A version of this story appeared on Granta, on the 30th of May, 2013.

The wetness is really a celebration, when it hadn’t rained in so long a time, and the dust outside his house had stopped breathing, stopped moving, with nothing to move against, nothing to stir it into swirls. And the smell, as the water comes hurtling through the sky, he sees it almost in slow-motion, speeding, in a hurry to meet the ground that has been dry for too long. The smell of it has always been homely to him, because he remembers a friend, a girl from his teen years, who always used to ask him, ‘Do you like the smell of the rain, Wijey? Do you like the smell of it on the dust?’ and he used to say ‘Yes,’ every time, wondering if there was a reason for it. It must have been the change. The instant change in the air you have been breathing ­– its new freshness. It was a funny way to find hope, a really baseless, groundless way to suddenly feel better. But that’s how it always was.

Wijey remembers being sixteen, and how difficult it was. He is now at the very edge of his sixties, sitting on a sloping armchair with armrests that could swivel around to become footrests. And now, so many years after being sixteen, he thinks, insensibly, that the smell had also a note of innocence to it. Not in any way of a symbol, but in way of a memory. And this makes sense, actually. Because it’s his own innocence as a boy who found hope in the smell of rain-on-dust that he remembers, that he associates with the smell of rain-on-dust now.

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I acknowledge the reference to a phrase from a song written by Samuel Beam, titled Passing Afternoons: “There are things that drift away, like our endless, numbered days.”