The sky turned the color of an old bruise around 5PM and I didn't take it seriously, which is how a June thunderstorm caught me completely in Tompkins Square Park.
I'd gone to the East Village to sit and sketch, which I do when my brain is too loud. There's a bench near the dog run I like. The dogs don't care about deadlines or rent. They are pure, uncomplicated joy, and I needed to be near that this week.
The rain came fast, the way it only does in summer. One minute the air was thick and still, the next it was a wall of water. People scattered. I ran with my sketchbook tucked under my shirt like a small wounded animal.
I ended up under the awning of a bodega on Avenue A with three strangers. A guy holding a skateboard. An older woman with two bags of groceries. A teenager filming the storm on his phone, of course.
Nobody spoke at first. We just watched the June thunderstorm flood the gutters of the East Village, the way New Yorkers do — quietly, together, separately.
Then the older woman offered me a paper towel from her bag for my soaked hair. The skateboard guy said this reminded him of monsoon season and I asked where he was from and he said Mumbai and I nearly hugged him in the rain.
We stood there, two desis and two strangers, watching the city get washed.
Monsoon in Ahmedabad was a whole event. The smell of the first rain on hot earth — petrichor, but we never called it that, we just called it the smell of home. The street boys playing cricket in the downpour. My Ba making bhajiya while the windows fogged up.
For one second, under a bodega awning in the East Village, I had all of it back.
The storm passed in twenty minutes, the way June thunderstorms do. The sun came back like it had never left, embarrassed almost. The four of us nodded at each other and went our separate ways into the steam.
My sketchbook survived. My shoes did not.
Get caught in the rain sometimes. It's where the strangers are.
Love,