What the Monsoon Knows

The southwest monsoon reached Colombo in the third week of May, as it does, and has been conducting its business ever since, as it does. I know this the way I now know all Colombo weather: as a rectangle of information on a screen, and as sound. Because my mother has invented a ritual. When the rain is good — and she is a connoisseur; drizzle does not qualify — she carries the phone to the veranda, props it against the old brass lamp, and lets me listen.

Sunday's rain was good. It came down the way monsoon rain does, in freight, drumming the veranda roof, gurgling in the downpipe my father has promised to fix since approximately 2019, hissing on the hot road. My mother sat beside the phone shelling prawns and said nothing, because the rain was the conversation. I sat in a bright English evening — the sun here now sets past nine, a fact I still find faintly indecent — with my eyes closed, five thousand six hundred kilometres inside a sound.

The mathematics of missing

Eleven months since the airport, and I have been auditing the homesickness the way I audit everything now. The findings surprised me. It has not shrunk. That was the lie I had been promised — that it fades. What it has done instead is change state:

• Month one: an ambush. Any smell, any song, could knock me down
• Month four: a monsoon of its own — December, the empty campus, the toast
• Month seven: a schedule. Sundays hurt; Tuesdays did not
• Month eleven: a companion. It walks beside me now. We have an understanding

The understanding is this: the ache is not a malfunction. It is the receipt for something real. I read that the word nostalgia was coined as a disease — Swiss soldiers, seventeenth century, allegedly dying of homesickness — and doctors spent two hundred years trying to cure it before anyone thought to ask what it was for. I could have saved them the research. It is for keeping the door open. My homesickness is the part of me that refuses to let Colombo become a place I am merely from.

What has grown in the gap

But the audit found assets too, and this journal has a policy of recording those with equal honesty. In eleven months: a lab where my name is on the leak-checking guide taped inside the cupboard. A teal pen dynasty and ninety-two students who learned error bars from a woman who says zed. A paper in revision with my name first, and a second one sketched on a Manchester whiteboard. Priya, who is coming over on Friday for the good chicken curry, third attempt, my mother supervising the roasted curry powder by video from the veranda, appalled and delighted. A daylight lamp I have not needed since April. A country whose sheep I have opinions about.

Two kitchens

Here is the thing I have been circling for eleven months, and can finally write down. I used to think the journey had a direction — that every month here was a step away from there, and the arithmetic of belonging was zero-sum. The monsoon on the phone has ended that theory. When the rain sound filled my English kitchen on Sunday, the two rooms briefly became one room. My mother shelling prawns on the veranda; me chopping onions under a nine-o'clock sun; the same rain, technically, if you think about it — water that will rise off the Indian Ocean and fall, eventually, some of it, on the Pennines. My father's love language, it turns out, is heritable.

Next month makes one year. The girl who wept for four minutes into a spice tin — I think of her the way you think of a younger sister: with tenderness, and with news. I want to tell her the tin still smells like the kitchen. I want to tell her the winter is survivable and the second one, they say, is easier. I want to tell her that she will stand in a poster hall and a seminar room and someone else's laboratory and never once check whether she is allowed. But mostly I want to tell her the thing the monsoon knows, which is that leaving and staying were never opposites. The rain falls on both kitchens. The journal stays open. The journey, it turns out, was never a line — it is a tide, and tides do not depart. They return, and return, and return.

My mother is threatening to fix the downpipe before next Sunday's rain, which would ruin the gurgle. I have formally objected. Some sounds are load-bearing.