ML Freshwater Reserve – Tank 7 (12°54'29.72"N, 77°37'1.24"E)

They say the one thing that has never changed about the ML Freshwater Reserve, or as the area’s inhabitants call it, just ‘Tank 7’, is the birds. Plenty of egrets and cormorants fly around the treatment plant that sits right in the middle of the always-moving water every morning and evening, soon after sunrise and just before sunset. This might be the evolutionary quirk of old habits dying hard, as the facility used to be a protected island and green reserve many decades prior. One could take a boat around it back then. As I walked on the unpaved walking path that surrounds its western edge, it was relatively silent and tranquil for a late 21st-cetnury urban area. There are no walkers around at this time of day and besides the quiet hum of the couple hundred windmills floating on the lake surface to power the area’s streetlights and air purifiers, not much can be heard from where I stand. Actually, I meant ‘sit’; I’m on the ground right by the water as I write this sentence. In a few minutes, a few dogs join me. Strays, but respectful as ever; maybe the water calms them down as it does me. Dogs were probably the happiest Bengaluru residents when ‘The Great Emptying’ started taking place.

I should have brought some food.

Just as I got up to leave, a large, foreboding cloud passed over, stopped right above me and dropped about half an hour of pounding rain. It turned the entire world slate grey for a while; the pockmarked water, exposed concrete buildings, dust-covered planters lining the walking path, that large, bulbous mass of machinery and pipes at lake-centre. A grey painting, sketched hastily, of a aging city with grey hair. I waited at a bandstand for a while longer.

As I walk out onto the road, the storm drains have just started to overflow. It has been an hour or two, but the traffic has just started to move. It’s eerily quiet as cars and pods creep along, slower than I am walking.

Even though Bengaluru is now famously the only super-city on Earth without a skyscraper and there is a wealth of airspace, private flying vehicles are a rare sight. Getting a license is a financial impossibility.