It was 92 degrees in Williamsburg this week and my apartment does not have AC, only a fan that I have named and consider a coworker.
And out of nowhere, sweating on my floor at midnight, I got hit with the most specific homesickness I've felt in months. I missed the Ahmedabad monsoon so hard my chest hurt.
Not the rain, exactly. The smell of it. That first fat drop hitting dry summer dust and releasing something the whole subcontinent recognizes in its bones. Petrichor, they call it in English, which is a fine word but doesn't hold a candle to just knowing.
Back home, the monsoon is an event. The heat builds and builds and builds until the whole city is unbearable and irritable, and then the sky finally breaks and everyone exhales together. Kids in the street. Chai and pakoras. My mother watching from the balcony.
New York heat doesn't break like that. It just sits on you, humid and personal, until you resent it. A NYC heatwave is a slow argument. An Ahmedabad monsoon is forgiveness.
I walked to the deli on Bedford at midnight just to be somewhere air-conditioned, and bought a mango lassi I didn't need. The guy behind the counter is from Gujarat too. We didn't talk about it. We just nodded, two people far from the same rain.
Missing the Ahmedabad monsoon isn't really about weather. It's about belonging to a place so completely that even the sky is on your side. Here I love the city but the city doesn't know me. The heat here has no memory of me.
I FaceTimed my mom the next morning, her afternoon. It was pouring in Ahmedabad. She turned the phone to the window so I could hear it, and I sat on my sweaty Brooklyn floor and listened to rain twelve thousand kilometers away.
She said, "Come home when the monsoon is on, you always leave before it." She's right. I always do. I'm always here for the wrong season.
The heat finally broke last night. A cheap, thin rain, nothing like home. I stood by the window anyway and breathed in, hoping.
It didn't smell like Ahmedabad. But I closed my eyes and pretended.
Love,