Reflections on a monsoon

It was 7:45 on Sunday morning. Having arrived to Varkala, Kerala the day before after a fifteen hour train ride, Mangala, Natasha, and Ajay were still sleeping. I, awoken by the duet of a monsoon and the crashing waves of the Arabian Sea, slipped out to the verandah to read. I didn’t get too far, though, in The Catcher in the Rye. I mean, how could I? What spread out before me was idyllic. Our hotel – an 85-year-old cliff-top home converted into beautifully simple rooms – was enveloped in the rich green that only comes with the monsoon season. Palm trees wearing coconut necklaces stretched out at an angle to be closer to the sea. Streams of water raced down the crevices of the tiled roof, falling to the ground with restorative rhythm. It was calming. I felt like I had just walked out of a great therapy session, but all I had done was woken up and walked outside. Life was good.


A funny thing happens when it storms over the ocean: the water and the sky become the exact same color. I stared at the horizon – or, rather, where I thought the horizon should be – and only saw a swath of pale grey. Two elements had become one. There was absolutely no separation.

Our aforementioned train journey from Bengaluru to Kerala was very similar, in a sense. Walking into our berth, we were suddenly at home with a handful of other people: a portly, mustachioed “uncle” of a man, his wife – “Aunty”, and this tiny young bespectacled woman who giggled incessantly at our admittedly ridiculous conversations. Like the monsoon before me in Varkala, there was no separation between us. Mangala offered food and games. Uncle offered advice. Tiny woman offered us a chance to laugh at ourselves. Throw in passing men touting coffee coffee coffee chai chai chai biriyani biriyani biriyani and it was a microscopic mobile community. We felt some sort of kinship with the tiny woman, which struck me. How many times have I been on a plane and been seriously irritated by someone wanting to chat with me? How many times have I put in headphones – music not necessarily playing – as a precautionary measure to avoid small talk? Why was I open to this exchange of humanity here but not elsewhere? Why had there always been a divide in the past but here it disappeared?

I suppose some of the answer could be found in the much more familial and communal culture here. Also, as Mangala said in passing, with over a billion people (one sixth of the world’s population) in India, personal space is something that many simply don’t experience. Those no-fly zones that we have constructed around our bodies don’t exist here so this sense of community has been ingrained into the larger national and cultural psyche.

This idea of a shared experience is completely universal, I think, in childhood, but somehow we lose it as we grow older. Walking into a migrant labor school in Bengaluru, Mangala and I were happily bombarded with hugs and handshakes, cartwheels and frog jumps, and general merriment. Despite the geographical, cultural, linguistic, and economic differences between these kiddos and the first graders I worked with in Boston last year, they were exactly the same. There was still the same level of curiosity and willingness to engage in conversation with a total stranger. While every adult seems to lose the eagerness to mimic a frog (is this a good thing?), we seem to fold up into a solitary cocoon whereas the interest in others – neighbors, strangers, guy sitting next to you on the G-train – continues to flourish here.

I cannot begin to count the number of chats I’ve had as I’ve meandered around five different Indian states. They usually follow a prescribed questioning order, with numbers two and three being interchangeable:

1. Where are you from?

2. What do you do?

3. Are you married?

4. And your good name?

From there, the conversation circuitously strolls, sometimes touching on family, religion, my impressions of India, and – in one very bizarre case in Cubbon Park in Bengaluru – a proposition for sex.

I declined.

Coital proposals aside, it has been nice to feel like these arbitrary walls I have built up around me have started to fall. I’ve given myself the liberty to let my mind wander and – dare I say it – relax. I feel like my vision had become myopic over the past year, solely focusing my thoughts on work or failing relationships. It was a false bifurcation, either thinking about the water or the sky. I didn’t let the entire human experience melt together into a single shade where I could freely move from one area of thought and inquiry to another. As a result, I found myself on first dates with nothing to talk about because I had only thought about a handful of topics. In Varkala, though, mornings of chai and books morphed into afternoons of appams and cliff-top explorations which turned into evenings of Kingfishers and laughs. My mind jumped from grammatical differences between Hindi, Kannada, and Punjabi to the joy of the lungi. We laughed about Britney Spears concerts and the excessive amount of oil used in our ayurvedic massages (Seriously, a strong breeze would have sent our loin-clothed bodies flying off the massage table and down the hallway like a slip-n-slide). All the synapses in my brain – not just a measly pair – had been reconnected and were flourishing on the new input.

I finally was able to focus on The Catcher in the Rye, one of those “classics” that I’d somehow never read before. I don’t know if I’d call it the most stunning piece of literature, but I did appreciate the protagonist’s rather stream-of-consciousness thought process. Jumping from films to depression to girls to Catholics, Holden’s notions were without borders, without separation. There were no lonely thought silos, but rather limitless musings.

Maybe I need to be a bit more like Holden Caulfield, like the grey expanse before me. Perhaps I need to remind myself to be multifunctional long after this trip ends. Such existential ponderings, though, would have to wait. After reading a single chapter, I decided to go back to bed. The sea aside, no one was awake. And hey – aren’t vacations for relaxing anyway?