By mid-July, the jamun harvest that opened this story was over. Across southern Telangana the fruit had been shaken loose from branches heavy since May, caught in bed-sheets spread beneath the trees, sorted, and sold by the kilo to buyers who mostly bought it for its taste and its reputed benefit to diabetic relatives, and did not think of it, in that moment, as prophecy at all. The trees that gave so generously this year stand quiet now, their season already finished while the monsoon’s own season still has months to run. But the question the fruit raised back in May — the question this entire cover story opened with — still hangs in the air over those groves: did the trees know something?
The scientist’s answer is more interesting, and more honest, than a simple yes or no. Put the question directly to Prof. K. Ashok of the University of Hyderabad — a researcher who has spent a career turning exactly this kind of observation into testable science, as a member of the group that first identified the Indian Ocean Dipole in 1999 — and he begins not with the tree at all, but with a parallel from the other side of the world.
“Farmers carry real observational knowledge. El Niño itself was named by fishermen, long before scientists studied it.” — Prof. K. Ashok, University of Hyderabad
The phenomenon at the very centre of this whole cover package, in other words, entered science exactly the way the jamun proverb has survived in Telangana: as an unlettered but genuinely accurate pattern, noticed by people who depended on it for their livelihood, long before any instrument existed to confirm what they already knew.
But naming a pattern and explaining it are different achievements, and Prof. Ashok was careful to keep them separate when the question turned specifically to this year’s fruit. “A dry spring isn’t always statistically linked to a weak monsoon,” he said — a clear, unhedged caution against reading the jamun harvest as reliable prophecy in any general sense. And yet he did not dismiss this year’s coincidence either. “With El Niño present this year, I wouldn’t be surprised if the two are connected,” he said of the dry spring and the weak monsoon developing alongside it — a careful, genuinely scientific form of words, closer to a hypothesis than a verdict, and considerably more honest than either the folk certainty that started this story or a scientist’s false confidence would have been.
Read closely, his answer resolves the mystery without deflating it. The tree is not reading the future. It cannot be, because a jamun tree flowering in March has no access whatsoever to information about what the Pacific Ocean will do in June. What the tree can do — what any organism under environmental stress can do — is respond to the present it is actually living through. A harsh, dry pre-monsoon spring, the kind that stresses a flowering tree, can push it toward an unusually heavy fruit set, the oldest insurance policy available to a plant facing an uncertain season: flower hard and set fruit before conditions can worsen further. The heavy jamun harvest does not forecast a dry monsoon. It testifies, retrospectively, to a dry spring that has already happened.
And here folklore and forecasting turn out, on Prof. Ashok’s own account, to be watching the same event from two different vantage points rather than making two different claims. A scorching, water-stressed pre-monsoon spring and a weak monsoon can share a single upstream cause — the same El Niño, already strong by April, already pressing down on the whole season before the rains had even a chance to begin. The tree, the spring, and the sky may all have been reading the same ocean, at different times, in different languages. The old judgement of the Telangana groves was never wrong to notice a connection. It simply misdescribed the direction of the arrow — mistaking two children of one parent for a parent and its child.
That, in the end, is what living with ninety per cent genuinely means for a country of this size. Not resignation, which would be the wrong lesson to take from a season this well anticipated — but accounting. A state government activating a formal contingency plan in mid-July rather than waiting to mourn a bad season in September. Scientists and agriculture officials in one room at ICRISAT, arguing over which drought-resilient seed variety suits which district. A Telangana farmer weighing cotton against paddy the way an investor weighs a portfolio, sowing seventeen hectares of cotton for every two of paddy, not out of pessimism but out of a clear-eyed read of the season’s odds. And readers who, having walked this cover story’s entire engine room — from the Nairuti’s mechanics to the Kerala onset to the coin-in-a-bag difficulty of tropical forecasting — can now read a district rainfall map with something closer to a scientist’s eye than a bystander’s anxiety. The monsoon of 2026 will very likely finish short. It will also be, by a wide margin, the best-anticipated short monsoon in India’s recorded history: watched from April, revised candidly in May, tracked weekly through June and July, and answered, district by district, well before its final numbers were known.
And the calendar holds one card yet to be played. When the Nairuti finally withdraws at September’s end, the wind across the subcontinent reverses, and India’s other, quieter monsoon — the Ishanya, blowing from the northeast from October through December — takes its shift over a peninsula that spent its summer parched. There are no promises in that reversal; a deficit summer does not guarantee a generous autumn, and the season stays conditional on oceans that have not finished deciding what they intend to do. But reservoirs that failed to fill in July may yet be partly redeemed in November, and the Bay of Bengal will be watched in October with exactly the attention the Pacific received in April.
On 30 September, the season’s books finally close, and the 90 per cent forecast this story has followed from its opening line meets the rain gauge directly, for the last time. Whatever the final number turns out to be, this cover story has already delivered the lesson it set out, on its very first page, to carry: the monsoon is not fate, arriving or withholding itself by whim. It is a machine — vast, genuinely ancient, and, at last, legible to anyone willing to read it. It can fall short by a tenth. We can know as early as April that it might. And knowing that much, in time, a country of a billion people can act.
– G Sudhir
