Rain (F)

The rain like a gray veil unfolded across the bay and worked itself toward the city, and Dalaja wrapped the pillau of her saree a little tighter about her shoulders in anticipation of the cool air that would follow the rain in from the sea. Standing in the doorway of her father’s tea shop, she breathed in the air rich with the mud exposed by the low tide. Still, after seven years, the smell was not the smell of home, not the smell of her childhood by the ocean. Her English, still cadenced by the rhythm of her home, would be enough to remind everyone who lived in the city that she was hardly a local girl. 

Even the tourists who somehow managed to find the shop several streets over from the central market area thought her pronunciations more delightful than the Southern voices they thought they yearned to hear when they came from the towns and cities of the North. Of course this observation only bolstered Dalaja’s father when he explained to his wife and children what a brilliant stroke his decision was to upend his family’s tranquility and bring them to this foreign port. In Mumbai we were one of many he would exclaim, but in America we are exotics.

True enough, but for Dalaja her otherness oppressed her. Without an adult escort, she endured the first moment of entering a foreign classroom filled by other 12-year-olds, carrying her admission pass like a butterfly about to suddenly flutter away at her slightest misstep. As she walked the length of the classroom to the teacher’s desk at the front of the room, the other students were silent, but she could feel them studying her like some kind of fruit in the market that they had never seen before. While the teacher sounded out her name for the class, Dalaja glanced at the map above the chalkboard—the United States, with a large blue star located over the city that would be her new home. Now she would wear her otherness as another skin, on the playground, in ballet class, at the shore. 

The family would drive out to the beach where the lighthouse stood, and when Dalaja braced herself and faced the sea, she would be most grateful for those days when a southern wind brought warm and humid air. Deeply she would breathe in and let the heavy air fill up her lungs. Of course she soon was more than old enough to go out to the beach without her family—and there were friends, true friends, that would often go with her or invite her to go along with them—but, she most treasured those outings when she would walk the sand alone, sometimes drifting down to the edge of the water to let the last thin push of water sweep against her toes.

Dalaja leaned against the door frame and wrapped her arms around herself.  A fine, wet air, carried in ahead of the main sheets of rain falling, touched her arms and forehead. Even though the calendar marked the end of May, she shivered in the damp air. A day of rain was forecast, to be followed by another the weatherman had said. Like the rainy season of her youth. And now, so far from her home and after so much of her life spent in what would always be a land of strangers in her heart, she blinked several times to clear her eyes.

“Excuse me, Miss.  Are y’all open?”

“Yes, sir. Yes, we are open, sir.”

The stranger smiled. “You really are from India?”

“Yes, sir. I am from India.” Dalaja turned around and stepped away from the rain.  Ladson 2014