(Photo courtesy: Amos Chapple)

Residents of Mawsynram, a village in Meghalaya which gets a record-breaking 11,861 mm of rain a year, are used to clouds floating right into their homes. But once the monsoon is over, they have to queue up at taps and fight for water

It was the kind of rain you wouldn’t see anywhere else. We could barely see four feet ahead of us. We could touch the clouds, smell the clouds, taste the clouds.”

We’re sitting in a government building in the heart of Shillong but Social Welfare director HM Shangpliang’s thoughts are elsewhere. Sixty-five kilometres away, to be precise, in the tiny rain-swept village of Mawsynram, where he grew up. It’s a place where residents use grass to soften the sound of the deafening rain on their roofs, dry their drenched clothes on chulhas as often as thrice a day, and won’t bat an eye when a mass of clouds floats right into their homes.

They follow us too, those clouds, as we drive up the winding, pot-holed road to Mawsynram on a rainy afternoon. Nestled in Meghalaya’s East Khasi Hills, the cluster of about 1,000 homes is the custodian of a rather grand title. It holds the Guinness Record for “the wettest place on earth”, having nudged long-time champion Cherrapunji from the podium. Around June, when most of India begins to look forward to the first weak drizzles, Mawsynram locals are already well into their monsoon. The average annual rainfall is 467 inches (11,861mm), according to the Guinness website. And this year, the rains began even earlier in April.

As we move closer to Mawsynram, the gentler, intermittent showers that this Mumbai-based reporter had begun getting used to since arriving in Shillong, soon give way to an insistent, noisy downpour. It makes car chatter difficult, drops visibility to around five feet and gets the driver grumbling about how the government “needs to fix these damn roads already”.

In Mawsynram, however, this is a “good weather” day. Less than an hour later, when we arrive at the village’s fringe, the rain has paused. It’s bazaar day, and vendors from Shillong and the surrounding region are fast setting up their stalls.

“Slap khyndai sngi. It means the ‘nine-day rain’ in Khasi,” says the appropriately named Barisha, as she restocks the shelves at her kirana store. She’s seen 67 monsoons, and her grandson, who’s translating, says she is very tired of them. Mawsynram experienced the slap khyndai sngi recently. Terms for seven-day and 12-day rain too find their way into casual conversation on a regular basis. “Everything is damp inside the house, all the time. And so noisy. My head hurts,” Barisha adds, grabbing her forehead for effect, and summarily shooing us out so she can get back to her work.

For the kids of Mawsynram, though, the monsoons mean two kinds of holidays. “There are times when it has been raining a great deal for a week or more at a stretch so we decide to give the students a couple of days off,” says former village-headman and now grammar teacher RW Rapsang, who teaches at the Mawsynram HSC School. “And then, there are times when the rain stops for a bit, and we want the kids to enjoy the good weather. So, too much rain — holiday. No rain — also holiday!” Classes are cancelled on days when the sound of deafening rain on the tin roof makes it impossible to hear the teacher. “So you can say this is quite a happy place for students!” Rapsang adds, laughing.

Rapsang, who’s in his fifties, grew up in Mawsynram. Over rice cakes and chai, he talks about growing up in a home where the kids went about barefoot in the rains because plastic slippers were too expensive to afford. “We say here that when the leaves start turning inside out, the monsoons are over.” He is referring to the time when the kyrtih or wind begins blowing from east to west, and makes the leaves blow in the opposite direction. “Our elders would ask us to observe if we could see the white inside of the leaves. Once we could, we knew dry weather was on its way.”

A rare spell of good weather sends local optimism off the charts. An open-air congregation planned by a local church had to be moved inside a building when the downpour knocked the pandal down. “They rebuilt it, and that same night, it was destroyed again,” says assistant headmaster PW Shangpliang, tutting. “What they were thinking, I don’t know. The rain hits the ground almost horizontally here. That and the winds lash out at houses from the sides.”

Houses used to be built “more sensibly” here, he says. The architecture involved rocks weighing down the roof, resting at the sides of the limestone structure. Today, most homes are made of concrete, with tin roofs. A couple have the ‘knup’, the turtle shell-shaped rain shield of bamboo and grass, propped up outside. They’re mostly used by farmers who work in the fields around Mawsynram.

Aside from potatoes and turnips that a handful of the residents cultivate for their kitchens, produce is sourced from outside. The soil in the limestone plateau doesn’t absorb water. “There is barely any forest cover, so a lot of erosion of top soil happens. All of it flows down into Bangladesh next door,” says village headman Moonstar Marbaniang, laughing. The irony is that like its neighbour Cherrapunji (or ‘Sohra’ as locals call it), the “wettest place on earth” grapples with an acute water shortage after monsoon ends around October. The few reservoirs in the area run dry in winter and residents get water supply for just two hours in the morning, and two in the evening. Former headman Rapsang recalls how most of his earlier workload involved placating residents engaged in battles at the water-taps. “We very much need an initiative that solves our water crisis. Mawsynram is the wettest desert,” he says. “Sohra next door has faced a similar problem.”

Because it is better-known and hence, gets more tourism, Cherrapunji’s water crisis is less acute today. The Sohra Eco-Restoration Project was launched in 2010, with the support of the Planning Commission. Trees were planted, locals got involved in the campaign and gradually, Cherrapunji’s forest cover has increased considerably. “Our plan is to gradually expand the project to Mawsynram and other places in the Khasi Hills,” says Barkos Warjri, who is among those spearheading the initiative.

While resident Betty Mardaniang, 33, hopes her hometown’s water woes get resolved soon, she is unsure if she wants to wait around until that happens. “Do you know how long it rained last week?” she mutters, as we traipse around the village, making the most of a dry afternoon. “My god, I can still hear the noise in my head. I want to move to Shillong as soon as I can. What’s the Mumbai rain like?”

She listens, unimpressed, to this reporter’s descriptions of floods and overflowing drains. “Hmm, that is bad. No, our rains definitely don’t have any of that.”

Some of India's rainiest places:

Cherrapunji, Meghalaya - 11,430mm. About 5km from Mawsynram, this is the world’s second wettest place

Hulikal, Karnataka - 8,344mm. Located in the Western Ghats, Hulikal is known for its lush beauty and huge waterfalls

Walakkad, Kerala - 8,234mm. Located in Silent Valley, the region gets continuous rain for six to seven months in a year

Agumbe, Karnataka - 7,620mm. Known as the Cherrapunji of the south, the region once recorded the highest rainfall in the south

