Janice Pariat talks of how in Meghalaya, people welcome the rain, encourage it to split stone and tree

At the height of the monsoon, prepare for “slap mynsaw”, rain so dark and so heavy it brings with it a sense of impending doom and danger. “Slap bam briew” they say is rain that will not stop until it has taken a life. “Slap Sohra” is rain anywhere else that reminds you of downpours in Sohra — which once would receive, yearly, over a thousand inches of rain. Rain comes to us in many ways in Meghalaya, though my favourite might be what reminds me of childhood, of being in the mountains, in bed, curled up with a book, being comforted and lulled to sleep by “slap praw praw”, rain that patters patters patters on a low tin roof.

For the longest time, our many names for rain in Khasi remained for me bound in dictionary and story. I’d lived for so long in Delhi, the city at the edge of desert, and elsewhere. I’d only heard of how my grandmother, in her girlhood, would sleep when tired and eat when hungry for there were no clocks in the house, and the endless rain rendered time —night and day — meaningless. How my mother and her siblings would turn back from the foot of the hill where we live because the rain had washed away the wooden bridge that connected our neighbourhood to the rest of Shillong. So thrilling for them this inadvertent school holiday! How fires were lit in the middle of July to dry ever-increasing piles of damp laundry. How, by the time August came around, everything carried the distinct smell of mushrooms — which is how the month “Naitung”, the “smelly month”, got its name.

It was only over the pandemic years that I returned home to Shillong from elsewhere, for any great length of time, and rediscovered the Meghalaya monsoon. I hadn’t even realised it but I had missed the rain — this kind of rain — and there was so much that I’d forgotten. How slap bah convinced you that you’d never see a dry day again. How slap ñuip-ñuip threw up the greatest of existential dilemmas — to use or not to use an umbrella. How one made friends finding shelter in random roadside tea shops. I’d forgotten how one didn’t make plans during these months. “You just go,” as a friend told me, “with the flow.”

Nohkalikai Falls in Meghalaya (Getty Images)

Apocalyptic rain interrupted deliveries, the internet being fixed, home renovation, weddings. It interrupted life. Reminding you that in this clock-work world, some things, if not many, are beyond our small human control. I re-remembered that the sound of the monsoon is not just the sound of water, but the cacophony of frogs outside my window, delighting in the wet. It is also the sound of sudden silence, when the rain stops after so long that the quiet seems strange. I was also reminded that the monsoon months brought with them the most beautiful light — the sky lit like an ocean, the clouds glowing silver and gold from within. Who needed rainbows, when we were gifted after-rain evenings such as these?

You might imagine that the wettest place on Earth might be more than a little weary of rain, but in truth, I’ve discovered, it is just the opposite. We have a simple rhyme that welcomes rain, that encourages it to split stone and tree, so people in towns and villages may celebrate, and the paddy be readied for harvest.

Ther, ther ‘lapbah ‘lapsan!
Ban dup pait ka maw ka dieng,
Ban shongshit ka shnong ka thaw,
Ban dup tad u kba u khaw

My father tells a story about a chat he had with an elderly lady in Sohra, who was selling pouches of kwai (betel nut) outside the Mawsmai Caves. “How do you put up with it?” he asked. “All these months and months of rain.” And she smiled and told him that she didn’t feel well if it did not rain as much as it did. That it watered and nourished her bones.

I am only beginning to understand this — to be at home with wind and storm and water. To learn a vocabulary that knits me to the earth through the nuances of a season. I am only now beginning to carry the monsoon of home with me, to listen to her songs.

Pariat is a novelist and poet, her most recent book being Everything the Light Touches