the desert smells like rain

petrichor is a coinage for the most wondrous of smells- the smell of rain on earth, the smell of red earth and pouring rain. often claimed by many as their most favourite smell, it is supposedly a complex odour created by more than 50 chemicals with redolent names like geosmin.

gary paul nabhan's book captures the world of Papago indians (or more poetically O'Odham in their native tongue) and their Sonoran desert environs with a rare sensitivity and beauty that vanilla natural history books lack. i found the book at Strand Books after several years of hunting in used and new book stores (of course i could've found it online but didn't want to). and incidentally i kept it on my makeshift kitchen altar for saraswathi puja and read it this morning for vijayadasami. it also tackles issues threatening their lifestyle- political problems caused by an artificial border, water hungry and resource devouring anglo-american farming practices and the challenges of keeping their culture and practices alive but without the unbalanced, rhetorical and often polemical approach that characterizes such conflicts.

The title, gary explains in the first chapter, is the answer a young papago boy gives him when he (gary) asked him what came to his mind first with the mention of desert. the papago indians cultivate solely on run-off water after the first late summer rains, a capricious beast that often is propitiated with the drinking (and vomiting afterwards as he wonderfully describes the ceremony in another chapter poetically titled "Throwing up the clouds") of cactus wine. over hundreds of years, they have developed a simple and efficient network of arroyos for channelizing the runoffs and feeding their fields. Gary's descriptions of the stirrings of life following the first rain are enough to make the book worth it. Turtles wake up from their slumber and blindly rush into the water ( it is as if their bodies know it), toads rise and hurriedly make love in a frenzy, winged ants flying around, amaranth seeds bursting into life.

and quietly in the middle of all this, almost inexplicably, rises the smell of the desert, the smell of rain.