The First Rain
- 3 minute read
- Ages 4-9
- Bedtime Stories
It had not rained for four months and everybody was waiting.
The ground had gone hard and pale and cracked into plates. The leaves on the neem tree had dust on them so thick they had stopped being green. Everybody talked about the rain every day and nobody knew when it was coming.
The smell
Then one afternoon, before anything at all happened in the sky, the smell arrived.
Everybody in that street stopped what they were doing at almost the same moment and lifted their heads, because everybody there had smelled it before and knew exactly what it meant.
It is the smell of rain hitting dry ground somewhere else, carried ahead on the wind, and it arrives before the rain does. It has a name, which most people never learn: petrichor.
Getting ready
The street did about ten minutes of very fast work.
Washing came in off every line. Charpoys were carried inside. Somebody's grandmother was helped up off a step and taken in and complained about it the whole way. Sacks went over things and a cart was pulled under a roof.
The children were not helping, because they had all gone up onto the roofs.
It arriving
The light changed first, going from white to a strange dark yellow, and the wind picked up and turned over the leaves so the pale sides showed.
Then the first drops came, big and slow and far apart, and each one made a mark the size of a coin in the dust.
Then it came properly.
Within a minute the whole street was going grey with it and the gutters were running and the noise on the roofs was loud enough that nobody could hear anybody else, and every child in that neighbourhood was standing in it getting completely soaked and shouting, and no adult was stopping them.
Afterwards
It rained for two hours and then eased off and then stopped.
The children came down and were dried with whatever came to hand and were fed and did not stop talking for a while, and then, all at once, in the way that happens, stopped talking altogether.
The street outside was dark and wet and dripping and smelled of earth.
And every one of them went to sleep that night to the sound of water still coming off the roofs, one drop at a time, slower and slower, for hours.
Moral of the story
Everybody in that street knew what the smell meant and everybody moved at the same time. Some things are learned so early and so completely that nobody remembers being taught them.
Questions and answers
- How long had it been since it rained?
Four months.
- What arrived before the rain?
The smell of it, carried ahead on the wind.
- What is that smell called?
Petrichor.
- What did the street do in the ten minutes before the rain?
Brought in washing, carried charpoys inside, helped an elderly woman in, and covered a cart and other things.
- Where were the children?
On the roofs, and then standing in the rain getting soaked while no adult stopped them.
Word meanings
- charpoy
- A traditional woven bed used across South Asia.
- gutter
- A channel at the side of a road for carrying water away.
- petrichor
- The smell of rain falling on dry ground.
- eased off
- Became less strong.
Questions about The First Rain
Is petrichor a real word?
Yes. It was coined by two scientists in 1964 for the smell produced when rain falls on dry soil, and it can genuinely be smelled before rain arrives.
Why is the first rain such an event in South Asia?
After months of dry heat the monsoon changes everything at once, and its arrival is one of the most anticipated moments of the year.
What is the moral of The First Rain?
That some knowledge is shared so completely by a community that nobody remembers learning it, and everybody acts on it together.
Why is this good at bedtime?
It ends with water dripping off a roof getting slower and slower, which is close to the sound children fall asleep to.