News channels flash red alerts. Rivers swell beyond their banks, swallowing homes in Bihar and Assam. Landslides bury roads in the Himalayas. In Mumbai, local trains—the city’s blue veins—choke to a stop as water rises past the tracks. A beggar floats his entire worldly possession—a plastic sack—above his head. A shopkeeper wades through waist-deep water to salvage sacks of grain. The same rain that feeds can also drown. And yet, when the clouds finally part in September, and the last retreating monsoon showers bid farewell over the Bay of Bengal, no one forgets what it gave.
The monsoon is not a season in India. It is a character. A temperamental, life-giving, sometimes-destructive god that sweeps across the subcontinent like a slow, green wave. monsoon season india
The reservoirs are full. The fields are a brilliant, impossible green. The peacock—India’s national bird, which dances only when it rains—has performed its courtship one last time. The earth is soft. The air is clean. News channels flash red alerts