The Rain Smells Different Here"

The Rain Smells Different Here

By Maavia tahir

Letter One: First Storm

My sweet Lila,

It rained today.

Not the warm, thick rain of our mango season, but a hesitant drizzle—cold like the tiled floors back home at dawn. I stood at the kitchen window of this borrowed flat, and I tried to pretend it was the same. I even closed my eyes.

But the rain smells different here.

It doesn’t carry the scent of tamarind pulp and earth turned dark and greedy. No smoke from street vendors floats through it. No barefoot children splash in puddles under tin roofs, laughing like gods. Here, the water is clean. Sterile. As if it’s never known joy.

I wiped the glass. I whispered your name to the steam.

Lila.

Does it still rain the same there?

With love from a thousand clouds,

Mama

Letter Two: The Street Names

Dearest daughter,

Everything has a name here, but nothing means anything.

The streets are numbered: 5th Avenue, 32nd Street, Exit 14A. They twist and wind like they’re running from themselves. I take the bus to clean offices I’ll never sit in, passing houses with trimmed hedges and perfect mailboxes. I smile. I nod. I am invisible and visible at the same time.

Back home, the roads were made of memory. “Turn left where the red sari flaps in the banyan tree,” I used to tell your father. “Go past the goat with the crooked horn.” Everything we knew was alive.

Here, the signs are dead. But I carry your name in my mouth like a song. It keeps me whole.

Mama

Letter Three: The Smell of Bread

Lila,

I’ve started baking.

Yes, me—your rice-and-lentil mother! The women at the shelter taught me. It’s not like chapati. It’s soft, pillowy bread with names I cannot pronounce. The oven hums like an old lullaby, and for a moment, this room smells like home, even if it’s a different kind of home.

I burned the first loaf.

I cried—not because of the bread, but because your tiny hands used to help me knead dough while humming made-up songs. You had flour on your nose. You were four. Maybe five.

You are thirteen now. A teenager. Taller, I bet. Still humming?

I wish I could have sent you the bread. But I ate it instead. Every bite was burnt but warm, like memory itself.

Love,

Mama

Letter Four: The First Friend

My darling,

I met someone. Her name is Ines. She speaks three words in my language, and I speak four in hers. The rest is smiles and hands waving like leaves in wind.

We plant things in cracked ceramic pots. Basil, she says. “Tulsi,” I tell her. We laugh. It’s the same plant, just a different tongue.

She misses her mountains. I miss our river.

Sometimes we don’t speak at all. We sit on the apartment stairs, watching people come and go. It feels like prayer. Like waiting for rain in the dry season.

Friendship, I think, is a language of its own.

With care,

Mama

Letter Five: Almost Home

Lila,

I dreamt of you last night.

You stood at the edge of a giant field of wildflowers, the kind we never had back home. You wore a yellow scarf, and you waved at me. Behind you was our old house, except it was taller and brighter, like it had learned a new way to exist. You smiled, and I felt something inside me stretch—not pain, not joy. Something in between.

I woke up and realized I was still here. Still in a city where even the pigeons look confused. But for once, I didn’t cry.

I think I’m learning. Not just the language—but how to belong without forgetting. How to wear new skin over old bones. How to find the rhythm of this place and still hum our songs under my breath.

And this morning, it rained again.

But this time, I went outside. I stood beneath it. I closed my eyes, and for a single, trembling second, the rain almost smelled like home.

Almost.

Always,

Mama

Letter Six: One Day

My beautiful girl,

One day you will come here. I will meet you at the airport with too many bags and not enough arms to hold you. I will cry into your hair. You will laugh and say, “Mama, stop!” But I will not stop.

I will show you the basil plant, the bread I’ve learned to make, the alley where I first danced in the snow.

You’ll say the rain smells strange. I’ll say, “Give it time.”

You’ll say the sky looks too clean. I’ll say, “Look again.”

And maybe, just maybe, this place will bloom for you the way it has begun to bloom for me—slowly, painfully, beautifully.

Until then,

I write.

I wait.

I love.

Mama