The Red Rain of Kerala: When Blood-Coloured Water Fell for Two Months

2026-07-23 · Nature Defying Explanation · 8 min read

The washing was the first thing to betray it. In the last week of July 2001, women in the hill villages around Kottayam and Changanassery, in the south of the Indian state of Kerala, pulled their laundry from the line and found white cotton freckled with pink, as though someone had flicked a brush of thin blood across the drying shirts. Rain had fallen while the clothes hung out, and the rain had come down coloured.

In the days that followed the same rose coloured stain settled on rooftops and courtyards, pooled in the ruts of red dirt lanes and, according to residents, tinted the water standing in wells. People stood in their doorways and watched water the colour of watered wine fall out of an ordinary monsoon sky. The question everyone asked was the practical one. What is in it?

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