IN THE MEMORY OF A LOST MONSOON

It’s always either the monsoons or the summers here. But at Chachan’s, when the kapok tree near the fence snows, it’s summer. When you see bunches of golden or silver gramophones bloom in the orchards, it is going to rain in a few days. It is the end of autumn when the backyard is scented with coffee blossoms, and you know it’s winter when that tree by the roadside rains yellow. The seasons—like broken crayons—were deep, with finer fragrance and shade. The monsoons smelled like coffee, and summers, like vacation.

We always left leaving remains of our holidaying—a swing on the guava tree in the backyard, a play hut in the groves made of old chiffon sarees, or a riddle echoing unanswered in the evenings that smell of myrrh. And when the monsoons vacationed on these reminiscences of summer, Chachan watched it with a coffee in his hand. Every year, he powdered the coffees, filled that same old jar on the kitchen shelf, and waited for the monsoons to come—just the way he waited for us in summers, with stories that always ended: “...and that’s how we reached Malabar,” and a sigh.

I always envied those paper boats carried away by the summer rains—for how they disappeared far into the orchards and remained there, when we left, like the May lilies at the end of their season. And someday, on a rain-waned afternoon walk through the orchards, you’d find them like souvenired summers. So was the coffee he made—it reminded me of the rains. I used to smell that almost-emptied jar of coffee powder every next time I went, to get the smell of the season I missed there—to feel the monsoons.

The season of coffees at Chachan’s was like those favorite lines of a song we would wait to hum along. When it’s January and there are just a few blooms left on the Rangoon creeper, the coffee cherries in the backyard would all be red and ready. Shaded amidst the trees was a hovel as old as that tale of his coming to Malabar. That was his coffee factory. I have this memory of us sitting on the wooden bench of its verandah on a vintage-colored evening. It was some day in the last December of the ’90s. Ammachi was reading out a letter Valsa aunty wrote, that came in search of such evenings at Chachan’s once in every two months from England. It was then kept folded in that old diary of yellowed pages, with numerous other letters of long-forgotten savors.

“Here, the winters are just beautiful. It’s snow everywhere—on the trees, roadsides,” the letter said.

Looking out at the almost-ripened coffee cherries, I wondered if she had any coffee plants in her backyard in England. I pictured coffee plants draped in snow; the red ripe cherries fallen.

In the morning, when the wind from the hills lightened, he would disappear into the backyard, and come back with cane baskets full of coffee berries. By the time it was our season there, he would dry and hull those berries, make sure to weigh them at least thrice on his old thlassu (beam scale), and store them in the hovel. Ever since the day his father married a 14-year-old—a week after that rainy evening he married Ammachi—Chachan balanced his life on that beam scale. (It had three weights: five, three, and one kg, and a few stones wrapped in polythene for two kg.) He weighed everything he grew there—from yams, tapioca, cashews to love—before giving it to someone.

Then someday, before the rains, he would light that hearth at the corner of the verandah, take out those coffee berries, and roast them to the color of monsoon clouds. The hot beans were then powdered to a fine dust. With the pestle moving up and down, the aroma of coffee would spread in the orchards, planting seeds of rain everywhere. He would then flavor the coffee with powdered fenugreek, cumin, cardamom, coriander—and the fragrance of the season yet to come. Like a ritual, he would light that hearth again, boil a coffee, and far away you could hear the rains coming.

This time, neither he nor his coffee waited for the monsoons to end. It was an evening—the orchards still pouring in the memory of an afternoon rain—and there he was, lying peacefully in his bed, leaving a cup of unfinished coffee on the window sill.

Have you ever noticed those dragonflies in the end-summer evening sky disappearing with the rains?

Those sunset bells that once filled the orchards when nothing else bloomed in the monsoons?

I remember, as a kid, I asked him,

“Where do they all go?”

“To the other side of the seasons,” he said.

And for a long time, I believed that somewhere, all of them—the dragonflies, coffee blossoms, mulberries, and the May lilies—waited for their turn to come back to Chachan’s. And now that he left, with the enviable ease of changing seasons, I wish it was true.

P.S. I no longer smell that coffee jar.

Anjali Joseph Palakunnel came to Canada as a student from India. She loves to read and is learning to find her voice through writing. This piece is a reflection on childhood memories, seasons, and the personal experiences that shaped her life in Kerala, southern India. She is a social worker and currently works with neurodivergent children.