Under the awning

The rain came the way it always does here, without discussion. One minute the evening was dry and the drains were dusty, and the next the whole street was hissing and everyone on it had run for the same three feet of shelter under the medicine shop's awning. I got there fourth. By the time it had properly set in there were nine of us, pressed shoulder to shoulder, all facing out at the water like passengers on a boat.

Nobody planned to talk. You never do. But rain like that makes a room out of a strip of pavement, and a room wants conversation the way a kettle wants to boil. It started, as it usually does, with the weather, which is to say with a man stating the obvious to no one, that it was heavy, that it would not last, that it always comes at exactly the wrong time. An auntie beside him disagreed on principle. It would last, she said. She could tell by the colour of it. She had a plastic bag of vegetables going soft in the heat and a bus to miss, and she said all of this with the calm of someone who has missed many buses and outlived every one of them.

A boy of about seven had his face turned up to watch the awning fill and sag and tip its little waterfalls off the edge. He put his hand out into one. His mother pulled it back without looking, a reflex worn smooth by practice, and he put it out again the moment she let go, because that is the entire job of being seven.

The uncle from the medicine shop came out with a stool for the oldest of us, a woman who had not asked and did not thank him, only sat, which was the correct response and understood by both of them. Somebody's phone played half a song and was silenced. The smell was wet road and drain and, underneath it, the sweetish medicinal smell of the shop, dried herbs and menthol, that I will now always half expect whenever it rains.

Then, because it was that kind of rain and not the other kind, it stopped. Not slowly. It simply decided it was finished, the way it had decided to begin. The hiss dropped to a drip. The auntie was wrong about the colour and gracious about being wrong, which is to say she said nothing and left first, vegetables and all, off to catch the bus she had already written off. The boy got his hand wet one last time with nobody stopping him. The stool went back inside. Within a minute the awning was just an awning again, and the nine of us were strangers again, walking off in nine directions as though the room had never existed.

It is the most ordinary thing in the world and it happens here a hundred times a day in the wet season, this little society that forms under a shopfront and dissolves the moment the sky lets it. I have started to think of it as the truest kind of gathering we have. No one invited. No one performing. Just a handful of people who happened to need the same dry patch at the same time, keeping each other company until the thing that brought them together let them go.

Every rain carries something in The Rain Collector of Kampung Semilir, where twelve-year-old Sari becomes apprentice to the last rain collector at the end of the coast road.