when did you last stand in rain

Not run through it, holding a bag over your head, apologizing to it. Stand in it.

As children, the monsoon's first proper day had a legal status of its own. Paper boats in the colony's best gutter. The one aunty who shouted about catching cold, overruled by everyone. Coming home wrinkled and triumphant.

Adulthood is, among other things, a long project of staying dry. There are good reasons — the office, the phone in the pocket, the general dignity of the enterprise. But somewhere in the project, rain stopped being weather that happens to you and became weather you manage.

No one here is asking anyone to fall ill. But there is a balcony or a window in your house where the spray reaches and the smell of wet earth arrives — the books call it petrichor; your childhood called it the smell of the first rain, which is the more accurate name. Stand there tonight for two minutes, without the phone, and let the monsoon do to you what it is currently doing to every child in the building.

The child who happens to see you at that window learns the house's actual policy on wonder. Policies are set by what adults do at windows, not by what they say at tables.

Then towel, tea, enough.