I would see the first signs of monsoons on my mother’s face, till some years back. Shubha is in her late 80s now. She has been frightened of thunder and lightning, twin phenomena which precede the monsoon onslaught, since school.
“The sky grew unusually dark all of a sudden over Salai. No one thought it would rain that evening,” she said. Salai is also known as Salvador do Mundo (Saviour of the World) after a similarly named 16th century village church.
My mother ran out of her house to call out to her brother, who was tasked with drying boiled paddy in a field nearby. She started screaming as the first shard of lightning blazed over the open field. The sound of thunder followed, threatening to rip the lit-up sky into fragments. She kept screaming asking him to come back home.
“My mind froze. I was afraid that he would be struck by lightning. I had to be carried inside by neighbours,” she says.
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Thunder does not scare the filament of her sanity anymore. With age, she is now hard of hearing. And lightning without the sound of thunder, which accompanies the first monsoon deluge, doesn’t evoke sufficient menace.
I had seen her cringe during bouts of thunder all these years. It was only a few days ago, as we discussed the delayed rains, that she told me about the genesis of her fear.
After a few pre-monsoon showers at the end of May or early June, an ideal Goa monsoon season translates into a full-blown phenomenon by the end of June.
Stepping out of the house during the monsoons in Goa is a challenge, especially when it rains for days together. The work commute is arduous. The umbrella fabric gets ripped off at least more than once, even rubber raincoats seem inadequate and the forever-soaked palms and soles of the feet look dull-white and ribbed like the skin on a fresh, plucked broiler chicken.
On an average it rains 100 inches every year in Goa. According to meteorological calculations, one inch of rainfall spread across a one-acre area, is equivalent to 113 tons of water. That would mean in an average rainy season, 11,300 tons of water pours over just one acre of land. Goa, India’s smallest state in terms of landmass, is spread over nine lakh acres.
While leaving one’s home is not convenient, staying indoors is also a trying experience, because of the erratic electricity supply during the monsoons. There are other plusses. The roads are emptier, because tourist footfalls drop considerably. Just like nature claims its space in Goa’s rains, so do the natives. It is the only time of the year, when my mother does not care to spend the afternoon counting the number of tourist buses which pass by our house in Anjuna. There are too few.
The monsoons in Goa have been sketchy this year, almost reluctant.
In the post-apocalyptic Covid era, which made us certain about the uncertainties of life, the first spell of rain this year in Goa occurred in January. That ill-timed shower took a toll on Goa’s cashew crop, damaging the fragile flowering process .
Distillers of feni, a popular double-distilled cashew liquor, now fear a sharp drop in production. In 2022, feni prices are expected to double from Rs. 4,000 per kolso (35 litre measure) to nearly Rs. 7,000 to Rs. 8,000. One gulp of feni is known to create a warm, protective layer around the soul, which keeps the monsoon’s cold and wet at bay. After two gulps, you stop worrying about the rains.
And then it did rain in June, when the South West monsoon winds swept sufficiently northwards. But this time red velvet mites have gone missing. I first spotted the mites sometime in the 1980s. They were yet another reliable marker for the onset of monsoon. The eight-legged mites are also called rain-bugs.
The mites creep up through the moist soil, loosened by early showers. Against the new, young layer of grass and weeds, the little red arachnids tend to stand out like blood red rubies casually studded in an emerald necklace.
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As children, we would scour around open pastures and hills to collect the red velvet bugs. Their soft, almost squishy backs felt like crumbs of moist red velvet cake, when you gently poke at them.
Optimists cannot be blamed for interpreting the rains as a season of rejuvenation or rebirth. It is all that, but it is also the season, when weeds and parasitic vines, appear to assume super human powers. They simply do not die. Instead, they wage a virtual war against inertia. Their mesh of their tendrils take over anything that is stationary and their seeming mutant powers morph verdant auras over idle objects.
You pluck, trim, burn them or dig them out of the soil, and yet they dart back to life and javelin their parasitic lassoes over young plants, trees, abandoned cars, compound walls, barbed wire fences or ruins. In recent times, creepers would find it difficult to take over moss-lined abandoned ruins, which look like crumbling jade huts in the rain. Ruins are a rarer sight in villages now, amidst Goa’s real estate boom.
Like the red velvet bugs, peacocks also tend to walk into your lives when it rains. When you look at a peacock, its elongated brilliant bluish green neck that bobs with every step, those curious eyes and the fragile crown on its head, you expect the bird to sing and not let out undignified squawk, which they do every now and then.
The proliferation of peacocks in pastoral Goa over the last two decades has been credited to the decline in the fox population. Foxes would control peafowl numbers by foraging their nests for eggs laid by peahens.
Goa appeared to have almost lost its patience with peacocks. In 2016, authorities were keen on formally declaring India’s national bird a vermin, because of the damage they caused to crops. The plan was however stalled leaving peacocks to unlock their sheaf of feathers and dance in the rains for a few years more.
Amid the abundance of rain, fresh water gushing out of springs along hillsides, overflowing wells and drains, it isn’t uncommon to trek to a monsoon-fed waterfall or a swim in an abandoned stone quarry, where water accumulates forming a pool of bluish-green water around this time.
Swimming in the sea is off limits for obvious reasons. The crashing of the waves against the beach can be heard miles inland, especially at nights, when electricity abandons entire villages every few hours. The more the rains, the more the fury in the intensity with which the waves pound the beach. The dull roar of the waves from a distance, the trembling foliage of a tamarind tree lit up by stray lightning and gentle, recurring patter of water seeping from a cracked tile roof is my monsoon.
The sun can wait.
