It rained sideways on Tuesday. The kind of rain that makes your umbrella feel like a personal insult.
I was coming up the stairs at 28th Street off the 6 train, already late, already damp, and the wind just took my umbrella and bent it backwards like a flower giving up. I stood there laughing because what else do you do.
A woman next to me, maybe fifty, maybe sixty, in a yellow raincoat, just tilted her umbrella over both of us without saying a word. We walked half a block that way, strangers, shoulders touching, until she turned toward Lexington and I turned toward Park.
"Beta, buy a better one," she said, and she wasn't even Indian but she called me beta anyway, and I almost cried right there on the corner.
The 6 train at rush hour is its own kind of theater. Everyone pretending not to be pressed against everyone. A man eating a bacon egg and cheese with surgical focus. Two teenagers arguing about whether a song was mid. The 6 train doesn't care about your meeting, your mood, your wet socks.
But sometimes it hands you a yellow raincoat lady.
In Ahmedabad the rain was an event. We'd stand on the terrace. Mummy made bhajiya. The whole city smelled like wet earth and frying besan. Here the rain is just an obstacle, a thing to survive between subway and office.
Except on Tuesday it wasn't. Tuesday the 6 train and the rain conspired to be gentle with me.
I got to work with one ruined shoe and a soaked tote and I felt, weirdly, held. Like the city had checked in on me.
That's the thing nobody tells you about New York. The 6 train will crush your spirit at 8:40am and then a stranger in a yellow raincoat will save your whole week.
Buy a better umbrella. Take the kindness anyway.
Love,