End of June

June is not expected to be a great month. Unlike popular perception, it isn’t wet and gloomy usually; among wet months, it ranks below May. It’s windy as the Monsoons sweep through. This brings in a lot of dust and garbage from all over. I like the winds, coming as they usually are after a hot summer, and sometimes a rainy and stormy May. I like the weather in general. It is usually sunny with puffy clouds and lots of winds. Later in the day, you get windswept clouds. Early on in the month, it gets cloudy, and rains to show that the Monsoons are here.

This year has been crazy. You wake up to cloudy weather. Some days even drizzly weather. You watch those clouds hanging by all day. And then in the evening, they let go and it’s the usual chaos. You wake up again the next morning, hoping that all those rains would’ve cleaned things up, but no, it’s the same charade all over again. It feels like October. You’d think it’s nice to have these bountiful rains, except that KRS and other important dams have barely registered anything. Pretty much, all these rains fall on concrete and roads, and not adding up to any value. And you have flooded roads and a potential water shortage. Maybe I should put in a rainwater harvesting thing. But the area we have is pretty small, not sure how useful it will be.

The part that gets me is how things are turning out for me this month. All cycling has been advanced to the morning, when am also needed at home. This means waking up crazy early, and pedalling out, hoping to return as early as possible and then deal with things.

By evening, the mood is generally off. Not too many people like a house that is dark at 4 PM. And then it starts drizzling and raining. An entire evening’s worth of cheer is gone. I like rains, mind you, except that I like them when they should be raining. Supposed to be dry and windy, and it’s raining means that when it should be raining heavier, it probably might not.

Oh well, sometimes I wonder if this is just a phase for me, and the weather is something I am railing against for not helping. A bit of sunny love would be nice though, but what does one do?

June is pretty much over. It’ll be July now. Supposed to be wetter than June, but not as much as August. I only hope for a break, something that I can catch my breath in, before I have to run again, cos God knows when I’ll get to stop again. But I feel hopeful at times when I realise I’ve been through all this with Amma’s health in 2012, then again in 2013, hitting a nadir in 2014 and getting back to some semblance of something in 2015. 2016, I feel hope with, but it might just turn out to be worse than 2014. The signs are all there.

But there isn’t much to do but fight. And fight we will. What else is there to do?

Update:

So it isn’t just perception. Bangalore has received more than 170mm of rainfall so far in June, while the average is around 89mm. Source: The Hindu.

June begins…

June 1st, a Monday. Couldn’t be worse. The second half of May is generally grey with pre-Monsoon clouds gathering, announcing the end of the summer vacations as we went about making sure we had the uniforms stitched up, the books bought and bound in brown paper. New bags usually as I was generally bad with bags. New shoes to accommodate the extra inches the legs/feet would have grown over the 3 months. Everything was new, but the clouds formed a veil around the mind as we went about worrying about another summer gone. Another year beginning. New things to learn, new teachers to deal with.

Somehow the school used to sense what we were going through and the first day would be a half day. Yay, we would go, running back home. And from the 2nd, it would be back to business as usual. Teachers, some known from previous years, some new, coming in with reputations of skill with the cane or a good sense of humor, and sometimes both. A legacy of a brother and a cousin to live up to all the time. The same friends moving up, some lost to exams, some new having not managed to advance to the next one. But life went on.

Evenings came with the monsoons in full fury. The footpaths of Chamarajpet turning into a major slush. Raincoats in different colors and sizes, some fitting, some not. Which worked best – wearing the bag outside or inside the raincoat? Outside meant you were more comfortable, while the bag and books got drenched. Inside meant the opposite. Socks and shoes getting drenched and having to leave them overnight under the fans hoping they dry up, or to face the fury of the PT master. Wet shoes were taboo, and the legs were supposed to turn into wood if we wore them. Somehow we never thought of spare shoes!

Somehow through all this, June passed and it was like there was no summer before. Like the rains had always been there and would continue to be there. Like there was no summer and there would be no summer.

I sit here welcoming another June, but with no Monsoons, no rains, while I wistfully check the weather forecast to see when it’ll rain next. June 1st sadly holds nothing anymore. No heavy hearts at a summer gone, no meeting up friends again, simply put, nothing new to look forward to that day. That’s the way life is…