Monsoon joy, monsoon blues

Some warm and other gloomy reflections on a rainy day from the dying biosphere of a ravaged planet.

Monsoon can be dreadful and often tragic, especially for those residing in areas prone to landslides and flooding. This description fits the remote mountainous village where I was born and grew up (please watch the video at the end of this post).

We were then terrified to death during every heavy downpour and often fled our house late at night and took refuge in the ruins of another house placed in a more rocky foundation. Nearly half of Nepal’s population still lives with similar fear of variable magnitude.

It is the least safe season to travel anywhere in the mountainous and Himalayan region in Nepal.

Decades have passed since I last felt that kind of dread as we migrated to the plains of Madhesh region in Nepal. Indeed, monsoon is the best season for me to do everything now: eat, swim, travel, play and so on.

A vegan tongue gets to taste the widest varieties of fruits and vegetables in the summer.

My in-laws have a small but ingeniously built grove where various types of mango trees yield the fruit starting from early June and all the way to early October. This year, I have already eaten so many mangoes that one day I felt compelled to check my blood sugar and HbA1c, the marker which shows the status of blood sugar levels over the preceding three months.

Litchi, khaniya, jamun, various types of berries, local grapes, dragon fruit, all grow and ripen in the summer.

A range of vegetables and mushrooms including the wild todke mushroom are exclusively found in the summer. Tama, shitalchini, badero, niuro and a host of wild vegetables and sprouts enrich the taste just this season.

Because of my allergy, I cannot go swimming in cold water in the winter and early spring. Besides, most natural swimming pools in the streams have swimmable pools of running water only in the summers.

Then comes the travel.

Apart from the ugly and poorly designed cities, every part of the universe as far as you can see is beautiful in the summer. The sky, whether dark blue, white or dusky, is beautiful. So are the overflowing streams and rivers. So are the hills and mountains blanketed by trees or grass.

Even the fields with maize, rice and millet plants sown or transplanted by humans are beautiful.

To me, a huge part of this beauty comes from the clean air around us. In most parts of Asia, such clear air is already a luxury available only during the four summer and early autumn months.

Clean air is not only visually appealing, you can breathe easier, even during heavy exertion like cycling up the steep slopes. On and off rain means it is rarely too hot for long. Especially in the tree-covered stretches of the trail, the ambience is simply heavenly.

And when you are swimming supine in a pool of natural fresh water and rain drops fall inside your open mouth, as does in one of the famous short stories by Anton Chekhov, that is simply euphoric, the next best thing after nirvana.

….

For the past three years, I have opted mostly for short trips to nearby destinations during weekends and other holidays. That is because I had to carry our son on my back or the shoulders.

That way, my wife could catch up with my speed while hiking or trekking. This has helped her regain muscles and gradually trim the fat that had accumulated in her body during pregnancy.

This year though, our son is almost four and it is increasingly tough to carry him for long. He has not yet grown enough to match our speed in the hikes. So we have discovered a perfect new method for the family outing.

We take my wife’s e-scooter and my bicycle. I pedal the fastest I can and they keep up with my speed. After the steep uphill cycling is over, I take the turn with the scooter and she pedals in the plain or downhill slopes. Our son, perched in my lap in the scooter, is mesmerized by the scene of his mom speeding in the bicycle like a flying bird.

This way, I hope she gradually develops her cycling prowess and by the time our son too can join us, all three of us can go cycling to faraway destinations.

Not to boast, but we traveled almost 50 kilometers in the rugged mountains this way one evening this week. My friend too joined us with his wife in a scooter and we had our dinner in a resort at the top of a hill. What a joyous outing it was!

….

Am I just showing off my privilege by writing all of this to you? (I know many single people among you will envy my family.) Or do I seek validation before fully enjoying my own experience as has been the norm with the advent of social media?

I cannot rule out an element of either of these as the motivation for writing this post. But there is a deeper and more important reason.

Frankly, I don’t know how long this kind of normalcy will last in my part of the world as multiple crises erupt and magnify in various parts of the world and the Climate Crisis envelops all of us from all the sides at a terrifying speed.

For clarity, you can check out this June 2024 article in the journal Nature Communications where a study of phytoplanktons in California for CO2 levels over past 15 million years shows this:

Our reconstructed pCO₂ values across the past 15 million years suggest Earth system sensitivity averages 13.9 °C per doubling of pCO₂ and equilibrium climate sensitivity averages 7.2 °C per doubling of pCO₂. Although these values are significantly higher than IPCC global warming estimations, they are consistent or higher than some recent state-of-the-art climate models and consistent with other proxy-based estimates.

You know what? We are already past the halfway mark towards doubling the atmospheric CO2 levels from the pre-industrial era. (From 280 ppm then to 427 ppm in April 2024.)

What a colossal human stupidity: aiming for 5-7C and talking about stopping at 1.5C!

….

I am totally unsure if the teenage years of my son will have even today’s normalcy in Nepal: breathing in fresh air for four months every year after breathing in the toxic smog and fumes for eight months.

The children in today’s Gaza can only dream of a Nepal-like normalcy right now. So do the hundreds of millions of people trapped in the conflicts in Ethiopia, Sudan and elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands who passed away in those conflicts did not even have the privilege of barely surviving the famine while dodging bullets and shrapnels in the conflict zones.

So here is my motto for survival amid the unfolding chaos: fight to avoid the worst in whichever way you can, prepare for the worst-case-scenario but do not forget to rejoice what is still left. Don’t let anxiety and despair devour you.

This will immensely help your mental health. This, in turn, will make you more resilient and enhance your agency. This will, ultimately, help you in your fight to save your children’s future. Or whatever of it is still left.

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At last, please watch Monsoon in action in this video from my village, few hundred meters below my childhood home where we used to dread precisely the landslide of this kind :

And here is the bonus video for Nepali speakers among you, my latest in the Bodh Varta series dissecting Nepali hyper-nationalism: