind speed and a Stevenson screen full of thermometers.

  Mr Luitel maintained a dignified distance from any rivalry there might have been between Cherra and Mawsynram. He just said they were both very wet. He also refused to be drawn into any controversy over the Mawsynram readings. However, he did agree that the Mawsynram station probably warranted a full-time observer like himself.

  ‘The problem, of course, is financial,’ he told me when we got back into his office. It was the sort of office you’d expect of a working meteorological observer, with climatology books and papers in neat piles on his wooden desk, a bookcase stocked with more piles of paper and meteorological manuals, and photographs of cloud formations pinned to the wall above the fireplace. Hanging from the mantelpiece, held there by four large batteries, was a coloured poster of a Hindu god playing a flute astride six snakes. Occupying the wall opposite the fireplace was a large wardrobe with one door open to reveal more stacks of records. A doorway off to the left of his desk led to Mr Luitel’s living quarters, another to the right led outside to the compound of meteorological instruments.