WHAT MOST OF INDIA is to the hyper-reality of Slumdog Millionaire, the coastal state of Kerala is to high mountains, sandalwood forests, and, most important, the monsoon. Each summer, along this narrow state occupying the southwestern edge of India, the ferocious rains and wind that originate in the Indian Ocean first strike.

This happens, with remarkable consistency, starting around June 1, when the monsoon rolls into Kerala and begins blowing through the country, advancing steadily north through India in a storm system that produces strong northeasterly winds. By June 10 it has usually hit Mumbai and Calcutta. By July 15, all of India will lie beneath a claustrophobic dome of pewter that settles over the country like a garbage-can lid. In the north, along the Pakistan border, even hardscrabble villages in the great Thar Desert will get a month of rain.

For travelers, the monsoon period is considered the most wretched time to visit India, but wretched was what I wanted. I've spent my life in the eternal rainforests of Southeast Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, so you might assume I've already experienced enough rain for one incarnation. But I haven't. Surprising as it might seem coming from someone who owns 14 rain jackets, I mostly feel cheated where precipitation is concerned.

Rain in the Northwest is, like the locals, misty, pleasant, and polite; often gloomy but rarely flamboyant. Rain we get, but almost never the opening-of-the-heavens theatrics of midwestern or southeastern thunderstorms. As my aunt Gay told friends upon returning to Ohio after a two-week visit to Juneau, "It's the craziest thing—it rains all the time, but you never get wet."

Decades of congenial drizzle have left me with a powerful craving for authentic rain. Belligerent rain. Rain so hard and steady that the fish complain about it. Thinking this way about the rain inevitably got me thinking about India. This in turn made every Indian I contacted about traveling to Kerala in June ask if I'd lost my mind.

"It will rain every day," they warned. "You will not be able to tolerate the heat." "June is the absolute worst time of all in India, and a perfect hell in Kerala."

This was a surprise. I thought Indians were supposed to love the monsoon. Ancient ragas have woven it into the national mythology. The country's entire life cycle supposedly revolves around a weather system that, at its climax, covers one-third of the planet.

The more Indians I talked to, however, the more I got the sense that the monsoon may not be the cause célèbre it once was. Seasonal rains used to mean survival in a country with little assured irrigation, but advances in food preservation have eliminated the worst rural starvation. Improved transportation means villages are no longer isolated by annual flooding. Even Bollywood's famed wet-sari dances—for decades the only legitimate T&A that Indians were allowed to enjoy—have been rendered quaint by the high heels and micro-miniskirts of the "Bombabes" who are bringing skank fashion to every corner of the country.

More important, motorists hate the legendary traffic jams the rains bring, and it's motorists who are driving (literally, figuratively) India in its manic aspirational push to keep up with China's manic aspirational push to overtake the United States' position of global economic primacy.

"And we come to the same story...which is repeated every year," bitches a typical Times of India article. "The monsoon showers playing havoc on the city roads, and the harried commuters praying for relief and cursing the authorities all the while."

Given that no one likes an outsider who's been in their country all of three weeks lecturing them about their culture, I assumed locals would be angered by my position that the modern state has blown past the monsoon. From train platforms to spice shops, I've been springing my monsoon-is-dead thesis on every Indian who will talk to me, yet, astonishingly, not one seems all that offended by my outlandish challenge to the national identity. After road-testing it on an endless array of bystanders in Delhi and Mumbai, I decided my old rain jacket was ready for the ultimate shakedown in Kerala.