Tapur, tupur to rimjhim, listening to the sound of rain

I teach poetry. The semesters are named after the seasons — Monsoon and Spring. We collect onomatopoeia, the sounds of water. Our first collection station is often the rains. We say the obvious — it rains differently in the English language than it does in the Indian languages. In Bangla, for instance, the sound for fat drops of rain is ‘tapur tupur’. In English it’s ‘pitter patter’. The consonants overlap: ‘t’, ‘p’, ‘r’, arranged differently on two continents; the open-mouthed ‘a’ and the pull of ‘u’ of the Bangla have their counterparts in the clipped vowel sounds of ‘i’ and ‘e’.

The consonants are aligned differently as well — the fat drops are held in the opening ‘t’ sounds of the Bangla, ‘tapur tupur’; the curtness of slim English rain in the polite opening ‘p’ sounds. That is why we can enjoy being bathed in the monsoonal rains in Bombay when Kishore Kumar sings “Rimjhim girey sawan …” The ‘r’ is liquid, the ‘jh’ adds flow and fluidity, the reason the names of water bodies often begin with the sound: ‘jharna’, ‘jhora’. The ‘jh’ sound falls off the tip of our tongue, like water drops fall off our bodies, or dust off brooms, the reason they are called ‘jhata’ or ‘jharu’ in Bangla and Hindi.

We notice what the vowels do to water — the difference between ‘drip’ and ‘drop’, for instance, a tiny i-like thread from a tap and the ‘o’ of a fat globule. ‘Barish’ in Hindi, ‘brishti’ in Bangla, the words hold their rhythm and their flow, even their fall. These are drops — small, thin, long or fat; they fall separately. The words fill with them; we hear them, like we do a jug or bucket, differently. There’s a sense of abundance in the words themselves: it’s not one drop or two, but a few more, a continuous more. What happens when the abundance changes to excess? ‘Bonnya’, ‘badh’, ‘badhi’, the Bangla, Hindi and Nepali words for flood, begin with ‘b’ as well, the same sound as ‘brishti’ and ‘barish’, but there must be something different in the code of these sounds that gives us a sense of accumulation, even an intimation of fear.

Notice how our tongue gets stuck and almost anaesthetised when we say ‘badh’. It’s almost like ‘bandh’, where the tongue gets paralysed temporarily, turned into a statue by the sound, by its architecture. But in the Hindi word for flood, the ‘n’ sound is missing. It’s not the nasal ‘n’ but a liquid ‘r’ — that’s the water, the waterlogging to be more specific. The ‘n’ appears in the Bangla, in ‘bannya’ but also in the more colloquial ‘baan’.

I, like many, learnt the word from a child rhyme — ‘Brishti pawrey tapur tupur/Nadey elo baan/Shib thakurer biye holo/Teen kanya daan’ (It’s raining tapur tupur, the river’s in flood, Shiv’s got married, given three brides). Even at that young age, entering a language unconsciously, I could not have failed to register that ‘bannya’ rhymes with ‘kanya’, ‘flood’ with ‘daughter’. I was one — ‘kanya’. There was also the other rhyme: ‘baan’ and ‘daan’, ‘flood’ with ‘donation’, giving away. The relation between women and water, set up so early in a girl’s life, haunts and directs her self-instructionally. Not just the women-should-be-like-water adage about adapting to the shape of the vessel but more violent ones, of the kind people like my mother had to hear, when they married against their parents’ wishes — being thrown into a well, like a clay jug.

In a poem where Rabindranath quotes this child rhyme, reminding the reader that he too, like us, had been inducted into the language through the same folk idiom, he uses other onomatopoeic sounds for water. At first the ‘tapur tupur’, then ‘jhoop jhoop jhoop’, which Tagore, very cleverly, rhymes with the little boy’s ‘choop’, listening in silence. In ‘jhoop jhoop jhoop’, the water isn’t slim and small any more; it’s not ‘tapur tupur’; it has been collecting and growing girth, sitting on bushes and roofs and eaves and falling from there. The rain is not an infant anymore; it has grown into an adolescent. There’s something in that sound which gives us an intimation of excess — that the centre cannot hold anymore, that the water must fall.

Gravity makes its presence felt in that sound, as it does in, say, ‘thud’. Water is being pulled towards the earth, and it is collecting there. Drops of water can make an ocean, and many tapur tupur can make jhoop jhoop jhoop. What happens after that? Or when there is no ocean for the water to flow into?

Another ‘j’ word. ‘Pani jam gaya’. ‘Jam’ — after the ‘jhoop jhoop jhoop’ — means to collect; it also means to solidify. Water is collecting, solidifying. Not inside a refrigerator, not on mountain peaks, but on land. ‘Jal’, water; ‘jam’, waterlogging. Land is turning into water. We are not water animals. ‘Machhli jal ki rani hai, jeevan uska pani hai’ (Fish is the queen of water, its life is of water). Notice where the rhyme falls — ‘pani’ and ‘rani’, water and queen. But we have no fins, no scales, no tail.

How will we be our own boats? Our languages shout out for oars. Poems about flood end abruptly. ‘Flood’, Miyazawa Kenji, the Japanese agronomist-poet’s poem ends with ‘I went in the water a few minutes ago, up to my waist …’, leaving us worried for him. A Birendra Chattopadhyay poem ends with ‘Tyaro nodir jawley/Buk dubiye khudar michhil chawley’ (Drowning its chest in the water of 13 rivers, hunger marches on). We are left to imagine the sound of hunger’s march past.

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