Guwahati: Where the Sun Burns and the Rain Drowns

In Guwahati, we don’t check the weather forecast. We carry both sunglasses and umbrellas, because we know better. Here, summer doesn’t arrive—it invades.

By 10 AM, the roads simmer like frying pans. You step out, and the heat clings to you like an old grudge. The sun glares, not shines. Even the Brahmaputra shimmers with exhaustion. The trees droop. The air turns into soup. You could fry an egg on the hood of a Maruti 800—if the egg didn’t melt first.

People talk in heat-shortened sentences. Shopkeepers fan themselves with receipt books. Uber prices surge like the temperature. Somewhere near Beltola, a man faints at a bus stop. Somewhere in Panbazar, a child asks why the air feels angry.

And then, just when the city begins to resign itself to fire—the sky snaps.

No drizzle, no prelude. Just a sudden, thundering, chaotic downpour. The kind that doesn't fall—it attacks.

Within minutes, footpaths vanish. Drains erupt like volcanoes. What was a road becomes a river, and what was a home becomes a story for the next family WhatsApp group. You watch an abandoned slipper float by, like a lost soldier of a war no one remembers starting.

Rukminigaon floods. Anil Nagar becomes Venice, minus the romance. Paltan Bazar stalls shut down. Mornings smell like petrichor; evenings reek of sewage. The frogs return. So do the excuses.

We hear the same phrases every year—“unprecedented rainfall,” “urban expansion,” “climate change.” But we know what it is.

It’s a city bursting at the seams, patched with promises that never hold. It’s drains choked with plastic, hills shaved into profit, wetlands turned into parking lots. It’s the silence of those who could fix it, and the resilience of those who can’t afford to wait.

But we carry on. Because we’re Guwahatians. We tie our gamusas tighter and push the water aside. We joke about needing boats more than bikes. We lift children over floodwater and curse the system under our breath.

Still, late at night, when the rain falls like a warning and the power cuts out, we wonder—how did a city once so green, so gentle, become this fragile?

And then morning comes. The sun rises again. And the cycle begins—heat that breaks your back, rain that breaks your home.

But we endure.

Because Guwahati isn’t just where we live.

It’s who we are.

And one day, maybe, it’ll love us back as fiercely as we’ve loved it through the fire and the flood.

ALSO READ: Dear Guwahati, Google Maps Didn’t Warn Me About the River on My Route