Flying home to Delhi this week from the north-east, the window next my seat revealed a tremendous drama being staged against the backdrop of the Himalayas. The mountains, from Bagdogra to Guwahati, were invisible behind the cluster of actors — that is, the clouds, from low, cottony stratus to high, wispy cirrus, all overshadowed by the towering few cumulonimbi. They put up an awe-inspiring show, these monsoon clouds piled up and up against the slopes, and scattered about on the floor of the atmosphere far below.
A cloud that charged the peak in mimic fray,
As an elephant attacks a bank of earth in play.
Naturally at such times one is moved to poetry. Those lines are from Kalidasa’s Meghaduta (translated by Arthur W Ryder), the Gupta-period story-poem which neatly brings together the drama and romance of the monsoon. When cloud touches mount again after a year’s absence, they embrace,
With the tear of welcome shed when two
long-parted meet.
Up in the sky, on what classical Greek actors a thousand years earlier might have called the god-walk, there seems to be no other way to view the monsoon than as grand theatre. The natural forces at work up there and down here — cloud, wind, mountain, river — demand to be personified, and it is hard to resist their will. One stops disbelieving, and becomes pagan again.
In The Clouds (translated by Ian Johnston), Aristophanes, the comic dramatist of golden-age Athens, has the leader of his Chorus of clouds introduce her fellows thus:
Everlasting Clouds—
let us arise, let us reveal
our moist and natural radiance—
moving from the roaring deep
of father Ocean to the tops
of tree-lined mountain peaks,
where we see from far away
the lofty heights, the sacred earth,
whose fruits we feed with water,
the murmuring of sacred rivers,
the roaring of the deep-resounding sea.
And so on. It’s quite a sophisticated picture of the water cycle, for the times. Up in the sky above Assam (as above any other part of the world, really), it becomes clear how water-determined our world is. In the neighbourhood of the Brahmaputra the sheer volume of water is appalling — the river is a dozen kilometres wide and its floodplain apparently boundless, but even small streams have slipped their banks, and every field is either fruitfully soaked or obscured by the water. When the plane passes over forest, one feels like a stormy Vedic god surveying his domain. Yet an hour east of Delhi, where the sun finally hits ground and there are no jungles to be seen, it’s clear that water is no less powerful, by the fact of its absence. Even the clouds have trailed off, and look light, weak and scattered.
There’s reproof in the air: if there’s not enough rain here, surely man must share the blame.
The wisest in this audience should here
take note —
you’ve done us wrong, and we confront you
with the blame.
We confer more benefits than any other god
upon your city, yet we’re the only ones
to whom you do not sacrifice or pour libations,
though we’re the gods who keep protecting
you.
So say Aristophanes’ clouds. And they add:
They say this city likes to make disastrous
choices,
but that the gods, no matter what mistakes
you make,
convert them into something better.
Yes, but for how long? “O cloud, the parching spirit stirs thy pity,” sighs Kalidasa’s banished lover pining for his beloved, when he beseeches the raincloud to carry his message of love. But a divine being is arbitrary, and unconstrained by human duty. So we must serve, in order to be served, because, as Aristophanes has one of his characters say of the clouds:
... they’re the only deities we have—
the rest are just so much hocus pocus.
