NONFICTION - April 21, 1991

CHASING THE MONSOON by Alexander Frater (Alfred A. Knopf: $21; 273 pp.). Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British statesman, once wrote that only insects and undertakers enjoy the monsoon climate. Alexander Frater of the London Observer didn’t intend to gainsay Macaulay when he set out to chronicle India’s 1987 monsoon, but that’s the effect of this entertaining book; Frater himself became a fan of the rains, caught up in their power to drown and save, to destroy and redeem. Frater’s journey takes him from the southern tip of India through Goa, Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta and finally Cherrapunji, a village known as “the wettest place on Earth”: In July it receives as much as 75 feet--that’s right, feet --of rain. There’s plenty of meteorological information here, but it’s the encounters with Indians that make Frater’s book memorable.