Monsoon medicine

Rain. It drips from every leaf, pours down every wall, rattles on the rooftops. Rivulets weave through the forest floor, gaining momentum as they descend from the mountain plateau and combine to form seasonal rivers that tumble over rocks, becoming the myriad of thundering waterfalls that attract thousands of Indian tourists to the Western Ghats every year. In the UK, we love to complain about the rain, but in India the arrival of the monsoon is celebrated. ‘This is my favourite kind of weather,’ a grinning member of the retreat team says, as he invites me beneath his huge umbrella and shows me to my villa.

The rain is loved here not only because it transforms summer’s scorched brown grass to an iridescent green and sustains the surrounding forests, rice fields and bamboo plantations, but also because the temporary waterfalls replenish Lake Pawna. This 58 kilometre-long artificial lake, which we took nearly an hour to drive past