What is your favorite type of weather?
“Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness, has never danced in the rain.”
Author Unknown
I’ve spent my growing up years in a hill station in India. And unlike the rest of the world that goes through four seasons, we seem to have three main seasons, with an almost, ‘blink-and-you-miss-it’ autumn. Needless to say, the climate was pleasant throughout the year. Summer was hot, but it rained in the evening, winter was cold in the evening, but moderately bearable in the day and the monsoons were wet. There was no negotiating that. But it was always enjoyable.
Growing up in a hill station, summer started in April and always marked the beginning of school vacations. Pavements were covered with a fine layer of grass, and weeds and perennials fought for space. If you were on the streets, plucking flowers from a neighbour’s garden, you were bound to be followed by a few bees, and if you stood still for sufficient time – butterflies landed on you, and the drains always homed a couple of grasshoppers of various sizes. I learned a lot of my biology lessons from these close encounters. Dad always carried around visiting cards and used to have those tiny boxes that held his cards in place. I used to ransack his bag to find those boxes and if he had none, then I went to the kitchen to see if mum had discarded or washed and kept aside any plastic bottles or boxes that I could carry around and she would not miss too much. Using safety pins to poke holes in these boxes, I used to put a few strands of grass in them and used to catch grasshoppers or butterflies. I know! So traumatic right? But those days, I did not know better, I used to keep them in for a couple of hours and then let them go. If I found a really pretty one, I used to keep it until mum or dad returned, show it to them, and then release them.
I was always very curious, and most of the day, while the parents were at work, we were left to our own devices. We did not have a working TV, there used to be a box that always had some problem, and even when it did work, the network only scheduled shows for late evenings. The Sibling and I usually spent time together not because we loved hanging out, but because none of the other kids got permission to come out to play during the day. So we were the default play buddies for each other. Summer vacations also had a timetable that Mum would set for us. It would start with one round of times tables from 1 to 20, followed by handwriting in all three languages, followed by one lesson from General Science and one lesson from Social Studies to be completed every day. She insisted that we had to have finished 60 days of tables, 60 pages of handwriting in each language, and the chapters from 1-10 at least three times by the time the vacations were done. And only after the day’s work was completed, were we allowed to play. Our house had a small overhang space/ledge between the ground-floor house and the first-floor house. One side of the house was enclosed in a mesh structure and was used as a garage of sorts, and while it did not have a roof, a metal door was provided. This door was roughly an inch wide, and we used to use the door as a support to climb into the ledge. Sibling was smaller, so I used to ensure she went through first, then I would pass her our bag with the notes and pencils and sharpeners and erasers and then I would follow. We used to sit there, in the shade, and complete our holiday ‘home-work’. Mum never negotiated, she wanted to see the homework completed. So we used to take our notebooks, and date it, right through the vacations till the end, and work on it. The first two days, that’s all we did, finish all the tables for all the days of the vacations and then the handwriting, and then the studies. Once these were completed, we were free. Summers were also the time mum used to let us rent bicycles and ride around. The only condition here was that the bicycles could only be rented provided even the sibling found one of an acceptable size.
Schools reopened during the monsoons, and while it rained morning and evening, the days were cool and pleasant. Occasionally it would rain for longer durations forcing schools to declare holidays. Unlike today when we get inclement weather notifications on our devices, in those days, we would wake up, and then our parents would decide if we would go to school or not. A 100% attendance was a rarity and leave notes included messages like, the house was flooded so we could not attend, or we had a fever/viral infection. Uniforms would invariably get wet, so we were often in alternate uniforms. Wet squelching shoes, and wet socks were a norm. Dripping umbrellas, and wet floors indoors, because we tracked the rain indoors were acceptable during the monsoons. Getting splashed by vehicles driving over puddles was expected and white uniforms usually had brown splotches of puddle stains on them. These were our winter rites of passage and we loved them because it meant that we would spend a 10-minute session making excuses in the class which took away from our regular class timings. We often spent time waiting to see if any stragglers would traipse into class a little late because of the rain. Monsoons were always the best season to waste time waiting. It was also the time that our games /PE periods got canceled and all classes were indoors. If a teacher thought it was merely cloudy and let us step out and if it started to rain, then there was a good chance that most of us would return soaking wet- because everyone dances in the rain. This was the only season when all visiting carnivals, circuses, and mobile exhibitions got canceled.
Winter saw us bring out the woolens. Uniform-prescribed woolens always got wet or stayed damp for more days during winter, forcing us to wear non-conforming jackets to school. Jackets, shawls, scarves, thick socks, and ear muffs were all the rage those days. We used to be packed off to school looking like we were dressed for a blizzard, except that this was just a typical tropical winter in a hill station. It was chill but not freezing. Winter also got us a 15-day break for Christmas. This was the season we spent practicing for the play we would perform during the Christmas party. Then there were the crib competitions. And if we were lucky there would be carnivals organised as fundraisers from the school. We spent most of our time in school practicing or preparing for Christmas so this was a lot of fun and something we always looked forward to.
Come to think of it, growing up in a hill station was an annual picnic.
“Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.”
John Ruskin
Every day was glorious and every season pleasant – all par for the course. So, if you ask me to choose a particular kind of weather I prefer, I would still select the weather at a hill station from at least two decades in the past. Today, thanks to ‘development and advancement’ all you find is lots of traffic and the resulting pollution and smog. Monsoons are always flooded, because all waterways have been reclaimed and there is no place for the rainwater to drain out. Summers are hot and muggy thanks to the depleting tree cover that has been removed to accommodate more housing or office spaces and winters are unpredictable.
Just a little more 