‘The umbrellas are on a protest march’: Bishnu Mohapatra’s poems on rain for a desolate May

It is May. And May has its darling buds. Palash and hibiscus. Zinnia and marigold. But this May is not the month of flowers in the Indian plains. It is a parched month of pining. For compassion. And for the rain. The open beak of the sparrow and cuckoo, the dry petals of marigolds and zinnias, the paws of cats and the dogs, and the desert of the mind and the heart all wait, panting for the rain to descend. So do the poems of Bishnu Mohapatra’s book, Rain Incarnations. It is rain in its many (in)carnations - the euphoria, the nostalgia, the awakening of the rain, as it arrives, as it seeps in, as it sponges in and caresses the soil and all life nestled within.

Paeans to rain and the monsoon are not new in the subcontinent. Kalidasa’s Ritusamhara offers resplendent rhymes to rain, a Sanskritic canon that Rabindranath Tagore was very fond of. His early work Bhanusingher Padabali carries clear signs of how immersed he was in both Kalidasa and the rains. In between these two maestros of monsoon came the mythologies of rain, the rhymes and the lores, and the poetry of Mas’ud Sa’d Salman, Mirabai, Surdas, Kabir and even Mirza Ghalib. When...

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