He had started as a man who knew the names of climates. He returned as a man who had felt the desert’s cold night, drowned in the mountain’s mist, sweated in the coast’s embrace, and shivered in the high-altitude sun.
From the desert, he flew east to the lush, manicured tea gardens of Shillong, in Meghalaya. This was and its wild cousin, the Montane Climate (H) .
Aarav, a young climatologist from the dry plains of Rajasthan, had a peculiar problem. He understood the theory of India’s climates perfectly—he could recite the Koppen classification in his sleep. But he had never felt them. So, he packed a single bag and set off on a quest to experience every climate his country had to offer.
Here, the air was thick enough to drink. He arrived during the pre-monsoon showers, and a local farmer laughed at his flimsy umbrella. “You are in the wettest place on earth, son,” the farmer said, pointing to Mawsynram. “Our rain doesn’t fall; it stands .” For days, a relentless drizzle painted everything in fifty shades of green. The heat was not as intense as the desert, but the humidity was a suffocating blanket. Hot, wet summers and mild, foggy winters. This was a land of rivers and rice, where mold grew on leather and umbrellas were a second skeleton.
He then traveled south to the tip of the peninsula, to the backwaters of Kerala—.