One of the reasons why the Cochin Port became so valuable was its proximity and access to the fertile hills of the Western Ghats. Famous for its native pepper and cardamom, the Western Ghats became a central feature of the Indian Ocean spice trade that was coopted by successive colonial empires since the 16^th century. In September 2018, a friend and I travelled from Kochi to Munnar, a hill station in the Western Ghats close to the headwaters of the Periyar River, Kerala’s longest river and the river whose estuary forms the harbor in which Kochi rests. We were nervous about the trip due to the uncertainty following the floods and deadly landslides that plague the hills throughout periods of heavy monsoonal rains. We decided to go ahead with the trip, primarily because the hills at this time were home to the famous blossom of the Neelakurinji, a purple flower native to the tropics of South Asia that only blooms every 12 years. We also wanted to see the Nilgiri Tahr, a horned mountain goat endemic to the Western Ghats. Fortunately for us, we not only caught a glimpse of both, but we were surrounded by them when we visited Eravikulam National Park just outside of Munnar. In this park, the escarpments rose high into the sky and had water flowing off them as if coming from the sky itself, and beyond the fields of purple flowers, were rows of tea carved out from the forests that would have once covered this astonishing place before it was turned into a plantation by the British in the 19^th century. After visiting Eravikulam, we drove around the Munnar hills to a reservoir in the upper reaches of the watershed of the Periyar River, Kerala’s longest river feeds the famous Keralan backwaters near Kochi before flowing out to the Arabian Sea. While we playfully explored the upper reaches of the river, I noticed plastic dangling from trees that overhung the flowing waters, indicating the high-water mark from the floods just weeks before. Waste usually pools and accumulates downstream, in this instance in the backwaters between the river and the sea, so I was shocked to see that even here in the hills water and waste were flowing together, inseparable except for the traces left behind from the flood.

A month prior to our trip to Munnar and the Western Ghats, in the immediate aftermath of floods my friend Joseph who ran a homestay in Fort Kochi messaged early one morning asking if I wanted to join him on a trip to visit friends of his that had lost almost everything to the flood. There was a cleanup underway and they could use some more hands. Here is a fieldnote I wrote afterwards:

When we reached the house where Joseph’s friend lives, we saw the entire belongings of the house in the front yard. I struggled to find the water mark when we first got out of the car but once under the verandah could see it was about 2.5 meters up. The entire ground floor of this house would have been submerged. It struck me as unlikely that this would have happened at all if it was rains alone that caused the flooding. It seems to me that the destruction in this area was almost entirely because of the dams opening their shutters.

Joseph’s friends lived in Aluva, an area of Kochi close to the banks of the Periyar River and nearby to the Cochin International Airport. The airport had shut down its operations when the flooding began, because runway was under several feet of water. The Periyar actually used to flow directly where the airport is today, but in another intervention into the wetland ecology, it was diverted during the airport’s construction. While we were helping to clean their house and sort the belongings into what could be kept and what needed to be thrown away, their neighbors had begun to pump the water out of their well. Though the number of households in Kochi that rely on well water for household use has decreased in recent years, putting more pressure on centralized water supply, many people in the city still relied on private wells for drinking water. Many of these wells were contaminated with fecal coliform and other wastes during the flood. The advice circulating through WhatsApp groups was to use a petrol-powered pump to drain the wells and wait for cleaner water to filter back in. Here the flood brought the everyday entanglements of water and waste into relief in ways that could not be ignored, highlighting how these entanglements operate beyond the infrastructural level through embodied ways that threatened public health.

Flooding is not new in Kerala or in Kochi, but its meaning and effects have changed through the entanglement of water with the city’s changing wastescapes, dam construction in the Western Ghats, intense rainfall exacerbated by climate change, and the ever-present threat of an encroaching sea. Living with and in water was once a way of life here, and yet it is now only imagined as a source of anxiety and shame, simultaneously a threat to urban life and a vital sink for urban wastes. Concrete infrastructures create the lines, the boundaries, upon which urban life continues to be imagined, where dry land is valued and water bodies become the sinks of material excess. Within these conditions, there is a need to understand “why floods with tragic consequences are more than physically devastating… they erase lines and offer a glimpse of chaos” (da Cunha 2019, 74). In response to the dual threats of waste and floods, there is an opportunity for Kochi to reimagine the monsoon as not something that simply arrives in varying degrees that can be temporarily contained through infrastructure. What promise might thinking and acting with the monsoon as an atmosphere in which urban life is enveloped hold for a kind of southern urbanism in South Asia (Bhan 2019)? What kinds of “atmospheric knowledge”, beyond extreme weather as something that comes and goes, need to be acknowledged and fostered in this endeavor (Abels and Eisenlohr 2025)?

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