The morning the rain took the corner table

It rained hard that morning, the sudden kind that arrives like a decision already made, and by half past seven the kopitiam on the corner had run out of dry tables. Everyone who had been caught out was in there, steaming gently, watching the water come off the awning in a single sheet.

I had my kopi o and two slices of kaya toast, and nowhere to sit. An old man at the corner table, the good one by the window, moved his newspaper six inches and tipped his chin at the empty stool across from him. That was the whole invitation. I took it.

We did not talk at first. He had half a soft boiled egg going and a coffee the colour of the road outside. The uncle who runs the place shouted an order to the back the way he always does, as if the kitchen were much further away than it is. Rain on a zinc awning is a particular sound. It flattens everything else. You can sit under it with a stranger and not feel you owe him a word.

Then he said, without looking up, that the rain this year was coming later than it used to. I said I thought so too. He said his father could read the year by when the first real rain arrived, and that he himself had never learned the trick, and now there was no one left to ask. He said it lightly, the way people say the heaviest things when they are talking to someone they will not see again.

I asked what his father had done. Fixed bicycles, he said, forty years, two streets down, gone now, a phone shop there instead. He dipped the last of his toast, ate it, folded his newspaper into a neat square. The rain was easing. Outside, the five foot way was beginning to empty, people testing the sky with a hand held out past the shelter.

He stood, nodded once, and went out into what was left of it. I never got his name. I do not know if he caught mine. I sat a while longer with the dregs of the kopi, thinking about how a whole life had just crossed my table, bicycles and a father and a trick for reading the rain, and how in an hour I would have told it wrong to anyone who asked.

That is the thing about the corner table when it rains. You do not choose who sits there. The weather chooses for you, and it always chooses someone with a life folded up small inside them, waiting for a stranger and a break in the downpour to let a corner of it show.

I finished my coffee. The uncle was already wiping the man's place clean for whoever the rain would send next.