My father hated the monsoon. Every June he stood at the door watching the water rise in the yard, cursing the drains, the corporation, the sky. Nothing good comes with rain, he said, and I believed him, because he was a serious man who repaired watches and did not say things twice.
The year I turned seventeen he fell ill in July. Not dramatically — a slowness, a hand that could no longer hold the tiny screws, a magnifying glass set down and not picked up. The shop stayed shuttered. The rain came as it always did, and for the first time he did not curse it. He just watched.
One evening I sat with him at the door. The gutter was a small brown river carrying a cigarette packet, a dead leaf, a marigold from someone's pooja upstream.
You know why I hate it, he said. It was not a question, but I realized I had never asked.
The flooding, I said.
Your mother died in the rain. You were two. I was at the shop. By the time I closed the shutters and ran, the roads were rivers and no auto would go. He watched the marigold turn in the current. I told myself the rain kept me from her. It was easier than the truth, which is that I closed the shutters first. I finished a customer's watch. Four minutes. I have hated the rain for fifteen years so I would not have to hate those four minutes.
I did not know what to say, so I said the only true thing. She wouldn't have wanted you to.
No, he agreed. She always said I was too hard on myself. And on you. He looked at me then, properly, the way he looked at the inside of a watch — as if I were something intricate he had been meaning to understand. I am sorry for the second one. I still have time to fix that.
He got better, that year. The shop reopened. And every monsoon after, until he died, he opened the door wide when the rain came, and let it be only rain, and let the four minutes go, one June at a time.