What can the monsoon, as an aesthetic assemblage, tell us about social and political power in South Asia? Returning to the famous “cloud messenger” of Kalidasa’s Meghdutam (4th BCE), I will explore the aesthetic logics of the monsoon as a circulatory system that connects peoples and places even as it carries portentous messages. I choose circulation and communication as the central features of the monsoon rather than the more static approach towards clouds as storage, as seen in contemporary media studies.While Kalidasa imagined an exiled lover trying to send a message of longing to his beloved via a monsoon cloud, Telugu writer Gurram Jashuva turned the genre of Sanskrit messenger poems on its head in in Gabbilam (1941) by positing a bat as a messenger of a different kind of lament – a protest against exile from the everyday hum and heft of society. As a messenger of Dalit anger and grief, the bat allows us to revisit the monsoon cloud as a medium of politics, specifically the politics of exile. I will end with a reflection on the use of the technique of the “vox pop” (Latin, voice of the people) in contemporary televisual news media. In keeping with the theme of monsoon circulations, exile, and migration, I specifically examine vox pop interviews with migrant workers who were forced to walk vast distances to return home during India’s abrupt pandemic lockdown during the 2020 monsoons. Who is chosen to carry messages to power and what is the form and address of such messages? This is an experiment in thinking with the monsoon, as method, and consider what an aesthetic approach can bring to the study of communication and power.