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In the living room of his spare 10th-floor apartment he keeps a few shelves of monsoon books — not only the scientific treatises and histories one might expect, but also a lyric poem by a fifth-century writer, Kalidasa, in which a mythical spirit asks a monsoon cloud to send a message to his love.

In one way or another, we should be able to accommodate “Hamlet” and the sonnets, Goethe’s “Faust” and the fifth-century Sanskrit poet and playwright Kalidasa’s “Meghaduta.”

The memory of Kalidasa’s writings led E. M. Forster to a long train journey to the ruins of Ujjain, the town in which Kalidasa lived.

As Forster describes it in “Abinger Harvest,” he took a small dip in Kalidasa’s favorite river, Shipra.

Consider the Sanskrit court poet Kalidasa, in whose verses we encounter a river scented with the fragrant ichor of wild elephants.