There’s something peculiarly unnerving about ‘Don’t Panic!’ signs. ‘Don’t Panic!’ signs accompanied by strangers in surgical masks with clipboards and thermometers are especially uncomforting. After a twelve-hour flight, when you expect to see nothing more stimulating than arrows pointing towards baggage reclaim, these things become very frightening indeed. I look defiantly at the sign, feeling rebellious. I panic.

‘Have you been experiencing any flu-like symptoms lately?’ asked one of the masked men as he took my arm – by now covered in a nervous sweat – to check if I felt feverish. I disobey the sign once more. ‘No’ I say, my voice quivering with uncertainty.

‘Have you knowingly come into contact with someone suffering from swine flu?’ continues my assailant, and I suddenly wonder if I have perhaps chosen a bad time to be thousands of miles away from the NHS. I already knew I’d chosen a bad time to be in India. Read any guidebook, go on any forum, and the advice is always explicit: avoid the monsoon. But as we’ve established, I’m something of a rebel when it comes to advice, and so I’d made my merry way to Asia with nothing but the comfort of a few maverick voices from the Internet claiming the monsoon was a pleasure. Three people couldn’t possibly be wrong, I told myself.

India actually has two monsoons, the South Western and the North Eastern. I was about to greet the former, which usually breaks around the start of June, hitting the south at Trivandrum in Kerala and working its way northwards along the west coast over the course of the next two months, soaking everything in its wake and injecting new life into a landscape withered from months of beating sun. 

My reasons for chancing a fortnight of rain and thunder were financial. India may be cheap, but for such a hopeless haggler as myself everyday would be a fiscal minefield. I was resigned to paying twenty-times the standard price for bottles of water on occasion, but was determined that this would be compensated for by the drop in room rates occasioned by the annual tourist lull between June and October.

I arrived in Ernakulam, Kerala, on June 5 expecting to be enveloped in rain, and felt not a little smug when I found nothing but clear-blue sky. The absence of rain was particularly lucky because I was bound for the ferry crossing to the nearby island, Fort Cochin, and didn’t much fancy being caught on an open deck in the middle of a tempest.

Fort Cochin has been a popular space with foreigners for hundreds of years. The Portuguese landed here back when Henry VIII was still slim, and nearly as soon as they were off the boat they built St Francis Church, which still stands today. I suppose they were looking for something familiar, and standing underneath the archaic porch I realise that so am I. Being less ambitious than the imperial Catholics of the past, however, I merely go in search of a cup of tea.

Finding one isn’t that easy. It seems off-season Cochin doesn’t cater for the needs of a tea-hungry Englishman at half past three on a Wednesday afternoon. If it’s possible to look mournfully deprived of a hot beverage, then I must have looked just that. A local sensed my pain: ‘tea?’ he asked.

Sitting in the palm-covered garden of a café, I begin talking to the wonderfully garrulous owner. He brings me a newspaper: ‘I always think’ he says, ‘people should have the news when they have tea, don’t you?’ I agree, and ask him about the monsoon. He says it came two weeks early this year, but there is gravity in his tone as he tells me this.

‘Years ago,’ he explains, ‘the monsoon would come the same time every year. Now we never know when. This is not good. There are the icecaps, and these are melting; up in the mountains, the snow is leaving us. No – this is not good, I fear.’

I quickly feel out of my depth as the man’s assessment of monsoons and global warming becomes steadily more scientific. I nod along, but feel shamefully uninformed. ‘But don’t you worry’ he says, quickly brightening up and pointing at the still-azure sky: ‘there will be plenty of monsoon for you!’

Indeed there would. As evening descends and I find myself strolling along the coast, I join a group of fisherman at the shore to stare at the dense black clouds gathering ominously half a mile out. Soon all the sky is cloud; just varying gradations of grey. There is a pregnant atmosphere, and the eerily languid blowing that precedes storms fills me with a growing sense of unease. But the scent of salt in the air provokes a comforting nostalgia: wherever I am – be it the palm-treed beaches of Asia or the gravel-strewn shores of Cornwall – sea-salted air brings me back with alacrity to my childhood summers spent on the drizzle-misted coast of Ireland’s Donegal. But drizzle is a long way off. I feel a single raindrop and reach immediately for my umbrella, but in the time it takes to open the clouds break and I’m wet to the bone. I run to the cover of the closest restaurant.

There, I fall in love with the monsoon. Rain is easy to love when you’re indoors – especially when you’re dining on a tasty Keralan curry cooked with fish caught fresh from the antediluvian Chinese fishing nets that hang over the Cochin coast like spiders waiting to pounce. Thunder roars with more force than I’ve ever known, and the inexorable pelting of the rain makes a mockery of the cheap umbrella lying by my side. 

When the rains calm, I begin to hear the noises of an arcade game being played somewhere behind me. The ‘hooaahs’ and ‘hyaas’ of pixelated men make a strange overture to the waning monsoon. ‘K.O!’ booms the machine, and I picture the victorious posturing of the winner made familiar to me through the machines of bowling allies and British beach promenades

My next stop is Alleypey, ‘the Venice of the East’. The primary reason for coming here is to take a cruise along the sprawling backwaters, and to my delight I manage to gain a discount for this on account of the season. Chuffed beyond measure, I board my canoe. The guidebook warns that high season can see these backwaters become congested with tourist traffic, but for me the monsoon has cleared a pathway. Not that the monsoon is anywhere to be seen: the day is nothing but sunshine and a soothing river breeze. Nevertheless, I fear the six-hour excursion will leave bored, even if it doesn’t leave me wet, but the gentle lolling of the canoe as it passes under outstretched palm trees quickly placates me. I feel obligated to relax.

I see water snakes gliding elegantly at my side, and an eagle perched majestically (how else could an eagle perch?) on the riverbank. When my guide and I stop for a drink, he leads me into his friend’s house-cum-café and we enjoy some afternoon arrack together – or perhaps more accurately, he enjoys it while I pretend to. Still, the alcohol induces a sleepy contentment in me that corresponds nicely to the implacable nonchalance of the waterways. 

Quite unexpectedly we stop at my guide’s home, a house upon the bank of one of the smaller waterways – only the slimmest of boats could penetrate it. He invites me into meet his wife and ten-year old daughter, and we all stand with the same ecstatically fixed smiles that only those who can’t speak each other’s languages can achieve. Sitting down together, I suddenly find I’ve been invited to family lunch. This is good news: all those hours of relaxing had made me hungry. I gratefully gobble down the fish and rice, thanking everyone until I’m blue in the face, before boarding the canoe for the final float back to Alleypey town.

Sometimes the rains are like a British spring shower – a quick flurry of light droplets, courtesy of a speeding cloud, which is quickly replaced by sunshine and the pleasing scent of the freshly watered landscape. At night the monsoon flexes its muscles, and is almost apocalyptic in its extravagance. Mostly, though, it doesn’t rain on me at all. I become accustomed to walking out of shops to a clear blue sky presiding over a glisteningly wet ground – all of those around me have been recently soaked to their skin, but I feel myself to be the centre of a dry and benevolent universe. It seems errant Internet opinions can be right: the monsoon is a pleasure, if only by its conspicuous absence whenever I’m outdoors. 

Another conspicuous absence: tourists. Even in Varkala, a traveller hub, the magnificent coastal cliffs loom large over a quiet beach. I take pity on a wandering fortune-teller who, in the absence of other Europeans’ palms to read, is extra persistent in convincing me of his credentials. It seems I am to come into money soon, which is nice, but for now it is he whom this transaction leaves wealthy. 

My final stop is the tourist hotspot Kovalam, and tourists it does indeed have. Kovalam used to be a hippy secret, but now it’s a package-tour staple. But the tourists who I see are not the usual sunburnt Brits of high season: it’s the weekend, and it seems most of India has come to enjoy some monsoon sun. The lively buzz of beachgoers is a nice aside to the off-season building works that have left the coast stained grey with cement mixture. I, though, am not bound to these building-site sands: my absent Western friends have left hotel owners in want of custom, and for less than the price of a gin and tonic in London pub I stay in a place with a pool – to all intents and purposes a private pool; I’m the only one here. 

On my way to the airport I get talking to a teacher from Bangalore. ‘What do you think of India?’ he asks me, and I rush to praise the socks off the subcontinent. The man laughs benevolently. ‘We are a simple people’ he says, ‘and we have lots of gods. That is all you need to know of India’. He eyes me to see if I agree too readily. ‘Or perhaps there is a lot more to know’ he says, almost to himself. More indeed. For now, though, my mind is filled with thoughts of surgical masks, airports, thermometers, and clipboards. I cough. Panic grips me. Do I feel feverish?