Homes with character in Bengaluru, Karnataka

Two Bengalurus are stacked on top of each other and both left houses behind. The older one is the pete, the market town laid out in the sixteenth century, where Chickpete and Balepet still hold rows of narrow shophouses with a courtyard in the middle, monolithic stone columns carrying the first floor and a strip of sky over the well. The second is the Cantonment and the planned extensions that followed it, and that is where the bungalow arrived: a deep verandah on all four sides, red oxide floors, Mangalore tiles from the 1860s onward, and the monkey top, a slatted wooden hood over the window that keeps the low sun out and the rain off the sill. Basavanagudi, Malleswaram, Richards Town and Langford Town still have them, usually with a garden that has outlived several owners.

The city is at nine hundred metres on the Mysore plateau, which is the whole explanation for the climate. It catches two monsoons, the southwest one from June and the retreating northeast one through October, and the evenings stay cool in a way nothing else at this latitude manages. There is no season to avoid. April is warm and the tabebuia goes pink and yellow, and the rain trees the old avenues and Lalbagh were planted with keep those streets several degrees kinder than the arterials.