About 40 years ago, when I was just out of college, I went on a Bharat darshan, using the excuse of visiting relatives wherever they were, to see as much of the country as possible. |
The second-class rail fare was paid by my father, board and lodging were on the relatives and the little cash in my pocket paid for local bus fares and an occasional cigarette, surreptitiously smoked in the company of my cousins of similar age. |
The journey from Bombay to Bangalore was undertaken in two legs, a good part of it on the meter gauge train. If that was a novelty to a Calcutta-born who was used to mainline broad gauge trains, Bangalore was more so. |
At a time when most of the country was roasting in the summer heat, I went to sleep with a light blanket folded at the foot of my bed. You will need it in the early morning, my brother-in-law advised. |
The morning was almost mystical. I woke up to take in the details of the bungalow that served as office-cum-residence for my brother-in-law. It had a bit of garden and was as quiet as you could get, despite being in the heart of town. |
The sky was overcast but not gloomy, and there was the hint of mist in the air. And when breakfast was served, I was introduced to purple grapes. They grow them around here, my brother-in-law said airily, adding to the uniqueness of the place. I looked at the near-idyllic surroundings and envied him his working conditions. |
During periodic visits over the next four decades, I have been witness to the way the city has been changing for the worse. But in keeping with its distinctiveness, there was always something left in it to make it special. |
Calcutta, on the other hand, was an entirely different being after the early 1960s. By the time I left it for Delhi in the late 1980s, the power cuts and the metro rail trench had wrecked their combined havoc on the quality of life and there was nothing much left in Calcutta to cling to. |
The fact that Bangalore never managed to lose all its charm and added a new allure, fashioned out of silicon in recent years, made it easy for me to pack my bags and shift there a couple of years ago. I was a bit impatient with those who said with finality that Bangalore was not what it used to be. Don't we all change with time, and which town in India is without traffic jams, I argued. |
It seems the gods were amused with my persistent enthusiasm in middle age and decided to test my commitment to the city by inflicting daunting weather for two successive summers. |
The first summer my colleagues said, the April showers usually cool things down, but this year, they seem to have gone on holiday. When the rains finally came well into June, things cooled down, but it was disconcerting to have had to live through mid-day temperatures of 37 degrees in the garden city. |
Nothing can beat the discomfiture of Delhi in July and August but in these times, what the weather gods give with one hand, they try to take away with the other. Why else will they test your patience by spiriting away winter right in the middle of February and make you fret till mid-June before cooling things down? And when the rains finally came, they did not quite do so. |
It rained all around Bangalore, the cool breeze said so, but not so much within the city itself. You got the cool weather without the rain and Bangaloreans said that was quite natural. But if you were a little superstitious about odd omens, you wondered if the weather had gone permanently out of sync. |
The next year the weather was not much better. Except that it made up for the whimsical rains with a better-than-average winter. But just when this direct experience and all newspaper reports of three successive droughts in several districts made you think Bangalore had irreversibly changed, 2004 broke all records. |
The April showers came but stayed on through May. Somewhere in between, the weather office said there was a pre-monsoon spell. And when the rains didn't stop, it was declared that somewhere in between, the southwest monsoon had taken over. |
We sat out on the terrace of the hotel, killing time till my friend had to get up and catch the return flight to Delhi. The clouds had made the sun disappear a long time ago, the rain-soaked breeze was almost chilly and my friend groaned in acute pleasure: where will you get weather like this. I explained that it was due to the unending rains this year but wished it was the natural thing. |
Ulsoor lake had fill up completely, looking like a river brimming with monsoon rain, when even a few months ago many were darkly predicting that, thanks to its misguided renovation, it would never fill up again. It took a visit to Chennai to rediscover the sun that had virtually retreated from Bangalore on most days of the week. |
These days I have taken to wearing my light, sleeveless galabandh on my morning jaunt. It's not that I am scared of catching a cold in this weather after having easily weathered many Delhi winters. But the rain-induced temperature drop can be quite treacherous, warn local friends. |
And while walking, I recall my 40-year-old memories of Bangalore. It is again as cool in mid-year in the mornings as it was then. The mood it creates is that of a reunion when you share old jokes, remember old flames, recall old escapades "" relishing it all, knowing that you are fleetingly revisiting something that is gone for good. |
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