Wednesday, May 21

A day of rain, wind and power cuts. It started at about 5 am when Shanti and I both woke up to a huge and very sudden storm. Rain lashed down for about twenty minutes and then suddenly stopped. Complete and eerie silence followed it, until a very loud chorus of frogs began.

No sleep could follow that so we got up early to get downstairs to a power cut, the first of four today. This one lasted half an hour, the second and third took about ten minutes each, and the final one left us without power for just over two hours in the afternoon when the sky darkened and the rain poured down.

We spent the morning at Petcity. Shanti has got much better but not completely, and she needs another two weeks of antibiotics. She now weighs 28.6 kilos.

Somewhere in all of this I went for a walk for get some samosas for dinner. Mani had closed the café so I walked back just as the rain started again. I photographed part of the tiled path the snakes round the pond. Some of the tiles have got broken or gone missing and today the gaps have filled to the brim with water.

When I get home I will read that the monsoon has now begun; the earliest start to a monsoon in Kerala since 2009.