Hunt for a flat as if it is already monsoon

Almost all flat-hunting happens in the dry, forgiving months, when every road is passable, every basement is empty and every building is on its best behaviour. Then July arrives and quietly tells you what you actually signed for. The whole trick to not being caught out is to walk a place in February as though the rain were already falling, and to read it accordingly.

Bangalore floods for reasons that are entirely predictable once you know to look. The city grew up around lakes and the low ground that drains into them, many of those drains are now choked or built over, and a serious cloudburst has nowhere to go but along the roads and into whatever sits at the bottom of them. Flooding here is rarely random. It follows the contours, and the contours do not change between the viewing and the monsoon.

Reading the signs the rain leaves behind

You cannot summon a cloudburst to order, but water is a tidy record-keeper, and it leaves the same marks every year for anyone who bothers to look for them.

• Walk the approach lane and find its low point. Water pools there first, and if that low point sits between the building and the main road, then that puddle is your commute for three months of the year.
• Find the storm drain. Is there one at all, is it choked with silt and plastic, and does the road tilt to carry water toward it or straight down toward your gate.
• Go down to the basement or stilt parking and look for a tide line on the walls, fresh silt in the corners, or a sump pump that has very obviously earned its keep. A building that pumps itself out every monsoon will admit it in those details.
• On a ground floor, scan the lower half-metre of the walls for the faint horizontal stain, and behind the furniture for the darker one, that says water has stood in this room before and will again.

Then ask the people who saw last July

The signs tell you where water has been. People tell you how bad it got. Neighbours and the watchman remember the last monsoon in vivid detail, because they lived it, and they will point without hesitation at the exact junction that goes under, the week the lift stopped, the year the parking filled. Two minutes of that is worth more than an afternoon of the polite tour, and it costs nothing but the willingness to ask a slightly awkward question.

This is exactly the reading our reports are built to hold onto, so a decision you make in a dry February is not quietly betting against a wet July you never saw. We carry a flood-safety figure for the area precisely because it is the thing a single viewing is least able to reveal and most likely to punish. Look at that first, then go and do your own contour-reading on the ground. The building may look identical in February. The road does not.

The building looks the same in February. The road does not.