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I glanced over at Joachim Kuettner, a German atmospheric scientist and by far the most experienced member of our team. A veteran of field experiments around the world, Joach had volunteered to be the intermediary between the six scientists on board the plane and the pilot in the cockpit, relaying messages back and forth about our current coordinates or modifications to the flight path. It was Joach who had just calmly told us the windshield was cracked and that we would be dropping fuel and heading back to Calcutta (now called Kolkata). Now I tried to read the lines in his seventy-year-old face to ascertain how worried I should be, but his brow remained unfurrowed, his lips unpursed.

I scanned the rest of the team manning this flying laboratory; the world-renowned experts in the analysis and modeling of weather were perfectly silent. My Indian counterpart, a scientist named Dev Raj Sikka, studied his hands, which were folded tightly on the desk in front of him. Just behind Dev Raj, three scientists who had been chattering away all morning about the numbers on their screens had turned ashen and mute. Struck all at once by the same impulse, we began to pull mangoes and bananas from the baskets placed on board by the flight crew. With little else to do with the long moments before our demise, the six of us began peeling the fruit and taking large, joyless bites.

Just minutes before, we had all been focused on our various consoles, each executing his or her assigned task. As the chief scientist of the 1979 Summer Monsoon Experiment (MONEX for short), I kept track of the airplane's flight path, monitored the incoming data, and announced when it was time to launch another dropsonde, a small, cylindrical sensor attached to a parachute. As each of these instruments descended into the bay, it captured an enormous array of data—altitude, temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind speed—that it sent back via radio signal to the aircraft's recording devices as well as the computer monitors of the scientists on board. They pored over each batch of data as the plane heaved and stuttered through storm clouds that lined the sky like boulders in a creek.

The aircraft itself was also collecting information via nose and belly radar, multiple cameras, a radiometer, and a laser probe that penetrated the clouds. Meanwhile, our pilot maneuvered this flying laboratory in ever-descending elevations, carving the sky into a perfect layer cake of data until the plane was so close to the surface of the water, we could nearly count the fish below. It hadn't occurred to me until the windshield cracked that all these fancy instruments along with all my new friends could possibly wind up in that choppy water.

As I watched gasoline stream past my window, I thought about the village I had grown up in, only a half day's drive from the Bay of Bengal, where I had first experienced the power of a monsoon storm. I had never dreamed that one day I would be in an airplane with some of the most brilliant people in the world trying to understand what made one of these storms happen. Back then, I didn't even know cars existed, let alone airplanes, and the storms that passed through the village each year seemed as unknowable as the jackals that howled from the edge of the fields at night. They came or they didn't; no one tried to understand why.

During the weeks I had been in Calcutta for MONEX, communing with scientists from twenty-one other countries, many old friends and extended family members had made the journey from the village for a visit. It had been years since some of them had seen me; they remembered me as a barefoot kid kicking around a soccer ball made of old cloth and heaving cow dung into a bucket balanced on my head. Now I was wearing shiny shoes and a tie. I worked at NASA. My old neighbors looked as astonished by my new American life as I was. At thirty-five, I still felt very much like a boy from the village.

Maybe that's because so much of the work I did studying monsoons was the direct result of seeing how vital the rains were for the people in my rural village, farmers whose families went hungry in dry years and whose livelihoods were ruined by ones that were too wet. If humanity could get better at predicting monsoon precipitation, those farmers would not be so vulnerable; they could plan ahead for difficult times, plant earlier or later, sow different crops. But so much was still unknown about monsoons—what triggered the onset of the rains, what influenced the intensity of the storms—and MONEX was the largest effort ever undertaken to bridge the wide chasms in our knowledge.

In fact, the Electra was not the only airplane collecting data for MONEX that day. Two other aircraft, a NOAA P-3 and a NASA CV-990, were also flying at high altitudes, their own cameras, radars, and lasers interrogating the atmosphere. Sixteen ships were sailing the Indian Ocean taking readings of the sea's surface temperature. Rocketsondes—sensors launched by rockets instead of being dropped from planes—were drawing arches through the stormy sky. Newly built micrometeorological towers on the east coast of India were recording wind turbulence. Weather balloons were drifting into the heavens at almost all hours of the day.