A churning violet cylinder of smoke, a thousand feet tall and growing with no compromise to its proportions, rose off forty smoldering broadleaf acres on a windless morning on the Indian plateaus. The second millennium had seventy days left to it.
The younger son, twelve, the father, fifty, and a lineup of atmospheric researchers, military officers, and statesmen all waited near a temporary station cluttered with meteorological devices. A heavy crackling, the cavernous thud of collapsing trees, and most of all the rumble of rushing smoke—it filled their ears.
The sky was dawning an uninterrupted cobalt, cloudless. The dew point was thought adequate, the upper atmosphere appropriately turbid, to stoke this enormous immaterial engine, one whose operation, it was hoped, would induce a torrent.
Deep in the Orissan jungle, every ten miles, for forty miles, another cylinder fired and another group clustered a mile from its base. It was the father, though, Menar Peshwa, deputy head of the country’s military weather bureau, and Indian representative to the World Weather Watch, who led.
The hard edges of the towers gave way. The smoke dispersed laterally at the tops, where the atmosphere turned violent, merging into what looked like gray nimbostratus underlain by scuds. This, as the sky was losing its green and going a truer blue in the half-light of a sun cresting the horizon. The jungle, a thicket of shrubs, airy bushes, lanky trees, all brown where they were not a searing orange, had been scanted by the monsoons, as had, more important, the rice paddies woven through the base of the mountain range, the Eastern Ghats.
Within the station, Menar studied the atmospheric data coming in from the probe, the small blimp they had sent up five thousand feet. The advanced metrics rolled across the screen, forming patterns whose significance he could read off the matrix like a map. The assistants, the sergeants, and the other officers all watched the data percolate through the display, but they could apprehend only elements of it. For a synthetic interpretation, a final diagnosis, they turned to Menar.
Intimates could sometimes see the answer in his face before Menar could turn it into words. This time he was blank. He rose from the long metal desk and strode between the men out of the station. “The readings are fine,” Menar said, the men gathering behind him. But on the fringe of the horizon they saw something unwelcome: a thick sheet of nimbus headed in. Menar disappeared into the station. On the radio he pressed the Bhubaneswar weather monitors for news. A voice explained that the fast-moving storm had unexpectedly kept much of its force as it made landfall. It had brought significant rains to the paddies among the Ghats—that was the good it had done—but it was now on its way, at great speed, to the plateau. In ones and twos the men trickled back into the station. Now Menar wore the news on his face. Only his boy, Ravan, remained outside, watching the convergence of clouds, natural and artificial.
The smoke had risen to seven thousand feet and now descended, as hoped, to three thousand, as nimbostratus clouds about to storm normally would. But the men stood at the monitors, indoors, and watched the incoming monsoon explode the experiment. A fine drizzle came down at first, then, in minutes, heavy rains. But the two clouds had by now become one, and the precise origin of the water became unknowable. Menar came outside again and called the boy’s name. Ravan looked back, drenched. Nothing more was said as he followed his father inside. At the cost of one hundred and sixty acres of scorched forest, the storm engine would have to remain hypothetical.
There were, and would be, many occasions of this sort. Like the time, in 2010, in Andhra, south of Orissa, that they covered a hundred acres of fallow fields in carbon black, and an adjoining area of the same size in chalk, hoping to promote thermal updrafts. For Ravan, who was now finished with university, art was overtaking science. So he couldn’t help but see the project under two aspects, as the atmospheric experiment his father intended, and as the Earthwork triptych, or else the field painting, unwittingly created. From the mountains running down to Andhra, Ravan and his older brother, who was also their father’s chief assistant and namesake, looked down onto the fields: an immense black against an immense white against an immense blue (the Bay of Bengal).
Menar had decided the project was worth a try. It was much less expensive than the others, and it destroyed nothing. The fields were already empty, and the carbon black might even rejuvenate the soil. The Babylonians, he told his boys, would burn their old fields to stimulate new growth, and rain too, for the next year’s crop. These ancients were, to the father, progenitors of a thermal view of storms.
He hoped the pattern of heat absorption and reflectivity produced by the dusted fields might stimulate ocean winds and condense water into low-lying marine clouds. Rain did come, and the blackened fields received a substantial share. But so did the white fields. Moreover the effects showed themselves only over weeks, making it hard to trace the causality. It may have been that the black was responsible for bringing rain to both, given that a storm’s trajectory couldn’t be precisely controlled. Or it could have been, as the skeptics at the weather bureaus at home and abroad thought, that the matter was, once again, simple coincidence.
There was the time, too, they set the sea on fire. This was even before they torched the forests of Orissa. They cleared a mile of beach, floated fire-retardant buoys, and applied refined oil to the ocean’s surface with six boats that covered the field in the manner of lawn mowers tending a soccer pitch, strip by strip.
At his request, Ravan ignited the slick. Aiming slightly upward, the boy, just ten, pulled the flare gun’s heavy trigger with three fingers. The stick shot out of the broad barrel of the pistol and ignited within yards, trailing red sparks before exploding in a ball the same color, shimmering from then on as it cut a path through the air toward the center of the slick.
As the flare struck the ocean, the smaller flare acted as the spark to a vastly larger one. Because of the slick’s expanse, the flaring proceeded as if in slow motion, the flames traveling methodically in all directions from the center. The breeze riffled the waters in the bay. It gave the flames a topography. Burning waves rolled in toward the shore, while the wind sent smaller, more fragmented waves laterally, intercepting the others. The path of the fire itself was unaffected. The flames rose over all of it, and for a moment, under the midday sun, a translucent, rolling red overlay the aquamarine of shallow bay water, just before smoke, charcoal black, came up off the tops of the flames, cloaking the red and blue beneath.
They kept the burn alive by piping fuel in just beneath the surface of the water, from tanker trucks stationed on the compacted sands of the beach. Within hours, stratocumulus formed and returned a steady drizzle to the sea. The clouds drifted inland on air currents aided by the flames, bringing rain to the rice fields, as hoped. A layer of larger cumulonimbus began to deliver a true storm.
They regarded the trial as promising, an advance over the last time they tried out the idea, in a slightly different form, inland, just a few months prior. A pool of oil, Olympic-size in width and length, but just a foot deep, had been set alight, sending a thick sheet of black smoke drifting into the lower atmosphere. No correlation with rain emerged. The humidity might have been inadequate. The sight of the flaming pools would stay with Ravan, though. They reminded him of the burning oil wells of Iraq, from the second American war there, though the flames had less clear purpose then. Still, as he drifted away from science, into art, music, the two, war and weather modification, would merge for him like clouds.
In the sea trial, the timing between the burn and the storm seemed better than luck could provide for. But consistent replication eluded them. Though the burning slicks appeared to increase the odds of rain, they couldn’t be depended on to produce them. Unaccounted variables remained.
There was the environmental cost to consider too, the sheer amount of fuel necessary, at best, merely to increase the odds of rain; the oil invariably seeping beyond the buoys out to sea; and the smoke itself, which was possibly an aid to rain but certainly a pollutant.
Storm generation ex nihilo proved hit or miss. But Menar’s results were good enough for his governmental sponsors. They pledged continued support of his experiments with weather, including newly begun interventions in existing clouds. There were other incentives in play, after all, beyond bringing water to rice fields during drought: military ones that remained hazy, still notional. There was also the perennial problem of flooding in the north of India, which meant there was as much to be gained from destroying storms as there was from creating them. It was thought the processes involved must be related. So Menar’s program grew.