When the skies broke open over Kerala's backwaters
I had been told the southwest monsoon would arrive on a particular evening, the way a mate in Darwin will tell you a cyclone is "definitely coming" three days running. The first two days it was bluff. On the third, the air over the coconut palms thickened into something you could almost ladle out of the lagoon. I had flown in from a grey Sydney winter a week earlier, partly chasing a different kind of grey, partly chasing a story I had been trying to write for years about rain falling onto flat green water. Kerala in June, the locals assured me, was not a place to be observed from a balcony. It was a place to be inside.
What follows is a photographic essay in the loosest sense, less a checklist of destinations and more a slow accumulation of frames and weather. I am writing this for travellers who, like me, treat the monsoon as the event itself, not as a season to dodge. The backwaters between Alappuzha and Kumarakom offered the canvas: a flat, palm-laced world where every cloud has a double, and every downpour becomes a sound check for an entire district.
Clouds like heaving canvas
The first morning the sky did its impression of a heavy duvet. Black-green nimbostratus rolled in from the Arabian Sea in tiers, so low they seemed to snag on church spires and the masts of anchored fishing boats. I made my way to the bund at Kumarakom, the raised path that hugs the eastern edge of Vembanad Lake, with a battered Canon and the kind of patience that, in Australia, you only develop after years of photographing southerly busters at Bondi.
The locals walking past were unbothered. A man in a lungi pulled a faded Eagles t-shirt over his head and kept moving. Two women carrying umbrellas the colour of school uniforms nodded at me as if I had simply come out for a walk. There is a particular quality to the air here in the hour before a burst: hot, oily, faintly metallic, the way a tin roof sounds just before a thunderclap in an outer suburb of Adelaide. Photographically, it is a gift. The light goes bruised and gold, and reflections in the canals sharpen into knife-edges.
The hour the sky cracked
Then the rain came, properly. It did not build so much as declare itself. Within minutes the lagoon was freckled with millions of tiny eruptions, each one throwing up a momentary white crown. I sheltered under a corrugated awning outside a tea stall with three men who had stopped work entirely. One of them ordered me a glass of cardamom chai so strong it felt like a weather system of its own. We watched.
I think about that hour often now, back home in Fremantle when the winter squalls sweep in off the Indian Ocean. There is something about being told, plainly and without ceremony, to stop and look. The chai man said, "This is only the first. Drink slowly." He was right. Over the next three weeks, I would learn to read the backwaters the way surfers from Noosa read sets: by the shape of the sky, by the way the kingfishers vanished, by the slaps of water against the hull.
Reading the light after the downpour
The trick of photographing rain here is not the rain itself. It is the half-hour after. The clouds thin, the sun punches through in shafts that move across the water like slow spotlights, and every wet leaf, every flooded paddy, every rusting canoe turns into a mirror. I learnt to wait it out the way I had once waited for that perfect golden hour over Cottesloe, except multiplied, because here the transitions happen every few hours rather than once a day.
A frame I keep returning to is a narrow canal near Kaviyur, where a man in a yellow cap was poling a wooden canoe through water so still it doubled the entire sky. A heron stood mid-stroke, indecisive. A school of small fish broke the surface in a single silver coin. None of this was staged. None of it would have existed without the rain having just finished. The light was the kind photographers in Tasmania spend a whole autumn chasing: low, raking, just slightly amber through the break in the clouds.
Life in the slow wet
Rain in Kerala does not interrupt daily life so much as thicken it. The village rhythms persist, just at a lower tempo. Women continued to wash clothes on the stone steps of the canals, lifting sarees out of the water in slow arcs. Schoolchildren in lime-green uniforms waded home, plastic bags over their backpacks. A fisherman mended his nets beneath a mango tree while his daughter, perhaps three years old, splashed barefoot in a puddle the size of a ute tray. There were no umbrellas being brandished as fashion. There were no honking horns. There was just a community going about its business in a uniform of wet cotton and patience.
I sat one afternoon with a family who ran a small eatery on the water. They offered me kappa and fish curry, the boiled tapioca eaten by hand, and talked, with a politeness I have rarely encountered on the road, about the cost of diesel and the price of cardamom. They asked where I was from. When I said Australia, the father nodded gravely and said he had a cousin in Parramatta who sends money home. It is a small world, and the backwaters are perhaps the smallest part of it. Standing in that Kerala kitchen I was reminded of the hidden warung I had once found on the other side of the Indian Ocean, where the welcome had been just as immediate and the cooking equally homely.
Frames from a houseboat
For three nights I moved slowly along the canals in a converted rice barge, the kind of kettuvallam that used to carry grain and now carries tourists willing to pay for slowness. Travelling with me was a young photographer from Kochi, Aneesha, who had come prepared with plastic sleeves for her camera bodies and a pair of fast primes. She worked in the way serious photographers do, with very little visible effort and a great deal of attention.
When the storms came, we did not retreat below deck. We stood at the prow, salt in our mouths, watching lightning stitch the horizon to the palm line. Aneesha set her tripod in the rain and shot long exposures of the lightning over the water, the shutter open for thirty seconds at a time. The resulting frames looked like x-rays of the sky. Between bursts, the surface of the canal turned so glassy that we could see the underside of our own boat. Travellers who do similar work on the Tonle Sap or in the Mekong Delta will recognise the strange vertigo of being inside a reflection.
A palette of wet greens and iron greys
Kerala in the monsoon is not the place to come if you want postcard blues. The palette narrows to perhaps twelve colours: the green of new rice, the green of older rice about to be transplanted, the brown of flooded earth, the iron grey of the lake, the near-black of storm clouds, the cream of lichen on a coconut trunk, the washed yellow of a house wall, the rust of a corrugated roof, the faded pink of a bougainvillea after a shower. Once you accept this restricted palette, the place becomes intensely, almost exhaustingly beautiful. Every frame is harmonious without ever being pretty.
I shot most of my colour work on a single prime lens, forcing myself to choose compositions rather than zooms. The discipline helped. It also made me miss far fewer shots than I normally do, the same way surfing on a longboard makes you catch more waves than a shortboard, which is something I had once been told at Lennox Head and only really understood here, three months later and half a world away.
The quiet the storm leaves behind
By the end of my third week the rhythm of the rain had become so familiar that I missed it on the two days it did not come. The evenings settled into something softer. Swallows came out low over the canals, snatching insects. The light went tangerine for fifteen minutes, then amber, then a deep, calm violet I had only ever previously seen above the Grampians in late autumn. I sat on the bow of the boat and did not lift the camera. Some evenings you are meant to witness rather than document.
In the mornings after the heaviest falls, I would walk the bund before the sun cleared the palms. The lake was so still it could have been a sheet of poured mercury. Every tree had a duplicate, every moored canoe a darker twin. The fishermen, returning from a night out on the water, moved slowly past with their lanterns still lit, casting small orange discs on the wet bund. It was the kind of quiet you only hear after a long rain, when the world seems to have been rinsed and reset.
What stayed with me, after I had packed the cameras and the spare lenses and the rain covers, was not any single frame. It was the slowness. It was the way a district learns to move at the pace of water. It was the quiet realisation that a photographic essay of a monsoon is, in the end, less about catching the storm than about being small enough to let the storm catch you. The backwaters will give you the weather; you have only to give them your patience.