Rain, Rain... Be My Sane!

A few nights ago, after what had been less of a long day and more of a long week, I stepped out around midnight for what has become one of campus life’s smallest but most sacred rituals, a Nescafé cold coffee. The campus-special kind. The kind that somehow tastes better at midnight than it ever could at noon. I took the first sip, and almost theatrically, the sky opened. Rain. Sudden, unannounced, as if it had been waiting for that exact moment. And just like that, the mind shut off. For a brief while, every thought took a break. Every deadline, every unfinished sentence in my head dissolved into the rhythm of raindrops. But this rain, perhaps one of my last on campus, did not arrive alone. It came carrying nostalgia.

Only a few months ago, that same patch of campus would have held the trio. My friends and I, stepping out every night no matter the hour or the weather, for coffee-fuelled refreshers before returning to work. 1 or 2 AM were not odd hours… they were routine. We laughed there, complained there, solved life there, delayed work there, and occasionally remembered why we had stepped out in the first place. This time, though, it was just me and the rain. The strange ache of standing in a place that still looked the same but no longer felt quite the same. There is something about rain that memory seems to trust more than anything else. Perhaps that is why the smell of wet earth can undo a person in seconds. They now have a polished word for it, petrichor, but honestly, the poetry of ‘baarish mein mitti ki saundhi khushboo’ is unmatchable. Some things are too rooted in feeling to survive translation.

They say hair holds memories, I wonder if smells do too. Because one random shower and suddenly you are no longer in the present. You are everywhere at once. Back to that one unforgettable cup of tea shared with someone while rain tapped gently against the windows. Back to wet school corridors overflowing with umbrellas in every direction during monsoon season. Back to a turbulent flight descending through dark clouds and heavy rain, your hands gripping the armrest while secretly loving the drama of it all. Back to jumping in puddles without concern for ruined shoes. Back to a plate of Maggi shared between laughter and thunder. Back to dancing like a peacock because the sky finally broke after days of heat. Back to running for shelter in an unexpected downpour while pretending not to enjoy the chaos. Back, somehow, to every Bollywood rain song ever made.

Rain has always done this to me, it collapses time. And perhaps that is why I have started believing, half-jokingly but not entirely, that there is some peculiar relationship between rain and me. I have observed this for years now that whenever I travel, no matter where I go, it rains. Be it a dramatic, headline-worthy arrival or merely a blink-and-miss cameo.

Ever since I moved to Hyderabad for my PhD, every single trip back to Delhi, whether for a few hours or a month, has brought rain with it. Every. Single. Time. When I spent a short while in Mumbai during peak monsoon season, I used to shuttle between Mumbai and Hyderabad every other weekend. And the coincidence became almost comical. Mumbai would be flooding under relentless monsoon downpours all week, but the moment I flew out to Hyderabad, the skies there would clear, and Hyderabad would receive the rain instead. Once, I took off from Hyderabad in the middle of a downpour and landed in Bangalore under bright, sharp sunshine. I thought perhaps my strange weather streak had finally broken. But no. The minute I sat in the cab, it started raining, after days of scorching heat. Out of nowhere. As if the rain had simply travelled with me. No, no, I am not claiming divine meteorological powers. I am merely saying the coincidences have become too sweet to ignore. Just as Shiva tells Isha in Brahmāstra, “Kuch toh rishta hai mera baarish ke saath.”

Over just the past year, I have travelled to a lot of places, Vizag, Ujjain, Shimla, Pondi, Udaipur, to name a few and yes, every single place greeted me with rain at least once. At this point, my travel feels incomplete without a hello from the gods of rain. A signature familiar knock saying, I came too. And perhaps because I am a hopeless Bollywood fanatic, I had romanticised one rain in particular for years, the Mumbai monsoon. The Wake Up Sid kind. “Aiesh, Mumbai monsoons are to die for.” And having now stood in the first rain of Mumbai’s monsoon, having watched the skies burst open over Marine Drive and the sea rise in applause, I can confirm… Sid was right.

But no matter where the rain finds me, on campus roads, airport runways, mountain towns, city promenades, temple steps, or unfamiliar hotel balconies, rain has never felt like weather to me. It has always felt like company. Like an old friend with terrible timing and impeccable emotional intelligence. Because life, in the last few years, happened in all the ways it could. Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. And then life got creative and introduced problems I had not even known were possible. There were seasons of loss, confusion, exhaustion, grief, disappointment, reinvention. Seasons where I barely recognised the person moving through them. Seasons where survival itself felt like full-time work. And yet, through all of it, one small ritual remained unchanged. 

Moving the umbrella aside, and just for a few seconds, letting the rain touch me. Not cautiously. Not partially. Fully. Feeling those cold, mischievous droplets land not just on skin, but somewhere far deeper. Somewhere harder to name. Somewhere soul-like. Because perhaps that is what rain has always been for me, not just weather, not just monsoon nostalgia. Perhaps it is proof. Proof that no matter how unbearable the heat gets, relief can still arrive unannounced. And maybe that is why I keep stepping into it. Sometimes under an umbrella. Sometimes without one. Often followed by being under the weather then. But always, always feeling more alive than before.