Getting wet with Alexander Frater chasing Indian Monsoon- a book review.
Alexander Frater's Chasing the Monsoon is one of those travelogues that stays with you long after you've closed the book. It follows the author as he chases the onset of the Indian monsoon up the length of the country — Trivandrum, Goa, Mumbai, Rajasthan, Delhi, Shillong and finally Cherrapunji — trying to outrun, or perhaps just keep pace with, the rains. Through his descriptions and candid asides, the book becomes as much about the cultural, historical and spiritual weight the monsoon carries for Indians as it is about weather itself.
The story behind the story is worth telling too. In 1986 Frater had been travelling along the newly built Karakoram Highway when he picked up a virus in China and was sent back to London for treatment. It was during that convalescence, not yet fully recovered, that he first properly learned about the Indian monsoon and began planning what would become this book — "monsoon chasing." There's something fitting about a journey built around water beginning with an illness that laid him low.
And there is his father's painting — torrential rain lashing down with temples in the background — a fixture of Frater's childhood that becomes a kind of touchstone he returns to throughout the book. It resurfaces in an unexpected way partway through his travels: he befriends a young engineer, Tom Richmond, after missing a flight, and Tom mentions, almost in passing, that it was his own father who had painted that very picture. Small world, big monsoon.
A Book You Can Almost Hear
What struck me most is how musical the book is — just like the rain itself. The heavy scent of earth that signals the first rains, the sudden coolness of the breeze before a storm, the rhythmic drumming of drops on rooftops — Frater layers these sensations the way a good monsoon song does. Reading him, I kept humming Rim Jhim Gire Sawan in my head, and once, absurdly, "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head." Both songs, in their own idioms, are chasing the same feeling he is chasing on the page.
He even reaches back two thousand years for company, quoting Kalidasa's Meghaduta — the cloud-messenger poem from the Sanskrit court of Vikramaditya — where the monsoon clouds are likened to the deep blue of lotus petals.
The sky on every side is shrouded by rain-clouds
Which wear the beauty of deep blue lotus petals.
And here look like heaps of made-up eye-salve, and
There Possess the charm of breasts of women with child.
It's a reminder that Indians have been writing love letters to the rains for a very long time before Frater arrived with his notebook.
An Eye for the Odd and Wonderful
One of the real pleasures of the book is simply how much Frater notices. He has a magpie's instinct for the strange, specific detail — a two-million-pound nuclear magnetic imaging machine, the forerunner of the MRI, turns up in his pages, as does a small lecture on the radiosonde, the battery-powered instrument package that weather balloons carry aloft to radio back atmospheric data. He also has fun with the meteorology of turbulence itself, explaining how cumulonimbus clouds and gusting crosswinds make monsoon flying such a bumpy business.
That last detail landed close to home for me. Frater flew into Sikkim on a Fokker Friendship turboprop, and by coincidence I was flying the very same aircraft, on sales calls between Calcutta and Guwahati, in that very year — 1987. I remember the terrific bangs and bumps of those flights all too well; they frightened me at the time, and reading his account of the same turbulence, decades later, brought it all back. He, meanwhile, had the good fortune of a friendly pilot who let him sit in the cockpit and actually steer the plane for a good twenty minutes as they approached Meghalaya — which tells you something about how resourceful and likeable a traveller he was. Trains, taxis, flights, he always seemed to conjure a seat at the last minute, tickets and all.
Following the Rains North and East
As Frater trails the monsoon's path, each region responds to it in its own way. In Tamil Nadu, parched land turns green almost overnight. In Karnataka, the rains breathe new life into the coffee plantations, the aroma of coffee mingling with wet earth. Moving into central India, Madhya Pradesh and the historic forts of Rajasthan show a stark before-and-after: rivers swelling to capacity, arid tracts suddenly teeming with flora and fauna. And in Assam, the monsoon reveals its double face — the Brahmaputra swells with fertility-giving silt even as it threatens catastrophic floods, while the tea gardens, wrapped in mist, quietly draw their lifeblood from the same rains.
Frater doesn't stop at the poetry of it, either. He digs into the science — how the Indian subcontinent heats up faster than the surrounding ocean in the summer months, how that differential heating pulls in moist air from the Indian Ocean, and how that inflow becomes the southwest monsoon winds we all wait for every June.
Kerala, Festivals, Matriarchs and Curfews
In Sikkim, his hotel manager tells him about an 8 p.m. curfew, rigorously enforced for a week, brought on by anti-foreigner riots — anger directed largely at Bangladeshi and Nepali migrants accused of taking local land and jobs. Frater knew how fortunate he was to be allowed to travel at all amid that unrest. Reading it forty years later, with Kerala and Bengal now grappling with their own concerns over illegal migration, the passage carries an unexpected, uncomfortable relevance.
Where the Book Falls Short
For all its pleasures, the book isn't flawless. Frater occasionally gets lost in his own thoughts, spending far more pages than necessary on a minor incident or memory — the detour to Paama Island, for instance, could easily have been left out. Some readers may also wince at a lingering colonial-era condescension in his remarks on India's poverty and bureaucracy. And every so often a comment lands badly by today's standards — at one point he estimates the age of a street woman by her breast size, a moment that reads as casually misogynistic rather than merely of-its-time.
The book is also unflinching about the darker side of the monsoon's duality. He notes that a 1970 cyclone killed half a million people, and another in 1985 claimed 15,000 lives — grim reminders that the same rains celebrated in song and festival can also be instruments of devastation.
How Wet Is Wet, Really
Frater, writing in the 1980s, quotes past records putting the highest annual rainfall at around 600 inches. Current data tells a somewhat different story:
| Rank | Location | Average Annual Rainfall (inches) | Average Annual Rainfall (mm) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mile 50, Papua, Indonesia | ~478 in | 12,143 mm |
| 2 | Mawsynram, Meghalaya, India | ~467 in | 11,872 mm |
| 3 | Cherrapunji, Meghalaya, India | ~463 in | 11,777 mm |
| 4 | Tutunendo, Chocó, Colombia | ~463 in | 11,770 mm |
| 5 | Cropp River, West Coast, New Zealand | ~453 in | 11,516 mm |
Closing Thoughts
By the time Frater reaches the end of his journey, his romantic notions about the monsoon have been tempered by the harsher realities of those who live entirely at its mercy. He recognises the duality at the heart of it all — a force as capable of regeneration as it is of destruction — and comes away with a quieter respect for adaptation, resilience, and the fragile balance between people and nature.
Reading the book decades after it was written, and decades after my own small brush with its world — those rattling Fokker Friendship flights out of Calcutta in 1987 — I found myself nodding along more often than I expected to. The monsoon hasn't changed much. Perhaps neither have we.
I would strongly recommend this book — it's like a brief narration of everything you may want to know about the Indian monsoon.
Before closing, I wish to thank Cochin Book Club for introducing the book to me. Our discussion on the book on 26 th July 26 - it was the time Monsoon peaked in Kerala- was quite lively when it was pouring heavily outside the glass walls, “Rim Gim Gire Sawan ......” just like Fraters musical prose !!!
Comments