Where The Rain Was Born --- an exercise in nostalgia Thalassery -- A verdant, little, coastal town, tucked away in the South-Western corner of India along the shores of the Arabian Sea. If you walk a long, long way north, hugging the coast you will finally reach Mumbai (formerly Bombay.) If, instead, you walk in the opposite direction, you will end up in the Arabian Sea, quite quickly, somewhere near Sri Lanka. I always thought that Kerala, our state, was where the rain was born. When I travelled from Chennai to Thalassery, by the old Madras Mail, (so called because it delivered our mail -- why else! -- all the way from the east coast, at just after mid-day, every day) I would see how the terrain changed from barren brown to rich green as we came out of the tunnel, through the Western Ghats. I’d press my eager head into the horizontal bars of the train window, and breathe deep of that familiar smell of wet vegetation and home; with it I would also take in the particles of soot and ash that came out of the front of the steam engine, making my eyes itch and my hair gritty. Well before the fears of global warming and consequent flooding, the monsoons arrived with predictable regularity each year, at the end of June, and swept away a few houses nestling precariously on the top of river-bunds. There was no welfare state as such, so the community, neighbours, had to step in. After several days of unrelenting downpour, the waters would rise and spread. My father’s sister would have spent the whole month of Karkadagam, ( the Malayalam month that falls between the middle of July and the middle of August) known for disease, death and devastation,) chanting prayers to ward off the disasters. Generally Small-pox, Chicken-pox, Typhoid and Plague, arrived in the rainy season. The old women in the house, whose duty it was to guard against all evils that could be fended off with prayer and incantation read out of the holy book, Bhagava, at dusk and dawn, in front of the nilavilakku, the scared lamp. But, of course, Chicken pox spread through the house and went. It lingered with one person or another and all of us waited for it to strike. That extended household had three children: myself and my father’s brother’s children, Mani and Appu, Mani eighteen months older and Appu four years older. My father’s niece, Nani, father’s sister whom I called Ammamma and father’s mother, Achamma, also lived there. So Chicken pox had quite a haul. Achamma (father’s mother} always organised her second line of defence when disease got close – as in next door. She kept coconut shells filled with a cow-dung solution along both sides of our walkway to the front gate. This was supposed to ward off Mariamma, the evil goddess of Small pox. Maybe the same Goddess did duty for Chicken pox too. I had a mental image of this vile witch, grotesque and pock-marked. She haunted my dreams. She was always hanging about our front gate, working her way up to the house.