It rained hard on the Lower East Side on Thursday and I stood under a scaffold on Orchard Street and had a small breakdown that nobody noticed.
Because it smelled like home. That specific smell, wet dust rising off hot pavement, the one Hindi has a word for and English does not. Sondhi khushbu. The smell of the first rain hitting dry earth.
I am homesick for a monsoon I left behind, and I did not know that until Thursday.
In Ahmedabad, monsoon is not weather. It is an event. The whole city holds its breath through June, everyone irritable and sticky and praying, and then the sky finally cracks open and it is relief you can taste.
We would run to the terrace, my brother and I, and my mother would yell at us and then come up anyway with pakoras and adrak wali chai. The streets would flood, the traffic would stop, and somehow nobody minded. There is a togetherness to monsoon that I cannot explain to my American friends who see rain as an inconvenience.
Being homesick for a monsoon is strange because you cannot fix it. You cannot buy it or order it or take a train to it. It arrives uninvited, triggered by a smell on Orchard Street, and then it just lives in your chest for a while.
New York rain is a different animal. It is angry, sideways, ruins your shoes, floods the subway steps at Delancey into a small brown river. It does not feel like relief. It feels like an attack.
But Thursday, for a few minutes, the smell was identical, and I closed my eyes and I was fourteen again on a terrace with pakora grease on my fingers and my whole family loud around me.
Then a man ran past me under a garbage bag he was using as a poncho and I laughed, and the spell broke, and I was back on the LES, alone, wet, twenty-four.
I called my mother when I got home. It was the middle of the night in India. She answered anyway, sleepy, and I told her it rained and it smelled like home. She said it had rained there too that day.
Same rain, different continent. I held onto that.
Wherever you are from, I hope it rains there soon. I hope you smell home again.
Love,