very year, the first proper monsoon rain arrives with all the ingredients of a Lahore love story... The cool air, the smell of wet soil cutting through weeks of dust and heat. Social media fills with steaming cups of chai, pakoras, old Noor Jehan songs and reels of rain falling over our rooftops. For a few hours, the city remembers the monsoon it inherited through poetry, cinema and childhood. Then the roads disappear under water, traffic grinds to a halt, electricity trips, schools announce closure and another season of emergency begins.

So let’s be candid, monsoon stops feeling like romance and starts sounding like a government advisory.

Our relationship with rain has changed because our relationship with the city has changed. The Punjab didn’t suddenly become vulnerable because the clouds became more unforgiving. We have spent decades building cities that seem almost offended by the idea that water needs somewhere to go.

So it’s a deceptively simple, almost rhetorical question: where exactly is all this rain supposed to end up?

Every year we ask why Lahore floods. We rarely ask where the ponds went, where the wetlands disappeared to, why agricultural land gave way to endless housing societies or what happened to the floodplains that once absorbed excess water. We have paved over soil with concrete, replaced open spaces with parking lots and covered every patch of earth that could have soaked up rainfall. Water still behaves as it always has. It flows downhill, gathers where it can and follows the path of least resistance. We are the ones who changed the map.

Climate change has made rainfall more intense and pretending otherwise would be dishonest (perhaps illiterate). But climate change has also become a convenient place to end the conversation. It is easier to blame the skies than to ask uncomfortable questions about unchecked construction, weak enforcement, shrinking green spaces and the kind of urban planning that treats every empty piece of earth as real estate waiting to happen. So the rain simply reveals the problems we have decided to ignore.

What makes this even more striking is how differently the same rain is experienced across the city. For some Lahoris, monsoon means merely cancelled dinner plans, occasional soaked sneakers and an hour longer in traffic. For others, it means losing a day’s wages because customers never showed up. It means riding a motorcycle through water, water deep up till the knees with the scare of crawlies biting you, without knowing if an open manhole lies beneath. It means wondering whether the roof patched together last summer will survive another night. Or worse, if sewage enters homes where there is nowhere else to go. So, that seemingly equal rainfall has quite unequal consequences.

That inequality becomes visible because water is remarkably democratic in what it exposes. It doesn’t care about political slogans or glossy development brochures. It finds weak drainage, illegal construction and forgotten infrastructure with ruthless efficiency. One heavy downpour can reveal more about a city’s priorities than a hundred official presentations.

There is another irony in this. We continue to treat every major spell of rain as though it were an extraordinary event. Emergency meetings are called, departments swing into action, pumps are deployed, statements are issued and officials promise that the situation is under control. Then the clouds clear, the water recedes and everyone moves on until next year, when the same script is performed again. The seasonal monsoon draws out a seasonal surprise out of us.

Perhaps the saddest part is that we have slowly surrendered one of South Asia’s most beautiful seasons to anxiety. Monsoon once arrived carrying memories of paper boats, school holidays, mangoes, verandas and stories told while rain drummed against tin roofs. For centuries, the rains of barkha rut, the season of Saawan and Bhaadon, held a special place in Punjabi imagination, woven into folk songs, poetry and the rhythms of rural life. The rains inspired poetry because they represented relief and abundance. But today’s children are just as likely to associate heavy rain with flooded classrooms, power outages, traffic jams and parents anxiously checking whether they’ve made it home safely. Their monsoon memories are being shaped by warnings and alerts.

The tragedy is that none of this was inevitable. Cities around the world receive heavy seasonal rainfall without descending into annual chaos. Good drainage is not glamorous, but let’s be honest, wetland conservation rarely wins elections. Protecting floodplains is less exciting than launching another housing project. Yet these are the decisions that determine whether rain becomes a blessing or a crisis.

Maybe that’s why the first rainfall still feels so bittersweet. For a brief moment, Lahore remembers the city it once imagined itself to be. Then the water begins to collect in all the places it never should, reminding us that nature has a longer memory than urban planners, politicians or property developers. The monsoon never forgot where it belonged. We did.

Kiva Malick is an academician and a writer who focuses on education, philosophy, music and culture