The year was 2000 when I landed in Coimbatore for an interview. I landed in Coimbatore and told uncle who had come to pick me up, it is cold. I still remember that they had placed the chair right in the path of the door at the interview. Me, coming from warm to very warm Trichy in the month of June, with no Google those days to check weather before travel, took the interview clad in a pure cotton saree my teeth chattering and my brains turning numb. I just wanted to get the interview over with for fear of peeing of cold. It was that cold in Coimbatore in June, 2000. So, when I joined the college and moved to Coimbatore for work, I brought with me, sweater, multiple blankets, shawls and socks. Tanuja, a colleague who joined at the same time as me and I used to walk around wrapped in sweater and shawls endlessly complaining of cold much to the amusement of students and colleagues. Coimbatore'ans laughed at us. Into December, both of us had taken out our entire winter paraphernalia. Walking down the corridors was like a 'cold obstacle course' which we endured or maneuvered to avoid at all costs. This was the time I picked my mom's printed silk sarees to wear, as I found that they did their bit to prevent the cold getting to you.
Marriage in 2002 brought it's own share of Coimbatore'an pride in the form of my husband. Coimbatore people were very proud of two things - Siruvani water and the weather. They felt they lived in seventh heaven proclaiming to the world their unique qualities. I always said 'nothing like Cauvery water' being a child whose blood drew strength and subsistence from her waters. Still, even I realized that Siruvani's water was sweeter. My husband, the eternal fan of Coimbatore used to declare at every instance, 'we Coimbatore are as big as Bangalore, with an equitable climate, a self-made city, people with an industrial mindset, water the sweetest to taste to the extent the British called Coimbatore "poor man's Ooty"'. He used to run the fan in speed 5 in peak winter and when I complained and grudged he used to say, 'Oh this is not cold, you should have seen how cold it was in the sixties and seventies'. His favourite line to rile me up was. 'Trichy people have come and settled in Coimbatore and brought their weather here, turning Coimbatore hot'. All this till 2006 when I moved from the city to Coimbatore. And know that I did use blankets extensively, because Cbe had only two months of summer those days and the rest was rainy/cold.
Sometime in 2009 was when I touched the city again. As we drove down from the airport on Avinashi Road, I asked Arun, 'Where are all the trees ? What happened here ?' He said that they had been felled for road widening work during the Tamil Conference. My straight retort was, 'And what were you Coimbatoreans doing ? How did you allow this ? ' The pain was because many of the trees I knew. In the first two years, I had walked down the roads in the shade of the trees down Avinashi road on the few Saturday/Sunday or weekday holidays I didn't go home to Trichy. The trees formed a canopy, like arms wide open, providing shade and cover. For someone from Trichy who grew up with trees, especially down the Karur road on weekends, trees touching each other and forming a canopy is a memory even today. Parking the car and having breakfast/lunch/tea or just relaxing is a memory from childhood. I have berated my husband for letting Coimbatore go upto date.
So, when I returned after my PhD in 2010, the city was not cold and I didn't need blankets. Just a sheet to cover would do. Staying in a flat at that time, we found so many neighbouring flats having an air conditioner which was pretty rare in Coimbatore. We found it sad but at the same time we said no to having an air conditioner and living the few months of summer out and not contributing to the carbon footprint we homo sapiens are leaving on earth. This continued every year and we did not fix an air conditioner when we built our own home planting trees and tall shrubs and living summers in the ground floor, sleeping on a mat, hanging a wet sheet and managing the few months of summer. However, 2023 was a turning point. It felt like ten months of summer.
