When the Rains Come

A leech,the season’s first. Other people rely on the met office and the newspaper for formal announcements of the monsoon. In the hills,the job’s done by leeches. They are called “joke” in Hindi — somehow they never make you laugh. It is a mystery where leeches come from in the monsoon and where they go to once it’s over. There must be people who know this. I don’t. About a week or so after the rains set in,the leeches begin to emerge. Out of air,dropping much as the gentle rain from heaven does upon the earth beneath,leeches fall quietly off leaves and trees,they pour out of the grass and pine needles and they march with starved determination towards warm blood. Ours. Leeches populate the mountains for the entire duration of the monsoon. They don’t appear when it rains at any other time,not where we live. Once you become alert to them,you have a chance of noticing them before they notice you. Walking,you pause on a rain-slicked road because a tiny bit of the tarmac seems to be alive: it’s vertical,it’s oscillating for a look,as if straining to spot you. But the gyrations are deceptive. Leeches actually find their victims via smell and sound,not sight. Once they have spotted you (or a dog or cow or anything with warm blood) they attach themselves to your skin and bite you with all the teeth in all their jaws. Since they have three jaws with roughly 100 teeth in each,that’s 300 teeth in all. It doesn’t hurt — this is the sinister bit. All those teeth sink into you and begin to drain your blood and you don’t feel a thing because the leech injects both an anaesthetic and an anti-coagulant when it bites. This is why every tropical wildlifer or mountaineer describes peeling off wet shoes and finding they are squelchy with blood. You never felt it happening and once the process started,there was no stopping it. I found out from trawling the internet that leeches are being used again in medicine: its anti-coagulant allows new body parts and tissues the time to attach. There is a farm in England that doesn’t do chickens or cows or potatoes,it does leeches. Its slogan goes: “The Biting Edge of Science”. Leeches are being used to cure a range of things from migraines to knee pain. Demi Moore went through leech-therapy in Austria to detoxify her blood and look younger.

The Demi-detox explained why our 12-year-old dog is the prettiest in the world despite her age. Her leech therapy is intensive and daily. When she comes back from a walk in the rains,we have to turn her over and inspect each of her paws. Her paw pads are dark grey and almost every day,bits of them seem to be independently alive. In the pads’ interstices,there are sometimes as many as three leeches feeding at a time.

We sprinkle salt on the pads to get the leeches off. If you prise off a leech,it seems to leave its jaws as a keepsake in your skin and you bleed more. Besides it doesn’t die even if cut up — half a leech seems to manage a full life just fine. Salt dissolves them to death: the blood the leech has sucked oozes out from it,the white salt turns red,and the leech dies a slow death.

I know this sounds gruesome. But the hill monsoon tests your capacity for mercy. When the rain has paused for a bit and all is quiet but for the occasional drip-drip of water,there’s a rustle. The sound stops the minute we say to each other,“Did you hear that?” We stop breathing,we hope we won’t hear it again despite straining our ears,hope it was the wind,or our rattly old fridge. And after a tense wait,there it is again. The rustle. A mouse. The first of many who will seek refuge now that the rain has flooded their holes.

I won’t tell you what we do to mice. This is a Sunday morning and you’re probably reading this (if you haven’t thrown up thus far) at breakfast.

I’m revolted by leeches too. But there is something horribly fascinating about them as well. Watch a leech expand in minutes from a dot to a shiny black slug and it is Alice,in wonderland,going from midget to giant in seconds; it is that tentacled creature no swords can kill in Pirates of the Caribbean; it is an advert for Viagra.

The fact is that the leech is in a hurry because it has so little time — just two monsoon months and the party’s over. The way it quickens to life when the monsoon comes unites it with the children who dance in puddles,the new green grass spurting out of burnt earth and the frog that croaks out welcome songs — only to be flattened into origami minutes later by a passing car. The leech,in the intensity of its appetite for life,is no different from the butterfly that soaks in nectar for a few weeks and then dies. Carpe Diem,the leeches yell to each other,hurrying out when their weatherman announces the rains. Their year-long wait for a rejuvenating drink of blood has ended.

It’s a strange time here,the monsoon. Not a season for poetry,wet sari sequences and love songs. The monsoon in the hills is elemental,dangerous. The sky cracks like an eggshell when lightning strikes,thunder shudders through the house. Trees fall. Chunks of hillside crumble,flattening villages. Giant boulders plummet onto roads from slopes above,sometimes missing people,sometimes not. Yet every morning lines of schoolchildren toddle off through the dripping woods,stoical under their flowery umbrellas.

As with much else in the mountains,it’s about survival. Go out for a walk and you come back nursing insect bites. Fungus grows on shoes,roofs leak. Newspaper and milk supplies falter. Garden flowers we struggled to keep alive through the summer drought get flattened in seconds by battering rain. The drumming of water on the roof for days without pause makes you want to die and kill.

When the rain does stop,one moment the clouds are so low you can’t see your nose and in the next they shift,the mists thin,watery forests tremble on the horizon,the sun sets in a blaze of pink and orange and purple and the snow peaks reappear,dazzling and remote like different planets.

Down here,on earth,regiments of leeches creep towards our ankles and scorpions scuttle out of dark corners. We don’t care. We are in the hills,and the monsoon has come. Anuradha Roy is the author of The Folded Earth and lives in Ranikhet