Thunder in the mountains
GANESH SAILI reminisces about thunderstorms past
As I write, the rain beats a steady tattoo on our tin-roof. Distant peals of thunder rent the sky. For six days now, without respite, the skies have opened up. But who am I to complain? For instance, there’s this letter dated October 14th 1843, from Maugher Monk, a teacher in the Mussoorie Seminary – our first school. ‘The comet has not been without its share of evil influence this wet season,’ he tells his father, adding: ‘Never did I see unceasing torrents pour for three months as they have this, I hope ended monsoon.’
An old friend, Jayanta Sarkar, who went to school in Bala Hisar here, reminisces on a childhood spent in Landour: ‘The ridge came alive with static at the approach of a summer storm; the trees took the thunderbolts at least five times leaving our windowpanes rattling.’
Little seems to have rattled those early settlers, who built the first homes in the hill station. An entry by Mrs Robert Moss King in A Civilian’s Wife in India, (pub: 1884), tells us: ‘There have been some heavy thunderstorms this last week, accompanied by the increasing roll of thunder which I have never heard. I am not nervous about lightning, but still unpleasantly alive to the fact that this house from its position is extremely liable to be struck. The whole ridge we are on is bristling with lightning conductors, and there is one to this house, but broken and useless.
‘The last storm discovered all the joints in our harness. It was at night, and my endeavour to sleep through it were put an end to by heavy drops beginning to fall on my face. The first drop murdered sleep effectively, and a few more made me jump up to drag the bed to a dry place.’
‘The lightning was so incessant as to produce the effect of a lamp flickering violently, but without going out. For at least half an hour I could plainly distinguish every object out of doors, and am sorry I did not make the experiment of trying to read by the light of lightning. I feel sure I could have done so.’
A tale survives of Capt. Charles Dean Spread of the Invalid Establishment, who was killed by forked lightning at Bala Hisar on 3rd September 1879, as he collected rainwater from the drainpipes to develop some photographic plates.
Believe-it-or-not, 24 years later, on the same day, 3rd September 1903, a bolt of globular lightning - a meteoric ball of fire - which sometimes falls with an explosion, killed his cousin Miss Eleanor Amy Nunn, a teacher at the old Abbey School. All she had done was walk up to bolt the door, which had swung open in a squall.
Next monsoon, come and find yourself a nook - a cosy ringside seat - atop this ridge and watch the show unfold down below in the Amphitheatre of the Doon valley as it gets lit up by curtains of sheet lightning.