The sky forgot how to rain, and September still feels like May

I keep checking the sky like an idiot. Not for a storm. Just for one honest grey patch that looks like it might actually mean something. Most days I get the same white-blue lid, the kind that doesn’t cool anything, just sits there and cooks the street. This is mid-September.

In my head, September in India still means wet walls, frogs, that smell of first mud, and the fan finally losing the fight. This year the fan is winning.

The evenings don’t drop the way they used to. You go to bed warm and you wake up already tired. August was the warmest India has recorded since 1901. That number sounds like a headline until you live inside it. It wasn’t only the afternoons. The nights stayed high. That’s the part people miss. Heat you can argue with during the day. Heat that doesn’t leave after sunset is different. The body never gets a reset. The monsoon arrived late, then behaved like a guest who shows up, sits in one room, and ignores the rest of the house.

June was brutally dry in large parts of the country. July tried to pretend things were normal. August heated up anyway. By early September the country was still running about 15% short for the season, and the first stretch of this month itself was worse.

Almost half the districts had already been marked deficient by the end of August. South and east took a harder hit. Andhra, parts of Karnataka, Telangana, Kerala, Tamil Nadu the map looks patchy and unfair, which is how Indian weather usually is, except this time the dry patches are too big and they have stayed too long.

El Niño is the official villain, and fine, give it the credit. Warm Pacific, weaker pull of moisture, monsoon that never quite settles into a rhythm. I don’t need the full lecture. I can see it in the fields that were sown late, in the borewells running longer, in the way people talk about “one more spell” like they’re bargaining with a landlord. There’s a last-burst forecast floating around, some rain between now and the 21st before withdrawal speeds up. Maybe it comes. Maybe a few places get lucky and the news calls it revival.

That doesn’t fix a season that arrived uneven and left the soil thirsty in the wrong weeks. Rice, soybean, maize, cotton these crops don’t care about national averages. They care about whether the rain showed up when the plant was asking. What gets to me is how quickly “unusual” became the background noise. A delayed onset. A heatwave in June while the calendar said monsoon. Bengaluru flirting with September records it hadn’t touched in decades. Reservoirs lower than last year in states that will need that water for rabi.

Then we all go back to work and pretend the season is just “a bit weak. I’m not saying the rains have vanished forever. India has had bad monsoons before. What feels new is the combination, hotter nights, longer dry gaps, rain that dumps in one district and skips the next, and a September that still hasn’t decided if it belongs to the monsoon or to summer. If you’re in a city with a tap that still works, this can look like a weather complaint. If you’re waiting on a tanker’s schedule, or watching a field that should have been dark green by now, it doesn’t feel like weather. It feels like the year slipped. I’ll still look up tomorrow. Old habit.

The monsoon taught a whole country to trust the sky on a schedule. This year the schedule is late, thin, and hot. That’s not poetry. That’s just what the ground is saying.

How is there in your part of the world where you live in?