She Smelled Like Rain and Regret

She Smelled Like Rain and Regret

By Hammad Khan

A story about the woman who raised me, the storms she carried, and the scent of a love that never left.

She always wore the same faded blue shawl.

It was soft at the edges, almost threadbare, with tiny holes that moths or memories had chewed through over time. Whenever she entered a room, she brought a scent with her—wet earth after a storm, roses left too long in a vase, and something else, something bitter and human. The scent clung to her like a secret. A scent I would one day call regret, though I didn’t know the word when I was ten.

I only knew she smelled like sadness.

Her name was Sameena. She wasn’t my mother, not really. Not by blood. But for three years, she raised me after my parents vanished in what everyone called “the accident,” as if tragedy was something to be politely referred to, like a dinner guest you wished hadn’t come.

Sameena arrived the same day the rains returned to our town—three years of drought broken by a storm that flooded every street and washed every sin down the gutters. She came barefoot, holding only a photograph of a young boy and a promise she had made to someone no one remembered anymore. That boy was me.

She told stories. Not the kind found in books, but living, breathing stories that hung in the room like incense—heavy and impossible to ignore. She said the trees whispered in the rain if you listened closely. That the wind carried the voices of those we’ve forgotten, trying to be remembered.

She said the shawl she wore was once her mother’s, soaked in monsoon tears and apologies never spoken.

I believed every word.

Sameena had rules. She never walked in sunlight, she never laughed after dusk, and she never—ever—looked in mirrors.

When I asked her why, she only said, “Mirrors show us more than we’re ready to see.”

I was a child then. I believed mystery was magic, and magic was safety. But even at that age, I knew her eyes carried storms. Sometimes, I would catch her standing silently at the window as rain streaked down the glass. She would touch her lips and whisper a name I never heard clearly. Maybe it was mine.

Or maybe it was someone who never came back.

One night, I found her on the porch, shawl wrapped tight around her like armor. She was crying, quietly, like a secret begging not to be noticed.

She said, “Do you know what the rain really is? It’s everything the sky couldn’t hold anymore.”

Years passed. The scent of rain became familiar. The scent of regret became home.

One day, I woke up and she was gone. No note. No explanation. Just the shawl folded neatly at the foot of my bed, still warm with her scent—earth and roses and grief.

I searched. For weeks, months. No one had seen her. It was as if the rain had come one last time, and she had melted into it.

Now, I’m older. A man. I live in a city where it hardly rains, and when it does, it’s too clean. Too forgetful. But every now and then, I catch a scent on the wind—soft, fleeting, and utterly hers.

And when I do, I stop.

Because I remember.

The way she touched the world gently, like it was already broken.

The way she told stories that felt more like memories than fiction.

And the way she made me feel, even as a broken boy, like maybe the rain didn’t mean endings.

Maybe it meant something could begin again.---