The Cloud Messenger

A yakṣa, a spirit in the household of Kubera, has been careless with his office. The punishment is a year of exile at Rāmagiri, a hill later associated with Ramtek in Maharashtra, among groves the poem still names as Rāma’s. His wife remains in Alakā, the city of the yakṣas on Mount Kailāsa. The Meghadūta does not open on her face. It opens on a season.

At the first of Āṣāḍha a cloud leans on the mountain. The exile, wasted with kāma and with the particular gravity of absence, sees a messenger. He addresses the cloud as a sentient kinsman, a traveller who can be taught. In Kālidāsa, distance is not an obstacle the plot will remove. Distance is the form: more than a hundred stanzas in the slow mandākrāntā metre, a geography recited so that a message might, perhaps, arrive.

The first movement, Pūrvamegha, is the route. North, then farther north. Mālā, the Vindhyas, rivers that must be drunk, the palaces of Ujjayinī where the cloud is asked to pause, not for the yakṣa’s sake only, but so that rain may belong, for a night, to the same city the wife might imagine. Named places stand in for the body that cannot be touched. The atlas is a caress that does not pretend to be a hand.

The second movement, Uttaramegha, is the message. The cloud is told how to find her in Alakā: thinner, perhaps; counting months; speaking with friends who know the look of waiting. Show a sign, the husband says. Speak of nights that were. Say that he lives. The poem is tender without being sure. A year’s sentence has a calendar. A monsoon has a direction. Arrival is not staged.

In 1813 Horace Hayman Wilson published the first English version of a Sanskrit kāvya, verse for verse, and called it The Mégha Dúta. “Where Rámagiri’s cool, dark woods extend, / And those pure streams, where Síta bathed, descend…” The English is of its century, latinate, a little proud. The Sanskrit is of a court that treated the monsoon as a literary season. Neither is a letter in a drawer. Both are a shape found for not being able to go.

Later readers have wanted the cloud to succeed, as if the poem were a postal service with a tracking number. Kālidāsa does not give the delivery. We are left with instruction, description, an imagined room on a mountain that cannot be excavated. The yakṣa remains on the hill. The wife remains, if she remains, in a city no traveller has to confirm. Longing here is not a defect in the plot. It is the plot.

The coordinates printed for Alakā are traditional and mythic. Kailāsa can be pointed at; the city of the yakṣas cannot. Rāmagiri can be walked. The person the cloud was asked to find cannot be taken from the ground. Between 21.40, 79.33 and 31.07, 81.31 there is a monsoon and a poem. That is what the atlas, in this case, is for.