By July, the novelty of new school stuff would have all worn off. The fresh notebooks carefully wrapped in plastic are sodden in some places because it seems, the Batman themed bag you thought was cool, isn’t really impervious to rain.
And so are the new leather shoes, your socks soaked through with regular warnings not to take them off to wade in the puddles- not that you’d want to anyway because you hated being in bare feet.
On nipa shingles, the rain is a constant hum, like a cat sleeping inside a blanket. Then my parents built a new, modern house and on corrugated iron, it’s louder and we used to raise the TV volume to hear the dialogue but when the rain was more intense, the TV signal would drop and we would just turn it off.
How we managed during those days without devices to while away the time is something I could no longer remember, but we did. And I think I just read and read; Le Guin, Tolstoy, Raymond Carver, Asimov, Barbara Cartland, the entire encylopedia, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Pearl S. Buck, John Irving, John Updike.
And we ate and ate. It makes me crave for beef boiled for hours in a clay pot with potatoes, cabbage and plantain bananas thrown in towards the end. You eat it with fried fish with a dipping sauce of fish paste and citrus.
And when I was older, we drank and drank. I remember cold naked gin and fingers greasy from fried fish. We start when the rain just starts to peak and finish - or when nobody is physically able to buy another bottle- just as it settles into a steady rhythm until dawn.
I would also take my bike out or my motorcycle and stop in the middle of this high bridge a few kilometres away where one can see the vast flatness of the town. In the rain, it is a different landscape, suddenly full of tall, craggy darkened mountains and deep, black-holed valleys.
Here, I can hardly hear the rain. The rains of the Southern Hemisphere are tepid and predictable. Outside, the suburban street lamps cast a warm comforting glow over low, clapboard bungalows, manicured hedges and neat gardens. I settle into a Netflix movie and call it a night.
