It was supposed to be a quick walk. I took the F to York Street to see a friend's photography thing in DUMBO, and the sky was doing that suspiciously perfect blue that New York uses to lull you into leaving your umbrella at home.
Reader, it betrayed me.
The September rain came down like it had a personal grievance. I ran under the Manhattan Bridge overpass on Washington Street, that famous spot everyone photographs, and found about a dozen other people already there, all of us caught by the same lie.
And for twenty minutes we just stood there together. Strangers.
A couple sharing one hood. A delivery guy checking his phone, resigned. Two tourists laughing so hard at their own bad luck it became contagious. Somebody's shopping bag slowly disintegrating.
There's a specific intimacy to getting caught in the rain in DUMBO. You can't do anything. You can't fix it or rush it. You just have to stand under a bridge with strangers and wait.
So we did. Someone offered me a corner of their umbrella when the wind tilted the rain sideways. I offered a tissue to a woman whose eyeliner was staging a dramatic escape.
The bridge rumbled overhead every time a train crossed. The cobblestones went slick and shiny. The whole scene looked like a film set, which, honestly, DUMBO usually does.
I thought about how in Ahmedabad the monsoon is an event, a whole mood, chai and pakoras and everyone watching the sky. New York rain is different. It's an interruption. An inconvenience it dresses up as romance.
But standing there, soaked ankles and all, I didn't mind the interruption. Sometimes the city stops you on purpose.
The rain thinned. We all scattered without goodbyes, back into our separate afternoons.
Carry an umbrella. Or don't, and let the city surprise you.
Love,