Before the Rain Comes
A Letter to the Reader in you on Slowing Down, Sitting Still, and Reading Again!
On the 26th of May, 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in London — a novel that opens with a traveller writing in his journal as a train carries him deeper into Transylvania, recording the food, the people, the light failing on the mountains. Stoker understood something that many writers take years to learn: the most faithful way to enter a story is through the texture of the world before the crisis arrives.
The last weekend of May is that texture. Summer has done its worst. Temperatures in Bhubaneswar have come close to 45°C & felt like 50°C this month; the India Meteorological Department has issued a heat advisory across coastal Odisha; and the land has taken on the colour of unglazed pottery. The monsoon will arrive. The IMD’s normal onset date for Odisha is the 10th to 15th of June. There are, at the time of this writing, approximately twelve to eighteen days before the sky decides to be generous again.
Use those days.
Open the book that has been sitting on your shelf since December. Begin the essay collection you saved and left behind. Return to the novel you set down at chapter four because a meeting ran late and you lost your thread. Slow reading — reading as the practice of remaining in one place with one mind for longer than the internet has trained you to — is, by current neurological consensus, one of the very few activities that rebuilds what psychologist Maryanne Wolf, in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018), calls the “deep reading brain”: the neural circuits responsible for inference, empathy, analogical reasoning, and critical reflection. Wolf’s longitudinal research established that sustained literary reading activates the right hemisphere’s narrative comprehension networks, the frontal lobe’s executive function, and the limbic system simultaneously — a tripartite engagement that brief-content consumption leaves unstimulated. The pre-monsoon weekend, hot and unhurried, is precisely the environment in which this kind of reading becomes available to you.
The Shelf That Judges You Silently
Every serious reader maintains, consciously or otherwise, what the Italian writer Umberto Eco famously called an “anti-library” — the collection of books one owns and has left unread. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who extended Eco’s observation in The Black Swan (2007), argued that unread books in a library are a source of epistemic potential rather than shame: they represent what you have yet to know, and their presence is a standing reminder that knowledge has edges. The books you have left unread are doing work simply by existing on your shelf — making the known feel provisional, keeping the reader’s posture slightly humble.
Most of us in this country speak publicly about the books we have finished — the ones with passages underlined and captions composed. The anti-library stays private. The last weekend of May is a good time to take an honest stock of it, to walk across the room and pull out something waiting, and to honour the original intention that put it there.
This essay offers a reading of a certain kind — the reflective novel, the fiction that resists rushing toward its resolution and instead circles its subject the way a hawk circles a field, returning repeatedly to the same terrain from different altitudes. These are books that cause the reader to pause mid-sentence and look up, not because something dramatic has occurred, but because something true has been said, and the truth requires a moment of quiet verification against one’s own life.
Five Books for the Twelve Days Before Rain
(I KNOW IT IS AMBITIOUS)
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) is the most precise account in modern English fiction of what it costs a person to mistake professional loyalty for a life. Stevens, the elderly English butler who narrates the novel, is travelling across the English countryside — a rare holiday — and what emerges, in the gentle accumulation of memory and self-justification, is an entire life’s worth of repression rendered visible. Ishiguro, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 partly for this novel’s influence on how literature understands interiority, has spoken of his debt to the Japanese concept of mono no aware — the bittersweet awareness of impermanence — absorbed growing up in a Japanese household in England. The novel announces its tragedy through omission rather than declaration. It arrives the way heat does: gradually, undeniably, until you realise you have been sitting inside it for some time.
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (1993), at 1,349 pages, invites the “begin during monsoon, finish by Diwali” method of ambitious reading. Set in 1951 India, in the fictional city of Brahmpur along a river that reads unmistakably like the Ganga, it is a novel of a mother looking for a husband for her youngest daughter and, simultaneously, a history of the first decade of an independent republic still learning what it is. Seth spent eleven years writing it. Its density is a property, a gift — you inhabit early-independence India the way you inhabit a city you have lived in for years, knowing its streets before you know where they go. Amartya Sen, writing of Seth’s achievement, noted that the novel performed what social history rarely manages: it made structural forces — land reform, communal tension, electoral politics — feel personal, felt, immediate.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997) was the first novel by an Indian woman to win the Booker Prize, and it remains one of the most structurally daring novels written in English in the twentieth century. Set in Ayemenem, a small Kerala town through whose geography the monsoon moves as a character in its own right, it is a novel about what Roy calls “the Love Laws” — the rules that determine who may be loved, and how, and how much. Roy’s language is recursive, doubled-back upon itself; it reads the way memory actually works, rather than the way narrative convenience demands. The novel’s famous opening — “May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month” — is itself a small lesson in how a writer in full command of a sentence can make geography into feeling while keeping firm hold of the concrete.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (2007) runs to exactly 184 pages and can be read in a single monsoon afternoon. Structured as a monologue — a Pakistani man named Changez, seated at a café in Lahore, speaking to an unnamed American listener whose reactions are available to the reader only through inference — it is one of the most formally intelligent novels of the last twenty years. Hamid has spoken extensively about what he calls “the second reader effect”: by the time the novel closes, you understand that you have been simultaneously reading a story about identity and belonging and reading a story about how stories are told, to whom, and what the telling itself performs. The form enacts the argument: every identity is, in some measure, a narration directed at a particular audience.
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013) documents with precision what it is to move between cultures and return to find yourself subtly foreign to your own origin. Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman who comes to the United States as a student and eventually returns to Lagos, writes a blog about race in America that became — within the novel and unusually outside it as well — one of the most quoted fictional social commentaries of its decade. Adichie, in her 2009 TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story” — viewed over twenty-six million times — laid out the philosophical argument the novel dramatises: that the stories told about a people, and by a people, determine the limits of what is available to them. Reading Americanah from Bhubaneswar in 2026, one notices how precisely Ifemelu’s observations about being “African in America” echo the experience of being Odia in a national cultural imagination that has, for much of its history, been centred elsewhere.
On Long-Form Reading and the Work of a Journal
Paricharchā was conceived to publish writing that demands space — too long, too invested in its subject, too unwilling to summarise where it should elaborate, for the formats that currently dominate. The quarterly publication format is, in the global publishing landscape, a deliberate resistance to the logic of the feed. The London Review of Books, publishing long-form criticism and essays since 1979, holds a current print circulation of approximately 90,000 copies and a digital readership many times larger — evidence that the appetite for sustained intellectual writing remains intact, displaced only by the convenience of the alternative. The Economic and Political Weekly, published from Mumbai since 1949, carries six to eight-thousand-word essays in economics, politics, and social science every week; its archive has become one of the most cited repositories of Indian scholarship in existence. Closer to home, Srjan, the annual journal of Odisha Sangeet Natak Akademi, has since the 1960s served as the primary scholarly record of the state’s performing arts traditions.
Paricharchā belongs to this lineage. It publishes on Odisha’s culture, heritage, literature, and living artistic traditions in the conviction that the region’s knowledge — about its temple architecture, its manuscript traditions, its ecological philosophies, its vernacular storytelling systems — deserves the care that only long-form writing can provide. A quarterly publication is an argument made over time, issue by issue, that certain things are worth thinking about at length.
Annual patronage makes this possible. The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, writing to a friend in 1817, put the case for literary patronage with characteristic directness: “He who does not love literature for its own sake will be a poor reader of it.” What he meant, stripped of the self-serving grandeur, is that the relationship between a reader and a serious publication is a position — a declaration of where one stands on the question of what the written word is for. Annual patronage is that declaration made tangible: a reader choosing to share in the cost of production because the writing matters, because independent cultural scholarship from eastern India matters, and because the alternative — letting it disappear for want of support — is a loss that compounds quietly, the way all cultural losses do, over decades.
The Books Are Ready. The Rain Is Coming.
One of the many gifts of the last weekend of May, before the monsoon arrives and the streets fill with the smell of wet earth and the kans grass begins its slow seasonal lean, is the permission it gives to be unproductive in the most productive sense. The novelist Marilynne Robinson, whose Gilead (2004) won the Pulitzer Prize and whose essays on the life of the mind stand among the finest written in American English this century, observed in The Givenness of Things (2015): “Thinking is not a productive activity in the economic sense, and in an age absorbed in productivity, thinking has come to seem a luxury, or even an evasion.”
Reading — the kind being described here — is thinking in company. It is the practice of allowing another mind, shaped by different conditions and different losses and different observations of the light on a late-May afternoon, to occupy the same space as yours, and finding that the company is clarifying. The books on your shelf have been waiting patiently. They will begin exactly where you left off.
Pick one up. The rain is twelve days away. There is time enough to read something that will still be with you when it arrives.