FOR TWO DAYS AFTER the motorcycle wreck and elephants and leeches, Baiju and I drive through magnificent countryside, exposing ourselves to the full intensity of all-encompassing showers. We return the welcoming laughter of strangers huddled for shelter in doorways. We watch village boys slip, slide, and howl through mud-soccer games. We laugh as two men race out of a bus and literally dance a jig amid drops of rain so big they look like meteors. Because temperatures are so high, you can stay out in the rain forever and never get cold.

It's all pretty great except that, with every inch that falls, I feel my monsoon theory being swept away in a tide of collective joy. Far from being hostile or even indifferent to the monsoon, the people of Kerala embrace it, clearly drawing from the storms a reaffirming, communal assurance. Nature still matters, at least to these Indians.

At some point during all this, the old woman and the wall of brown water return to haunt my sleep. Between this nagging guilt and the bad mattress, my last night in India becomes such a restless hell that, by the time Baiju picks me up on the morning of my flight home, I'm in an uncharacteristically pissy mood.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I complain as we claw through city traffic.

"Tell you what?"

"That I was wrong. My theory. We talked about it for a week. You translated interviews. You told me I was a man blessed with keen insight."

"I believe you have a good theory five days a week," he says. "Look out the window. It is Monday again." Baiju motions at the traffic. "The soccer games and dancing you will find only on the weekend. Now the people are going, as they say, back to the real world. It is just another gloomy Monday."

One of the great things about travel is getting to the point where you forget what day of the week it is. I roll down the window. Dirty rain, diesel exhaust, and angry blares of late-for-work car horns roll into the Ambassador. It feels like modern India again. I recline in the seat, close my eyes, and settle in for the slog to the airport.

For the schmoes on their way to jobs in threatening IT office parks, predatory call centers, and world-altering auto factories, it most certainly is another gloomy Monday. For me, though, things are looking good. Thanks to Baiju, I have some decent, if gore-free, monsoon pictures; a reliable ride back to the mellow drizzle of the real world; and at least five-sevenths of a theory that, like the clothes in my suitcase, still holds a little bit of ancient water.