Book Review - Chasing the Monsoon

This appeared in the July 26th Books section of The Times of India

In Shantaram, the latest hip book on Mumbai’s seamy side, escaped convict hero Gregory Davis alias Shantaram, discusses the weather with acquaintance Lisa as they await the monsoon – “It’s always worst just before the monsoon…this is my fourth monsoon…You start to count in monsoons after you’ve been here a while,”, says Lisa, “This is my second”, says Davis,”I love the rain even if it does turn the slum into a swamp”.
Time and place are truly measured in monsoons for many of us and that’s why Alexander Frater’s excellent and even exciting ‘Chasing the Monsoon’ touches so many chords. Travel writer Frater grew up on an island in the South Pacific where “tropical depressions moved in and out like trains”, and where his favorite rainy scene bedroom print was entitled “Cherrapunji, Assam, The Wettest Place on Earth”.
Many years later, having moved to England, after a particularly dank, dismal and depressing winter, Frater decides to follow the monsoon on its journey from Trivandrum in South India onto Cochin, Goa, Bombay, Delhi , Calcutta and finally Cherrapunji. ‘Chasing the Monsoon’ is the story of that meteorological pilgrimage, an English weather buff ‘s account of people and places, meetings with weathermen, poets and politicians, monsoon massage men , waitresses and doormen. In Trivandrum, where ‘the monsoon hijacked every conversation’, Frater meets the Meteorological Departments Julius Joseph, who is reporting the monsoon’s progress to the PM’s office- “At eight am it was cutting through upper Sri Lanka…Well, two days maybe three”. In Cochin “in the dark harbor small boats ran for home. Waves bursting over the scalloped sea were suffused, curiously with pink light”. Frater meets the McCririchs, an expatriate couple with Harrisons Malayalam, a company that owns tea and coffee plantations. Sitting in their ‘enormous, high ceiling’ bungalow, Anne-Marie McCririch talks of monsoon power failures and the snakes and cobras the rains bring out. In Goa where ‘miles of flooded paddies and puddle roads reflected the pewtery light’, Frater attends a monsoon do, then going onto Bombay and then to Delhi where he runs the bureaucratic rounds for permission to visit the rainy , rebellion filled North East . Armed with his hitchhikers guide, a well thumbed ‘South East Monsoon’ by Y P Rao, Frater‘s delight in the vagaries of wind and weather is infectious. He dips into history ever so often, and generally ruminates on the rain. Of the deluge at Cherrapunji he says,” I felt little of the excitement I had known when the burst arrived in the South. Those had been occasions for public jubilation. This was a routine matinee….awesome certainly but exhilarating only to the collectors of meteorological records; such specialists would now be watching, incredulous, as their gauges foamed like champagne glasses.”
‘Chasing the monsoon’ is wonderfully entertaining and very empathetic , and while Fraters vantage point may not be a Cuffe Parade slum, (he “chases it [the monsoon] by plane with intermittent pit stops in the swankiest of hotels “ as one acerbic critic puts it) it is nevertheless quite the best monsoon story you are likely to come across.