The Rain Remembers What We Forget

It started around four in the afternoon, the way it always does here, without warning and without apology. One minute the light was that flat white it gets before a Bangalore storm, and the next the whole street had gone silver.

I was standing at the window with a cup of tea that had already gone cold, watching the rain turn the road into something older than the road.

There is a particular sound that rain makes on this city. Not the drumming you hear in the plains, not the roar of the coast. It is softer, broken up by all the trees we still somehow have left. The rain hits a rain tree first, then a gulmohar, then finally the ground, and by the time it reaches you it has been filtered through three different kinds of leaf. It arrives sounding almost polite.

Below my window, the usual choreography began. The tender coconut vendor pulled a blue tarpaulin over his cart in one practiced motion, a move he must have made ten thousand times. A woman coming back from the market lifted her bag of methi over her head, not to protect it but to protect herself, which struck me as a very reasonable negotiation. Two schoolboys made no effort at all to stay dry. They stood at the edge of the newly formed stream at the kerb and raced twigs down it, and neither of them looked up once.

An auto went past with its side curtains down, water sheeting off the roof, the driver squinting ahead as though the rain were a personal opponent he had beaten before and would beat again.

I have lived in this city long enough to have stopped counting monsoons, and I still cannot decide whether I love the rain or merely recognise it. Recognition might be the deeper thing. Love can be given to anything. Recognition has to be earned over years.

What the rain does, more than anything, is slow everything down. Our whole day is built on the assumption that we will keep moving. Then the sky opens and the assumption fails. Traffic on the main road becomes a single red rope of tail lights. Meetings quietly dissolve. Someone messages to say they will be late and nobody minds, because everyone is late, because the rain has made lateness into a shared condition rather than a personal failing.

This is the gift, though we do not usually call it that. For an hour or two the city gives us permission to stop.

And in that stopping, things surface.

I thought about the first year I spent in this city, in a room with a window that did not close properly, learning that a Bangalore shower will find every weakness in a building the way a good cross examination finds every weakness in a story.

I thought about people I have not spoken to in a decade, for no good reason at all, which is the only reason that ever really applies.

The rain does this. It does not bring anything new. It simply lowers the noise enough that the old things become audible again. We spend our days at such a volume that the quieter parts of us cannot get a word in. Then the traffic stalls and the power flickers and the phone has nothing urgent to say, and suddenly there they are, patient as ever, having waited without complaint.

By six it had thinned to a drizzle. The street came back slowly. The tarpaulin came off the cart. Somewhere a generator coughed and caught. The smell arrived, that first wet earth smell that we have a word for in every Indian language because we could not possibly have done without one.

I went down and stood outside for a while. The gutters were still running. A crow shook itself out on a wire with enormous dignity. The boys had gone home, and their twigs had gone wherever twigs go, down the drain and out towards a lake that may or may not still exist.

I thought about how little of today I would have noticed if the sky had stayed clear. I would have got through the work I planned to get through. I would have answered what needed answering. The day would have closed neatly and left nothing behind.

Instead the rain came, and rearranged the furniture of an ordinary afternoon, and I ended up standing on a wet street at dusk thinking about my mother in a doorway forty odd years ago.

We talk about rain as an interruption. Mostly it is a correction.

There will be more this week. There always is, once it starts. The roads will flood in the places they always flood, and we will complain about it in the way we complain about an old relative, with more affection than we admit. Somebody will forward a video of a car half submerged near a junction we all know. Somebody else will post the same photograph of the same tree against the same grey sky that they post every year, and we will all like it again.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, the rain will catch you at the window with a cup of tea gone cold, and hand you something back that you did not know you had put down.

That is worth getting wet for.