The first sign that the monsoon has arrived is never the rain. It is the silence, three or four nights running, after the cicadas stop — and then a wind comes up the valley smelling of something older than the property. The rain follows a day or two later, and once it starts it rarely bothers to stop properly again until September.
We stay open through June, July, and August, though we won't pretend it's the season most people picture when they book a hill-station holiday. The cottages fill more slowly. The family settles into a quieter rhythm — fewer guests to seat at the long table, more time to stand at the kitchen door and watch the rain come sideways across the terraces. The generator gets tested more often than it needs to be. Umbrellas live by every door, used more as a formality than a real defense against water that seems to arrive from four directions at once.
What the monsoon does to the land, it does generously. Mushrooms appear overnight in places that were bare grass a week before. The frogs get louder and, we swear, larger. Waterfalls that don't exist in January show up on the drive in, briefly, gone again by November. This is the season we recommend to almost no one — the roads are slower, the views come and go with the mist — and it is also the one that the handful of guests who ask for it specifically never seem to forget.