Flooded...

A pattern has developed over the last few days - I wake up to a nice enough morning - dew on the grass in the lawn opposite my building, the road vaguely wet, but mostly dry, a gentle breeze blowing my curtains aside to let the morning light filter into my room. It gets hot later in the day; infact it's quite unbearably hot. And then come the clouds blowing in from the North East and within an hour the sky has gone from azure to grey. Torrential rains follow, the strong winds blowing in from the East...an hour later everything is thoroughly drenched.

And so it was on Saturday evening that my mother and I got down on our way to run some errands. A neighbour warned us to venture out cautiously since many roads were getting flooded. Dismissing her statements as pure exaggeration we got into out car and asked the chauffeur to take us to the Supermarket - we did cross this patch of water around 2 ft deep, but that patch gets water-logged with the slightest of rains so didn't give it any thought. Little did we know, that half and hour later my brother would call asking us not to even try heading home, but to head over to my uncle's place instead. As he was approaching our society, he saw a huge mass of water gushing down the slope towards him and had the quickness of mind to turn quickly onto a slightly elevated ground and park the car there. Wise, for the cars behind him got stuck in 4 ft water in their attempt to beat the water. We finished our chores and headed to my uncle's place and my father also joined us there - and there we stayed till the 5 ft deep water receded. My brother waited outside for nearly 2 hours, then finally gave up and waded towards our building in waist-deep water....apparently Manjari Meadows which is higher up than Mundhwa got flooded and so the people broke down walls there to allow the accumulated water to get out - and it all came gushing down the village towards our residential society, only to get stalled by the walls. It took nearly 4 hours for the water-level to come down - after villagers whose houses had been completely ruined descended on our society and made holes in the compound wall that was holding the water back... (got me thinking about the Torrential Tuesday in Bombay and how awful it must have been for those people when they couldn't get home for over 24 hours. Just a few hours away from home and I was restless - even though it was my uncle's place and I've stayed over so many times before! Also got me thinking once more about the crazy 'development' that Pune is going through and what kind of a city/nation we are 'building' for ourselves...)

That was one flood - meanwhile I've spent the weekend rummaging through the carton of our old photographs and trying to put them in some kind of an order and put them in albums, so that they don't get ruined with each time someone goes thumbing through them...plus I love doing this kind of stuff, and I think it's so much nicer to flip through albums seeing the gradual progress/change/evolution in life. It's kinda crazy doing this, because albums have been made previously with other photos, so by the time I end we'll probably have a couple of albums with similar date-lines! Anyway all the rummaging has got me flooded with memories from the past - some rather vague pictures, some very clear pictures. Pictures of a certain time bring back memories of events in my life of which I may not have photographs, but the images flooding my mind are just as clear.