Subir Roy: Monsoon blows hot and cold

OFF BEAT

I felt a little awkward going out for my walk on Tuesday morning. Who in his senses would sport a light pullover in India in the middle of June unless you are at above 6,000 ft. And that too, if I know the hills, is not so necessary if you let the day progress just a little bit.

The hills are not what they used to be and it gets almost uncomfortably warm as midday approaches before the rains. The image that bugged me was the amusing one of the Bengali tourist from West Bengal in the hills, laden with heavy woollens and monkey cap to boot, firm in the belief that if it is the hills it must be cold, irrespective of what time of the year it is.

Bangalore, as everyone knows, is half a hill station. But it is also not what it used to be. Greedy land owners, businessmen, politicians and their ever obliging officials have over the last couple of decades been ridding the city of its trees.

So that now, at the height of summer, temperatures nudge 38 degrees. Surely Bangalore, the symbol of tomorrow's India, must live up to its name, warts and all, and not be left behind.

But still, when it rains, when the papers use that great weatherman's deadpan jargon, "Monsoon active over city", when it remains cloudy most of the time and a damp almost chilly wind tells you that it is raining all around you if not just where you are, you would be advised not to be unnecessarily brave and go out in the morning without a light woollen. It is so easy to run into a cold or make ageing joints creek a little more than they need to.

The papers tell you more. That it is worse than a furnace, like a steel mill's blast furnace, in Jharkhand and adjoining areas of West Bengal, where temperatures have been nudging 50 degrees! Good old Kolkata, its leitmotif the babu in the hand-drawn rickshaw with the rickshawpuller up to his waist in the flooded street, has, say my friends, never had it so bad.

It has been a furnace by its own standards, temperatures consistently nudging 40 degrees, leading to a new line of political theorising over the municipal elections.

If your voters are working class, then may Marx, who must be in heaven, kindly keep the rains at bay till polling day. The middle class who are likely to vote for didi or the outgoing mayor's formation, will like to keep indoors if the heat persists.

As it happened, barring a sharp shower a couple of days ago, which brought down temperatures just a bit, the conventional gods failed but the "god that failed" on earth did not. Kolkata went to vote for its new mayor and his tribe at the head of the worst summer that many can remember.

In the unreal world of Bangalore made chilly by the oncoming monsoon, chasing that great climatic phenomenon becomes a downright esoteric exercise.

With the Ulsoor lake filling up almost to the brim even before the monsoons have got properly going, it is unreal to be told by the geography teacher relative that India would have been a virtual desert but for the monsoon.

And the monsoon these last three weeks has been at its quirkiest worst. It was not that late reaching the Andamans but late by a week in reaching Kerala.

Then on the way it almost got lost. Good news finally came after a few days when the experts said it is reviving and then finally friends in Mumbai said it has had its season's first big pelting almost two weeks behind time.

The ultimate unreality is that there is so little preparation to reduce the dependence on so erratic and temperamental a friend. I recall my first stay in Shillong where it rained most of the time but there was a water shortage also most of the time. India goes on, unchanged.

In Gujarat a visitor is compulsorily greeted with a glass of cool water, in Bengal you get a hot cup of tea. In Rajasthan, the Pushkar lake looks so small when you see it the first time after having heard so much about it, particularly when you have grown up listening to stories of great steamer journeys of East Bengal and the incredible sight where the Padma and the Ganga meet and you cannot make out the other shore.

If water means different things to different regions of the country, it is hardly surprising that it is priced so differently in its different parts. In Kolkata, piped water is effectively free; in Delhi, which should know better, it costs a pittance.

It is in Bangalore where it is priced reasonably right, with the household's water bill in close pursuit of the electricity bill.

But the unreality remains. Thousands of crores are spent in bringing the water to the city from hundreds of miles away, but virtually nothing is spent in setting up a few water treatment plants to reclaim the rain water that mixes with the sewerage and pollutes the lakes and kills the fish.

The finest symbol of changing and unchanging India is the long queues of water pots at public taps in the poorer parts of Bangalore. Earlier, they all used to bear the single hue of terracotta pots, today, they are like rainbows, made of multi-coloured plastic. That is progress, after a fashion.

sub@business-standard.com