a race against rain.

I knew it the moment I caught a glimpse of the colour of the sky, that day. It had begun. Months of torturous commute were in store for me. The rains were here, and I had to run.

I snatched my things and flew to the lift lobby.

The rains had come to Bangalore. It was exactly what the crackling city heat needed. But I was in two minds, and I begrudgingly accepted my fate for the next few weeks. I knew what was coming. The initial euphoria of monsoons arriving is usually always followed by bitter complaints of rain-soaked soggy socks, constant dampness, and ridiculous snarls of traffic — the magnitude of which only a person, using the Marathalli-Sarjapur Outer Ring Road for his daily commute, would wholly understand.

Last month was a disastrous start to the summer, with soaring temperatures never heard of in 85 years of the city history, a scorching reminder that climate change was real. And still, I preferred it to what lay ahead.

When hundreds and thousands of (mostly) middle-class, office-going family-men or women take a break from their monitors and look up at the ominously grey sky, sometime around 4 or 4.30 pm, an inauspicious burst of panic sends shivers down their spines. For some ironic reason, nature always picks this exact slot of the day to initiate its gruelling downpours.

You may also notice, only when you need to leave in a hurry, will various elements of your surroundings conspire against you — for example, the lifts take ages to arrive at your floor, and usually stops at every other level to take in more people, before you reach the ground. In the distance, I could hear the low growl of the sinister Nimbus clouds. They had waited long enough, and they needed a grand opening.

I was still safe when I left the parking lot on my bike. The air was crisp and cool, with occasional teasing gusts of moisture-laden winds. The faster I tried to go, the more obstacles befell my path. Nature was toying with me. Thousands of panic-induced commuters had taken to the streets to vehemently try and reach the comfort of their homes before the cloudburst began, and I didn’t want to get caught in that gridlock.

I had decided to take my usual shortcut that day, and as I embarked upon the gravelled road, my eyes fell upon a long, winding, bright red trail of luminous tail-lights. Apparently everyone had decided to take my shortcut that day. Sighing relief that I owned a lean slippery two-wheeler, I snaked in and out of the knotty traffic and sped past multitudes of cars, whose drivers glanced at me before sinking slowly into despair.

Further down the road, I realised someone had lined up boulders to block the oncoming traffic on my shortcut. Luckily there was a little bit of space near the sidewalk to slide through. But alas, I miscalculated, and the side of trusty vehicle banged against a boulder. Shaking my head, and wondering why bad things happen when you really need to go home, I backed up and proceeded to manoeuvre past the obstacle to freedom.

But the worst was yet to come. Now, I was to join the main road. Outer Ring Road. Anybody who has lived in Bangalore will know the dread that accompanies those three words. On any normal weekday, the sheer volume of traffic moving at a snail’s pace, will be unbearable, and will make you want to hurl yourself and your vehicle over the side of a flyover. When it rains, you won’t even have the space to do that much. Every inch of the tarmac will be shadowed by metal, gas, smoke and dust. Dust, which when mixed with the rain water, forms slush — slush that makes your tires skid, slows you down, and latches onto the ends of your newly washed pants. Water accumulates in sunken stretches between the flyovers — dirty muddy water which splashes onto you when some rude imbecile decides to speed past you.

Thankfully, it hadn’t rained yet. As I joined the Ring Road, I decided to try another hack. I slipped into the service road. It was a smooth ride for the next kilometer, and I zoomed past the congestion on the main road right next to me. But alas, I finally had to join them, when I could avoid it no further.

There were tiny foreboding droplets on the visor of my helmet now, and the grey parched road welcomed it, eagerly waiting to don it’s glistening black monsoon cloak. Fervently praying for a few more minutes of delay, I zig-zagged along the inching traffic. I had one last flyover to cross before I was free.

The sky rumbled and grumbled as I neared my destination. I smiled.

The rain would have to wait another day for it’s victory over me. As I escaped the vehicular prison and flew my way to safety, I knew I had won this day’s battle. But the war was far from over.