Of the many unforgettable sequences in Jalsaghar, the one I remember the most shows the ageing zamindar frowning at the darkening sky. It is the month of Baisakh, the time of summer storms known as kalbaisakhi in Bengal, and he is worried for his wife and son who are journeying back home on a boat. As he watches the light change outside the window and hears the wind rise, an unspeakable terror fills him.

Images of the fury of nor’westers that portend death and destruction are also present in Kazi Nazrul Islam’s verse, ‘Kalbaisakhi’, and song, “Ore tora jayadhwani kar”. The nationalist discourse of the early 20th century had been infused with enthusiasm by Nazrul’s use of the storm as a metaphor. It served as a symbol of a force that had the power to break the chains of colonial bondage.

It is not just terror and fury of kalbaisakhis but their wondrous beauty too that has inspired artists. Mohitlal Majumdar’s poem, ‘Kalbaisakhi’, is still read by schoolchildren in Bengali classes, while Tagore invites the storm to cleanse the old and the morbid in “Esho he Baisakh”. The beauty is not always metaphorical. In one of his stories, Satyajit Ray describes, with minute care, how, on the breaking of a storm, the Shahid Minar in Calcutta stands clouded in a swirl of dust. The nor’wester’s magic extends to popular art as well. The kalbaisakhi is celebrated in some bhatiyali songs while patuas paint scenes of storms on cloth and clay.

But the symbolism of the kalbaisakhi in art is also about the joy of deliverance from the tyranny of a culture that worships orderliness and permanence. In the calm after a storm, while gazing down at the dishevelled city with its uprooted trees and roofless stalls, its roads strewn with sludge and leaves, many an artist must have pondered the puniness of all that we build in the belief that it will last.