Where the word monsoon comes from, and what Hormuz knew about it

We tend to file the monsoon under weather, beside the heatwave and the cold snap, as something that happens to people. I think that filing is wrong, and the word itself says so. Monsoon reached English late in the sixteenth century from the Portuguese monção and the Dutch moesson, and they had it from the Arabic mawsim, which grows from a root meaning to mark or to brand. A mawsim is a marked time: a season, a fixed occasion, the days of the year that come round and must be met. The sailors of the western Indian Ocean used it for the sailing season, the window in which the wind would carry you where you meant to go. It was a word for an appointment long before it was a word for a downpour.

In the archipelago we never lost that first sense, because the same Arabic word came into Malay by a different road and settled as musim. Musim is not a storm. It is any turn of the year that arrives on time: musim hujan for the rains, musim buah when the orchards load up, musim durian, which needs no explanation to anyone who has lived through one. The word ran east with the ships and west with the Portuguese, and the two branches have met again in the same mouths, so that a forecast here can speak of musim monsun timur laut, the northeast monsoon season, and use one Arabic word twice without anyone noticing.

Take the word at its first meaning and the medieval history of Hormuz stops looking like a story about a place and starts looking like a story about a calendar. The island port near the mouth of the Gulf grew rich on goods that were, for months at a time, simply waiting. Ships from the west coast of India came in on the northeast wind of the cool months. Ships bound for India had to be loaded and away before the southwest monsoon rose to full strength and the harbours across the sea closed against it. Between those two dates sat a market, and its real product was a promise: that your cargo would still be there, safe and sold, when the wind turned. Merchants did not choose Hormuz for its comforts. They chose it because it was where one season handed goods to the next.

The price of missing the appointment is plain in the account of Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi, an envoy who passed through Hormuz in 1442 on his way to Calicut. He was held there until the season was more than half spent, and the merchants told him that the time for sailing had gone and that whoever put to sea now would answer for his own death. A missed mawsim was not a delay of a week. It meant waiting the better part of a year, or gambling on open water.

We now talk about the strait in hours: how long a passage takes, how quickly a ship clears the narrows. That language of speed is useful, but it hides what the older trade understood in its bones. Passage through a narrow sea has always depended on things nobody on the shore controls, and the people who prospered were the ones who planned for waiting. The clerks and warehouse keepers of Hormuz were, in a real sense, professionals of the pause. Their ledgers measured time as carefully as they measured weight.

When I wrote Strait of Hormuz, the chapter on that island market was the one I rewrote most, because I kept describing a harbour when I should have been describing a timetable.

The afternoons where I live have turned heavy this week, the thunder arriving a little after four, which is how the gap between one monsoon and the next announces itself. Nobody calls it weather and leaves it there. The washing comes in early, the errands move to the morning, and people say the musim is changing in the voice they keep for a guest who is expected.