This is a bad time of year to be leaving Bangalore, yet every time I leave it is these same few months. The weather is what makes it particularly hard. It is the kind of weather relatives from Overseas and friends from muggy cities sigh over: “Such Bangalore weather”. Every day, overcast skies, steady rains and then the sun, gently emerging at tea time. Not the mad fury of a Bombay monsoon washing away a city's sorrows in a grand deluge, but a gentle unassuming rain.
It used to rain like this everyday, years ago, my mother reminds me. “See what global warming has done?” In the 70s when she went to college, there would be tea time rains every single evening, regardless of the time of year. The shawls were never packed amidst mothballs as we did in Delhi, the light sweaters never retrieved in December as we did in Bombay; instead here the woolens lay undiscriminated amongst our other clothes. Bangalore was the city with giant tree-lined avenues and a darkness at 4:30 when a chill would nip the air and stay on, settling into the night.
In the 80s when I was in school, the rain would begin mid way through the one hour journey back into the city. Near Rose Gardens the skies would cloud over and the Seniors so boisterously occupying the last row of the bus would groan loudly while the juniors, piled pell-mell into the crowded front would look outside, unsurprised.
At my bus stop, in the old part of town, where my family has lived four generations now (“there were no flats here before,” grand aunts will say, with expansive hand gestures, “it was all atte paati's large compound...”) my mother would wait under a large black umbrella, furrowed brow, searching me out from a crowd of children tumbling off the last large bus step. And in her arms, such embarrassment, a large yellow pancho with Mickey Mouse on the back, for me. Thrust over my head till I was shining out from the crowd of bedraggled other Regular children whose mothers didn't wait for them, whose raincoats weren't bright yellow, weren't imprinted with Mickey Mice and weren't shapeless.
It's that time of year again. Summers have been getting hotter but the heat obediently dissipates by July, and every evening, just as it has for years the skies will cloud over, the dogs will whimper their way to a shelter and the rain will swish down the streets briefly, lowering the temperature before the sun shines again.
Delhi, on the other hand, is either very hot or very cold. I love it tremendously, but I will miss the tea time showers and these gentle nuances of the weather.
