The Freshwater Trail

Forty Names Of Clouds

The deep Thar desert sees only forty cloudy days. Yet, the shepherds have as many different names for clouds. Does the essence of thriving in this hostile clime begin with an evocative lexis of the land? 

Arati Kumar-Rao
Photographer & Journalist

This is part of a series on the deep-rooted Water Culture of the Thar desert. 
Also see: A Landscape Glossary;
The Memory Of WellsMiracle Of Sky-River

https://www.skipintros.com/photos/98539/vtz1irwmb “It is through the power of observation, the gifts of eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place first rises up in our mind; afterward it is memory that carries the place, that allows it to grow in depth and complexity. For as long as our records go back, we have held these two things dear, landscape and memory. Each infuses us with a different kind of life.
The one feeds us, figuratively and literally.
The other protects us from lies and tyranny.”
BARRY LOPEZ, About This Life

_________

There was excitement in the air. The horizon was flashing an intermittent neon in the darkness, silhouetting ghostly clouds.

What are those clouds called? I asked. Chhattar Singh gazed into the distance, as if mining a lost memory. The words began to trickle — hesitant at first, then faster, crowding one another in his excitement. Those were  Cheap Ambien Generic kanThi, he said. And if they consolidate and promise rain, their name will change to  Cheapest Zolpidem Tartrate ghaTaaTope. If the clouds become very dense, they’ll be called  here kaLaan.

That night, the  watch kanThi did not build up. It did not rain.

Life stirred awake next morning under a pretty-patterned sky — tufts of white trailing in arcs and lines, horizon to blue horizon. We sat sipping see url chai and watching a distant wind ripple through a feathery, fruit-laden  Ambien Online Fast Shipping khejri. “Those clouds won’t rain either,” I offered.

enter Teetar pankhi” Chhattar Singh replied. They had a word for this cloud pattern too – a perfect analogy that likened it to the pattern on the wings of a partridge.

A Landscape Glossary

They say eskimos have 40 names for snow. I get that — they are surrounded by snow all year. The people of the Thar have just https://bakingbrew.com/recipe/875sh3zyk forty cloudy days in a year — and yet they have as many names for clouds!

I was tempted to get Chhattar Singh to cycle through the names the desert people had for various types of clouds in one sitting, but some instinct stopped me.  It does not work that way. I would have to spend time, be patient. Listen, observe, walk, touch, experience the land with all my senses. Language is not learned overnight.

As I scribbled into my notebook, a soft warm wind picked up. The https://www.larochellevb.com/2024/01/31/fek1bl4 teetar pankhi flocked together into a light cottony blanket over us.

There was a name for that too.  https://www.eastcotesignanddisplay.co.uk/5qzdvxvpo7 Paans.

The Knowing

The area I have been visiting over the past three years, the deep western part of the Thar desert, lies in Jaisalmer district. It is bounded on the north and west by Pakistan, in the east by Jodhpur district, in the south by Barmer district, and in the northeast by Bikaner district.

The rainfall here is a meager 100-150mm, about a tenth of the national average and a pitiful 2 per cent of the rainfall Kerala and some other of the wettest areas in India get. For the people of the Thar, sighting clouds and rain are events. Memorable. Priceless. Because these moments hold the key to their very existence.

Traditional desert dwellers, traveling mostly on foot, have an innate knowledge of this vast and differentiated land. They map it not in kilometers but in inches, fathoming slopes as gentle as a foot over a kilometer. Shepherds form the majority of the rural population, and animal husbandry is crucial to the rural economy.

These semi-nomadic shepherds sleep in feeble  https://ipaxcabinetsdirect.com/uncategorized/4ntq3id kheemp and  https://overflowdata.com/uncategorized/bhsb61a kair  https://comercialfuentes.com/sdtxteh gawDis in the deep desert and navigate by the stars. During their weeks and months in the desert, the grassland commons is their larder. These people of the desert follow the rhythm of the land. From the grazing paths their flocks take to the food they themselves eat, everything maps to the seasons.

One morning, we headed out southward from the village we were in, under go eyyloor (cirrus) skies.  https://www.ipasticcidellacuoca.com/e9qmrn2 Kair trees were in full bloom, and some had begun to fruit. A babbler poked its beak eye-deep into the attractive coral-colored  follow site kair flower for its nectar. The flower is a known natural sweetener and widely used in traditional food.

A howling wind bent a  Zolpidem Buy Online Uk khejri’s branches, feathery and laden with  go site sangri fruit, low and whipped them back upright. A husband and wife, camel cart in tow, harvested the fruit with long hooks. Noting my curious gaze, Chhattar Singh explained the local food cycle. A desert family, eating the traditional way, will never want for food. Wheat and millet come from  https://comercialfuentes.com/3woq2oy2sq3 khadeens, supplemented with fruit from the commons according to season. Thus:

https://overflowdata.com/uncategorized/43yht665 Kair fruit with  https://nycfoodguy.com/2024/01/31/rl6wilq2 sangri — the fruit of the  follow link khejri tree — are invaluable additions to a summer menu. In the months before the rains,  shepherds go looking for  https://www.skipintros.com/photos/98539/dqygcolpzm pilu, the fruit of the  follow url jaal tree. A mid-summer walk with Chhattar Singh includes frequent halts under https://www.broommanufacturers.com/2024/01/31/7x8sb4z3ntl jaals to pick and eat the ripe https://menteshexagonadas.com/2024/01/31/namgh65 pilu. Pilu look like perfectly round tiny grapes — red when ripe — with a subtle sweetness, and without the tartness of grapes. Mushrooms growing under the  https://www.larochellevb.com/2024/01/31/2kl9xme1h laNa plant in the monsoons are a delicacy to be carefully harvested. Further into the sandy saline desert, orange buds of the see url phog plant are mixed with curd in winter for  baata. Flowers of the laNa plant are mixed into winter roTis. Milk, buttermilk, and clarified butter (ghee) from cows, goats, sheep and camels accompany the fruits.

Until recently, no one in the desert had seen potatoes or cauliflowers, french beans or sugar. No one had suffered from diabetes either.

With a wave of the hand, Chhattar Singh veered us off the road and over scree, for which too he had a name — magra. I didn’t ask where we were going or why we were off-roading — with Chhattar Singh I had learned to keep my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut.

Chinkaras (desert antelopes) darted away from us and watched from a distance. In season, it is reportedly common to see many mating pairs of godawn, the highly endangered Great Indian Bustard, here.

As soon as we left the scree behind, we stopped. The ground was now smooth sandstone, layered in purples and golds, oranges and burgundies. And suddenly, there was water.

It took me a while to fathom where the pools came from in all this layered rock. Rainwater, percolating through porous rock further up, had dripped onto stone, grinding it over uncounted time into a natural cistern. It was deep in some places to several feet and shallow enough in others to see rock. It was full of freshwater — sweet, strained. I knelt, cupped my hands, and sipped.

The desert people have a name for such natural cisterns. They call them bheys.

You won’t find these formations on Google Maps. These are remembered lifelines, paths to water sources that only walking shepherds know – the same shepherds who know where sevaN grass ends and phog plants begin, and can locate the one area where dune after dune of muraT grass can be found.

I met a shepherd who, brimming with pride, told me that his land, the desert, carries in its womb thirty-six different types of seeds. He was awaiting the dharoLyuo, a joyous veil of rain that bridges sky and earth, to see them sprout.

Such people recognize borders that are not on maps. Borders they recognize as thoughtful, meaningful, natural — geological, botanical, hydrological. With no written history to guide them, they rely on memory and muscle, on a visceral interaction with the land, and they are one with it.

This memory is passed on through words, place-names and named phenomena, songs and symbols. The act of naming — chhinto for a drizzle of rain or ghuTyo for the asphyxiating stillness of un-raining clouds — is a way of paying homage, recognizing worth, according importance of these events that are vital to their survival .

These ambling geographers, these mojri-and-saafa clad ecologists, read the land and know how to “divine” water. They  can tell ubreLyo (spent clouds) from dhundh (clouds heavier than the light cottony paans); follow the baaval (petrichor) towards as yet unseen kaLaan (heavy rain clouds); recognize over eighty different desert species of plants from aak to zillon, and know the behaviors of sandgrouse and spiny-tailed lizard, chinkara and bustard. 

It is a lived, intensely local knowledge. They find words for what they see and experience, they pass on these words, and individual knowledge grows into collective knowledge. They are the archivists of the desert.

A "bhey" or a natural rock cistern, Thar Desert, India

The Forgetting

In The History of the Countryside (1986), the great botanist Oliver Rackham describes four ways in which ‘landscape is lost’ : through the loss of beauty, the loss of freedom, the loss of wildlife and vegetation, and the loss of meaning.
ROBERT MACFARLANE, Landmarks

“My son doesn’t know this language…,” Chhattar Singh’s voice trailed off into an unvoiced regret.

Narendra, the youngest of three sons, is still studying. Modern education in this state, as in others across India, is wholly disconnected from local geography, biology, zoology, hydrology, geomorphology, and the anthropology of their own land.

Children in Chhattar Singh’s village can draw maps of India, but not of their own district or their village. They do not know rejwani pani from patali pani. The particular, lived language of the desert has been replaced with a universal, theoretical knowledge, administered to all from far-removed New Delhi.

“Education today is training my son and kids like him to become slaves of [paychecks which come on] the 31st.” Chhattar Singh’s voice was flat, carefully emotionless.

Earlier this year, The Guardian published an article about “natural” words being dropped from the Oxford English Junior Dictionary. A few weeks later Robert Macfarlane, whose in-depth work on resurrecting a landscape lexicon was inspired by this omission, called out the words.

The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.

Vineeta Gupta, editor of the OJD, offered this explanation back in 2008:

When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance. That was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed.

The remark, about modern life in Britain, spoke to an astounding acceptance of a future lifestyle utterly disconnected from the land – a mindset that is harsh reality across the world, including in India.

A young boy accompanies an old shepherd. After the old man's demise a few months ago, his son sold the flock, preferring to drive a car for a living instead.

Loss Of The Land

My time this June with Chhattar Singh and his peers confirmed a growing sense that all across India, deep knowledge of the land is declining with each generation. Its value is being officially undermined.

Sons of farmers and indigenous people are being forced to give up their lands and migrate. Chasing daily wages, youngsters move en masse to the cities, armed with an education that has not prepared them for anything other than cheap manual labor; they become the “slaves of the 31st” that Chhattar Singh mourns.

The reverence for landscapes, the knowledge of land as the creature that sustains us, is eroding.

This ties in with Chhattar Singh’s wistful plaint that his son had forgotten the lexicon of the land. The language of the desert stems from deep observation of, and reverence for, the phenomena that comprise their lives.  When we stop observing, we stop learning. And then we forget. Eventually, we stop caring. We disconnect.

Chhattar Singh looks up at the clouds that rise into the sky, and he sees a recognisable shape – that of women carrying water. His people have a name for this, too: paNi haari, the water-bearers.

I recognise it now and look for it. The next time I see a cirro-cumulus sky, I will remember “teetar pankhi”,  the wing of the partridge. These names will give shape, form and meaning to various patterns I had, previously, clubbed under insipid but exact scientific terms.

When we lose an evocative lexicon, when we forget, we lose what Barry Lopez calls the “voice of memory over the land.”

When this happens — and it is happening all over our country —land risks losing its defenders. With this comes the great danger of land being appropriated by those who are not familiar with it. By interlopers who don’t know where the last surface water can be found; by those who don’t know how to harvest the rain, or that seeds live under the sands, or that desert dunes birth water-wells

These people may stumble upon a bhey but not recognize the magic in water pooling among desert rocks. 

Land will thus be inevitably  reduced to a “resource,” a commodity for sale, to be done with as the interloper pleases.

A lexis and a land, lost to a price tag.

Babu Singh, a shepherd nearly sixty years old, still walks the deserts tending his flock and following the rains. His desert, though, is changing fast.

(In the next article in this series, we walk into the interloper’s desert and see what effect a transplanted lexicon has had on the land) 

Other articles in this series:

Blind Men & The Desert;
The Memory Of Wells;
Miracle Of Sky-River;
In Search Of A Minstrel

https://nycfoodguy.com/2024/01/31/42yak2pkuz Contribute to The Landscape Glossary

21 thoughts on “Forty Names Of Clouds”

  1. gregorylent
    June 30, 2015

    wow
    so poignant … around the world, a lexis and a land, lost to a price tag.

    • Arati Kumar-Rao
      June 30, 2015

      Thanks for writing in, Greg. Indeed, this is the malaise of choice.

  2. Sangeeta
    June 30, 2015

    Beautiful. Evocative and thought-provoking. Thank you.

  3. A great read as always. And I am already waiting for the next one.

    A few typos… you might have meant “my mouth shut” not ears.

    Cheers !!

    • Arati Kumar-Rao
      June 30, 2015

      Good catch, manu! No idea how that got thru. Will correct. And thanks for writing in.

  4. Lovely poignant writing. Reminds me of the essays of Gary Paul Nabahan on the Sonoran desert. Keep writing. PS: through, not thru please 😉

    • Arati Kumar-Rao
      June 30, 2015

      Thanks Manoj! Hahaha, rest assured, I don’t use “thru” unless it is a quick reply from the phone.

      On a serious note, thanks for the lead: will look up Nabahan right away.

  5. Gaurav Loomb
    June 30, 2015

    I took a road trip with my family to Jaisalmer and fell in love with the place. Your article is astounding and the images add a stunner to it. They lead a tough life but with lot of happiness and love.

    thanks

  6. This was beautiful. Thank you for sharing your words and your experience with us.

  7. This is wonderful writing. Thank you for reminding us that local lexis, as you put it, are integral to sustaining a reverent regard for land. I’m reminded, too, of Kalidasa’s Meghaduta “Cloud Messenger.”
    What language, by the way, gives us these cloud names?

    • Arati Kumar-Rao
      July 1, 2015

      Thanks for writing in, Scott, and for the kind words. These words are in the native language of western rajasthan: marwari/ local variations.

  8. Lata Sunil
    July 2, 2015

    Lovely as always Arati. Very interesting work. My only grouse, there is no direct share button here.

    • Arati Kumar-Rao
      July 2, 2015

      Thanks… and I know, Lata — it is our grouse too. But, good news: there is going to be a version 2.0 of Peepli soon. And in that, much more.

  9. Arun Bhanot
    July 6, 2015

    Thank you. Lovely piece. Reading it as monsoon hits Delhi. So clouds are very much on our minds.

  10. Abi Abraham
    July 28, 2015

    That is some fine writing. Much deserving of a greater audience.

    P.s . You need a enable a share option to this blog.

    • Arati Kumar-Rao
      July 29, 2015

      Thanks very much for writing in, and for your kind words.

      Our next rev of the Peepli website sure will incorporate social sharing … do stay tuned.

  11. shefalee
    May 3, 2017

    wonderful writing! looking forward to more…
    can’t seem to find a way to follow your blog.can you please help me with that?

  12. Lakshmi Mohankrishnan
    September 11, 2017

    I discovered this piece written by you today accidentally. Its one of the most interesting journey that i have ever read. You already made my morning. I think schools should such pieces of work in their English,History and Geography books. What a beautiful way to discover our own country. Thanks and keep it coming.

  13. Leslie Martin D
    September 11, 2017

    Felt Wonderful expressions of love and grace as I read through…these narratives should be incorporated in school education…will take the perspective expressed on school education and need to re-claim lives of love with natural boundaries.

  14. Prashant bee
    September 11, 2017

    Beautifully written. Irony that ,I got the link from Robert MacFarlane twit.!!!

  15. This is a wonderful piece of work. It takes deep into the desert life.