My first Indian rainfall

I find the smell of rain to be really invigorating.  Tonight, it rained, and while that might not be anything special to anyone else here, I adored it.  I was sitting on the terrace reading through my India guidebook (I should have been unspooling a knitted sweater, but I was in hiding instead) ...and I could see the clouds coming in, and the skies getting grey, and I sat there for as long as I could get away with without being noticed, and watched the rains come.  As it turned out, the clouds lingered, and it didn’t rain until several hours later, but that’s not the point. 

The point is, several hours later, the front door is still open, and the sitting area (and coincidentally, my sleeping area) is overflowing with the permeating scent of a fresh rainfall. 

As soon as Surrinder mentioned to me that it was raining, I stopped doing what I was doing – which was essentially nothing – and I ran out into the courtyard and let myself get rained on.  Both her and her servant were giving me strange looks; one does not go out and jump around the courtyard in the dark and laugh and shake their head like a wet dog in the rain, it seems.  I didn’t care.  I jumped around, and opened my mouth to let the rains in, like you do with the first snowfall (and every subsequent snowfall thereafter), and twirled in circles, and let the rain fall on my upturned palms.  I stayed out until I was soaked, whispering ‘thank you, thank you, thank you’ to the open skies, and then I came back in and made a point of shaking all the rain from me. 

It was just so beautiful.  And for this reason, I belong in a temperate rainforest.  I miss my eight months of rain a year.