All the Romance the Rain Holds
A meandering reminiscence on the rain and how Bengali that hold is.
Welcome to my Substack #21. Soundtrack for this post: Boygenius’ the record
1. Rain in Los Angeles this season appears like it has a Hollywood P.R. agency representing it – out from obscurity and then it is all anyone can discuss because it is everywhere and all the time. The coastal desert way it rains is different. It’s is never a light drizzle or a dramatic hail or a thunderous lightening storm. The rain here is a tension filled prelude with heavy gray clouds that collapses into torrential downpour leaving an aftermath of “What was that?” The clouds loom close to the ground ominously till it releases with a big splash. Rainy days are never casual in L.A. It’s not like in Maui or Miami where the daily rain evaporates as soon as it hits the ground and people go for galoshes walks without umbrellas in it. People here do not own raincoats, not because it never rains, but because when it rains the raincoat is a useless garment to how wet it gets.
2. Angelenos have almost bought into the narrative that our constant drought means it never rains in Los Angeles but a real Angelenos remember that it does. The first rain of the season makes freeways slick and reckless drivers into roadblocks. It’s not that we don’t know how to drive in the rain, it’s that other drivers won’t let a little rain inhibit their aggressive driving ways. Here, the firestorms mudslide million dollar homes into oceans like they were made of sticks. Cars, dogs, and people will get swept away in the concrete dry wash that was the Los Angeles river. Red flags on beaches remind everyone that the ocean is not safe to enter after the rain because of all the human toxicity that has drained into it. Intersections flood dramatically because city workers failed to clean drains because it’s so easy to forget in summer’s heat.
3. At my dad’s house, one of the most frequent question asked of Alexa is “What is the temperature outside,” and lately, “Is it raining?” Once, as the rain dumped, Alexa responded in a lie. So now, whenever it rains, we try to catch her in a lie, again. But the question Dad asks Alexa the most and daily is, “Alexa, do you love me?”
4. But after the Angeleno rain, the sky is washed of the yellow smog and you can read the Hollywood sign from all across the basin. You will finally see the mountain ridge to the north, white with snow cap. Clean air fills your lungs and the sunset that evening will be undoubtedly hot pink. Antelope Valley becomes covered in toxic orange Californian poppies and in the High Desert cactuses rimmed in hot pink blooms.
5. It-smells-like-rain should be bottled into a perfume. It’s distinct. It’s breathing in damp air weighted with suspense. It’s the scent of knowing something dramatic is on the way.
6. To be Bengali means waxing poetic about the rain is second nature. There are eight words for “rain” in Bangla according to the google translate app. Brishti, Jhara, Barsa, Bajrajhaṛa, Barṣaṇa. It should be no surprise, given there are six seasons in Bangladesh, one of them exclusively named after the rain (Barsa). During the rainy season, dry floodplains are turned into temporary lakes, and small boats are dusted off as the main means of transportation. I remember summering in Bangladesh during monsoon season as a child – I looked down over the railing of the stairs as the water creeped onto the terra cotta tiles on the first floor of my Nana’s house while we all huddled dry upstairs. After the rain, the adults would walk around outside looking at how many guavas and mangos had fallen from tree prematurely. Nani would take the fallen green mangoes to be dried on rooftops and turned into achar.
7. During the heaviest rains, you can hear the guavas falling from the trees in my Dad’s backyard in Southern California. They drop heavy, thudding against the wet mud. They will lay scattered on the grass, littered with leaves and debris. Within a couple days, the pungent stench of ripening fruits will go from sweet to putrid. Dad will try to pick them up quickly, putting them in plastic bags to distribute to friends as fast as he can. But if he’s not around, the fruits will just lay and rot.
8. Do you remember El Nino and how racist the news coverage of it was? All because of the name?
9. I was in Kathmandu during monsoon season – this time I was an adult and summoned to elderly-sit my dementia riddled Nana for two weeks. I lived in this three-floor mansion of the Bangladesh embassy house, with guards at the gate and servants at our beck and call. There, the monsoon felt like a trap, a means of imprisonment as I tried to keep my confused Nana with a thread of sanity in the three-rooms he walked about in. He kept confusing me for my mother, and I kept having to remind him she had just died. I wondered if he saw my Mom in me because he had dementia or because her ghost was present and he was seeing her spirit. Outside, the local Hindu temple played what sounded like the violent sections of the Ramayana television serial on loop over the insanely loud speakers from the crack of dawn through the night. It was a cacophony of horrendous electronic sound never allowing a moment of respite. I’d watch Nana walk 100 daily steps on the patio during breaks in the rain. It felt like Nana’s monsoon-ed dementia was rubbing off on me. The only entertainment was watching the security guards outside the barred windows trying to grab green mangoes off the tree, shaken free by the heavy rain. I never did get to see the Himalayan Mountains hidden by the clouds because of the monsoons.
10. I didn’t know Arizona had a monsoon season till my sisters and I went to Sedona last summer looking for vortexes and UFOs. A huge wart ridden toad greeted us on our AirBnB’s entryway, refusing to cross as the downpour made rivulets of red streams in our driveway. I couldn’t see the road as I drove through the storm and on our phones blew up dramatically with flash flood warnings. I guess, it made sense, given how we fought on that trip – it was our first trip together after our dramatic falling out the summer before. It was only fitting the weather would be just as dramatic. We never did see a UFO – it was cloudy every night.
11. It was the biggest ABCD mistake to walk into Deshi and ask for kichuri on a clear summer evening. It is the ultimate comfort food, and no one could make it like my mother could – she had the perfect ratio of daal and rice. Her kichuri was no fuss – no potatoes, no cauliflower, no mush and is perfectly accompanied by a little bit of gosht and a lot of mango achaar. I was missing her and thought I could find her through food. The Bangladeshi uncle behind the hot bar looked at me incredulously. “Nai.” But why not? “Brishthi hoi nai.” He looked at me like I was stupid. So you are telling me that you only make kichuri on rainy days? It turned into a game to go into Deshi anytime the clouds were dark and to order kichuri before they ran out. Last year I caught him – I had to turn on my windshield wipers on my drive to Little Bangladesh and I berated him in simple Bangla when he told me they didn’t have any. He retorted that the brishthi hadn’t fully arrived in complicated Bangla far beyond my capacity so I just smiled vindictively and said nothing.
12. The summer I turned thirteen, we went to my dad’s village of Jangal, back when it was junglee with bamboo bridges and interconnected ponds and tinned roofed bungalows. It was in a rainy period, and the roads were impassable – so the autobus dropped us off in the middle of nowhere, and we continued by bicycle rickshaws, then boat, then bamboo bridge. It was so wet, we had to leave the village by nokah – a narrow shallow boat with an arched thatched roof. It started raining on us, so we huddled under the jute roof, trying to stay dry, but knowing how futile that was in a place like this. This was how rain was supposed to be experienced, I thought to myself, primal and home.
13. I can’t count how many American television shows and movies that I don’t know the ending of because my parents would change the channel as soon as there was kissing on the screen. But Bollywood movies never had kissing scenes – just suggestive dancing under the rain in wet saris. My parents never changed the channel on those, and it took me a while to realize how gyrating in a wet white sari in the rain was possibly worse than watching White people kiss on American television. In a classic Bollywood film, the dancing rain sequence was soon after the protagonist sees their love interest, and implies the building of up lustful tension. The woman is in a barely there wet white sari that clings to her choli while the guy with dripping wet hair leans in for an almost kiss before she, of course, playfully turns away. Being rained on is sexy, gyrating in wet clothes is lustful, spitting water on each other’s face is hot.
14. I don’t have any Bollywood rain scenes with lovers in my memory palace. No gyrating in torrential storms or clingy wet clothes while almost kissing in the Alps. Kissing in the rain is highly overrated, especially if the person you are kissing is taller than you. Rain gets in your eyes, tears mixing with the rain.
15. In my early 20s, I went to Bonaroo to register voters with a guy I was dating. It was supposed to be adventurous, but it started to rain on us that night as we slept in a hole-ridden tent. He was insistent that it wouldn’t be that bad, but we woke up to an inch of water in our tent in the morning. In my early 30s, I went on a hike in Kauai with another guy I was dating – we were hiking to the Jurassic park sign when it started raining. He was miserable the whole hike, disappointed that the path was just a muddy road in the jungle. It was when I knew it was our end.
16. Not all the rain romance was bad – there is something pretty racey about making out parked in the rain, foggy the windows all up. But maybe that’s just because in Los Angeles, all your most significant memories revolve around cars.
17. Going door to door canvassing in Central Florida telling citizens to vote for anyone but Bush was an intimately atrocious experience. There were the neighborhoods with trees where you could catch a quick break in shade and there were the McMansions on treeless roads that provided harsh sun only. We hated the neighborhoods with no trees -they were so inhospitable, that they took down shelter from the sun. People would spew anti-Muslim hate without realizing I was Muslim and unleashed dogs would chase us down the street. I had never sweated like that in my life, rivulets down every crevice. When it finally rained, humid and sticky, it was a wash of relief cooling our burnt skin. The water would evaporate as soon as it hit the ground – making every nook of your body sweaty and your lungs choked. I hated the job but I felt like the state of the world rested on if I could turn Margaret out to vote not-Bush. All that remains in that memory bank of those canvassing days are how I physically felt – the humidity on my skin, the heat, the rain, sticky smell of sweaty sunblock. I don’t remember anymore how that election broke me, though I know it did.
18. After the rains in Chattanooga, the child versions of my sisters and I would run around in our yard and catch the tree frogs with our bare hands. It always thunderstormed big when we lived in that house, the creek in our backyard often overflowing. Once, we heard a crack of lightening and the house shook. My mother screamed from the kitchen – something had tingled her hand. When we open the front door, we saw that a wing of the eagle crest over the front had fallen, having been zapped by the lightening that struck our house.
19. After the rains in Champaign, the neighbor kids and I would collect the worms and snails that would crawl out of the mudbanks and blanket the sidewalks. My mom, ever precious of her garden, would throw the snails into the road.
20. After the rains in the Adirondacks, the mushrooms would flourish in the damp rotting trees and leafy underbrush. I was no longer a kid, but still, I ran around identifying Puffballs, Earthstars, Chicken-Of-The-Woods, Golden Chanterelle, Acarics, Agrocyb, collecting them all in a wicker basket to share with the residency’s cook. We’d look at gills, scales, stems and roots, and do scratch tests to see if they’d bruise blue. We’d have to time it right – not too soon after the rains and not too late or they’d be gone. I spent much of that residency when I should have been writing, wandering around the forest foraging and accessing a nature I never knew.
21. The rain here, now, at a residency outside of Chicago, falls from the sky in light sweeps that quickly turn to chunky snow. It’s a slurry, that melts as soon as it hits the ground. It’s not umbrella weather, but the prairie land on the nature preserve turns into bogs and walking on it after the rain squishes like a sponge underfoot. During a break in the rain, the fire fighters come and scorch the prairie. I am surprised at how it burns, and how the ashes tumble through the air, and how the birds eat worms in the scorched mud after. Today’s hail stormed down, littering the sidewalks with centimeter wide ice. It poured so heavy the sky outside was white. A few days ago I saw lightning hit the parking lot asphalt, green light bouncing off the ground, just a couple hundred feet from me. All the poetic symbolisms overwhelming.
22. When it doesn’t rain, you forget the all the romances the rain holds. And then it rains, and the romance in life is torrential.
23. It is now Ramadan, and from sun up to sun down Muslims fast from water and food. There’s something about all this rain during Ramadan. That we can’t drink water, yet the sky drenches the earth to drink, reminding us the importance of thirst and how Allah provides in the end. Allah’s Ramadan reminders everywhere.
Thank you for these beautiful rain reminiscences.