It always starts with this distinct smell.
Not rain exactly. Not yet. But the smell of about-to-rain. Of something old in the air. Dust rising. Memory too.
Growing up, the first sign of monsoon was always the same: someone rushing to the terrace, pulling the clothesline indoors. Not a word said. Just the movement. And somehow, we all followed. The fan would be off. The plastic buckets lined up under the leak. It was like a play we’d rehearsed every year.
Now, years later, when I visit homes, cramped rooms, care homes, shared flats, fading verandas. I see that same movement. The choreography of people who know what rain does, and what it demands.
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You don’t need a weather app.
If you’re someone who plays the role of a caregiver, the body tells you first. You wake up with a heaviness in your knees, or they wake up with a dull ache in their back. You know it’s coming.
Meena, who looks after her two sons, her diabetic husband, and her father-in-law, just smiled when I asked her if the monsoon changes her routine. She laughed.
“What routine? In the rain, we make a new one every day.”
She was folding old newspapers to line the shelves.
“If the medicines get damp, I’ll have to go all the way to Dharavi to replace them. I’d rather be careful.”
It wasn’t self-pity. Just maths. Effort saved later by effort now.
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The rain, in many ways, makes everything slower. But care moves faster. It has to.
You learn to spot the leak before it drips. You carry spare cloths in your bag, not for yourself, but in case a child slips, or someone needs a seat on the bus.
You learn which neighbour has a dry matchbox, which aunty stores turmeric like gold dust, which child cries quietly when the thunder starts.
In the lanes of Mysore, I met Rosie, a retired nurse. She lives alone now, but still keeps a first-aid box by the window. “Someone always comes,” she said. “Last week it was a boy who’d slipped on a wet stair. The rain doesn’t care who it takes.”
She didn’t say it with anger. Just experience.
People who’ve spent years caring for others, as nurses, mothers, househelps, older sisters, they speak in that tone. Not dramatic. Just tuned.
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One afternoon, in a home for elderly women outside Jammu, it began to pour heavily while I was mid-interview. Lights out. Room darker than it should be. For a few minutes, nobody spoke.
Then one of the grandmothers started humming. A tune with no words. The kind sung to babies or to vegetables simmering slowly.
Another woman, half-blind and mostly silent all morning, suddenly stood up and placed a towel under the door crack. No one had asked her. But she had noticed the water creeping in.
That’s what care in the rains looks like. It’s not declarations. It’s not campaigns.
It’s just… noticing. And doing the thing before someone says it.
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I think about that a lot.
How, in most places, when the weather turns, we talk about what’s been cancelled. But caregivers? They keep going. They don’t get to cancel.
“My son has autism,” a mother in Coimbatore told me.
“His whole world is routine. If the power goes out, it throws him completely. So during the rains, I start prepping in June. Extra batteries, a flashlight he likes, one song I keep on loop.”
She didn’t say it to impress. She said it because it was survival.
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The thing is, rain doesn’t romanticise anything.
It makes care more work.
Waterlogged roads mean missed school. So children stay home. Which means someone stays back from work to watch them. Which means less money. Which means tension. Which means silence during dinner, or sharpness where there was none before.
Care stretches thin. But it doesn’t break.
Even when the roof leaks, someone still boils water for tea. Even when the cough won’t stop, someone massages Vicks into a back while telling a story. Even when the room smells like damp socks, someone lights a diya, not because they believe in ritual, but because light feels better than dark.
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One grandmother once shared,
“We all become a little more watchful. Not worried. Just alert. Like birds before a storm.”
She was sitting on a plastic chair, gently rocking her granddaughter to sleep, one eye on the window. It had just begun to drizzle again. And I saw it, how she shifted her body, just slightly, so that the baby’s legs wouldn’t get wet from the wind.
She didn’t draw attention to it. She just did it.
That’s what care is, isn’t it? Not performance. Not perfection. Just presence. Even in the soggiest, most difficult moments.
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And so the rain continues.
Dripping. Delaying. Disturbing.
But alongside it, always, someone adjusting the curtain, someone checking the ceiling, someone bringing you a dry shirt before you ask.
That’s the real weather system we live in.
Not just the monsoon outside. But the one inside homes. Inside hearts.
Carried, year after year, by people who know how to rearrange the world, so the rest of us don’t have to feel it flooding all at once.
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