Bangalore — April 20, 2024
I had been at an ultimate frisbee tournament with my partner Nikki and our 12 teammates all day (welcome to the blog, I am an extremely cool person), at a big patch of lumpy, crisped grass the color of hay. It had taken us some 40 minutes to get there even though we'd left before five in the morning, when hardly anyone was on the road. There was not a square foot of shade on any of the three fields that the teams were playing on, and so we'd spent the day sloughing sweat off our foreheads, tugging uniforms away from our chests only for them to suction right back to our bodies, guzzling water that quickly heated to shower temperature on the sidelines. It had not looked like rain, and yet come evening, a huge, nearly black cloud rolled across the landscape. It was odd, being able to see such an enormous cloud in its entirety. Bangalore is not a tall city, but its buildings are still big and blocky enough to disrupt the full picture of the sky, and so for a few minutes I was mesmerized by just how vast that sky can be, delighted to be able to take in so much of it at once, to watch the enormity of a storm churn and froth and shadow the day.
Nikki and I were tossing a disc back and forth on the mostly-dirt practice field before our last match. We felt the first droplets and held our palms up to the clouds, unable to believe. No one had been expecting rain today or for weeks, really. It had not rained in months and months, and suddenly it was pouring.
The teams playing on the other fields kept going for five minutes or so, but quickly the rain was washing across us in waves, making it hard even to see. Nikki and I kept tossing our disc back and forth, happy to be soaked in something that wasn't our own sweat, even if the disc got grimier and more clay-colored with every missed catch. The dirt underneath our cleats thickened. Dust turned into a paste that smeared across our shoes and ankles. The teams that had been trying to play ran off to wait it out under the nearest tarp, except for some of them who stayed and hollered joyously at the sky. Even Nikki and I eventually joined the rest of our team under a thatch of trees, huddling against what was suddenly hail. White marbles sprinkled across the ground, slipped through our canopy and onto our shoulders, slid through our hair and vanished. Slowly, the rain settled, dried up, roared to life once more, then disappeared again. It had lasted maybe half an hour.
Nikki’s called her dad and told him, and it was hard to say whether he believed her. One of our teammates said the same thing of her friends. It seemed to not have rained anywhere else in Bangalore. Just one cloud – big but not so big in the scheme of things.
A couple weeks later, The Deccan Herald would write that Bangalore had just broken its record for number of days in a row without rain. It was as if Nikki’s dad and our teammate's friends had been right – the storm had never happened. And in a way, it hadn't. What had this one cloud done, really, to break the drought? Even that day, the sun was out again before it was time to set. The next day, back at the same patch of dried-up grass, it was even hotter. There were no clouds, not even as the evening set in.
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Bangalore — May 2, 2024
It was about 6:30 pm when I looked out the balcony door of my apartment and thought I recognized the melting butter tint of the light. The white walls of the building across the courtyard were bathed in a lavish yellow that only comes around when rays of the setting sun refract through a sheet of low, charcoal clouds. It was a familiar color, but as I stepped outside I questioned my memory of it. Maybe evening light just looked this way sometimes. But then I glanced up through the tree branches and saw that the sky was matted in thick, billowing gray. I sucked air through my nostrils, deep as I could, and the smell was unmistakably herbal, the smell of rain. I thought I heard thunder somewhere distant. My brain told me I was mistaken, that the sound was only someone wheeling in their trash bins across the street – rusted wheels rumbling against concrete – but the next second I remembered that I was not home in Virginia, where such a sound is common. Garbage collection at the apartment happened in the morning.
I power-walked inside and texted Nikki.
"Thunder??"
"And it smells like rain."
"This has been your update."
I was standing in front of my computer, putting my phone down, when I heard the static patter of a million little droplets scattering over leaves and grass. My eyebrows shot up. I walked back outside and dark splotches had begun to speckle the courtyard walkway. Thunder, unmistakable now, growled overhead. From somewhere nearby, dogs began to bark like they'd forgotten what to do when water fell from the sky. Two teenagers and an older man I see walking around the complex most mornings -- a little hunched, thin white hair rimming his head, just then wearing black slacks and a striped blue and white button-down -- stood in the center of the grass looking up at the clouds, all three of them grinning so wide I could nearly see their tongues. One of the boys whooped. The man shouted and raised his fists as high as he could above his head. He was laughing. I chuckled watching him, forgot to close my mouth. The man turned and looked up at someone on one of the upper floors of the block across from me. He unclenched his fists and shook his open palms at them, like, can you believe it? Kids cycled around the road that rings the apartment buildings, their chatter suddenly three octaves giddier. A security guard ran by for reasons I do not know and do not care about. It was all happening. Someone hollered from somewhere out of sight. The older man, his shoulders now drenched, scrubbed the top of his head like he'd just lathered it with shampoo. Water splashed off my balcony rail and onto my arm hair like dew. My cat, sitting on the railing, looked at me with an expression I can only describe as confusion. The patter rose until it sounded like the rain gods were shushing us. A few minutes later the older man decided he had gotten wet enough and began walking toward the elevators, his arms swinging from side to side in a little dance.
I walked back inside and texted Nikki, "Rain!!!!!!"