It rained in Brooklyn last night like the sky had something to prove.
I was walking home from the G train in Fort Greene, no umbrella, obviously, because I am a fashion person who owns forty scarves and zero practical items.
The thunder rolled and something in my chest went sideways. Because for one second, standing under a bodega awning on Fulton, I was seven years old in Ahmedabad, and it was the first monsoon of the season.
Homesick for a monsoon. That's a sentence I didn't know I'd write.
Back home the first rain was an event. The whole building came alive. My mother made bhajiya, the smell of hot oil and besan filling every corner, and we'd eat them on the balcony watching the streets flood into rivers.
The rain here sounds the same. But it doesn't smell right. No wet earth, no petrichor rising off the ground the way it did off our terrace. Just asphalt and hot dog water and that metallic city thing.
Homesick for a monsoon is really being homesick for who I was before I knew what I'd have to leave.
I stood there getting soaked. A guy sharing my awning offered me half his umbrella and I said no thank you, because I think I wanted to feel it.
When I finally got to my apartment I did the thing. I texted my mom, 3:30am her time, just: it's raining and I miss you. She was awake. She's always somehow awake.
She sent back a voice note of the fan whirring and my dad snoring and said, next monsoon you come home, beta.
I played it four times.
The storm passed the way NYC storms do — violent, then suddenly over, the streets steaming. I made besan bhajiya at midnight in my tiny kitchen. They weren't as good as hers. They never are.
But the smell of hot oil in my apartment, that part traveled.
Some homesickness you don't cure. You just cook through it.
Love,