The Trouble with Unfamiliar Rain
July 2017
I can vividly remember the first time I got caught in the rain. I was eight years old, visiting my grandfather’s mushroom farm picturesquely located on a small hill in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. The whole family was there: aunts, great uncles, even people I’d never seen before. My cousins and I had decided to walk the forest path out the back of the farm to look for putri malu – small fern-like plants that would curl up when you touched them. The name directly translates to ‘shy princess’ and as a child I’d loved to brush my hands over their leaves and watch as they shrunk away from my fingertips.
We were crouched by the undergrowth and so engrossed in our work that we’d failed to notice the slowly darkening sky. By the time we did, heavy droplets had started to land on our shoulders and roll down our foreheads, and we could faintly hear the calls of our parents in the distance. Seeing no alternative, we made a quick decision and ran through the rain. It was real rain; drumming against the soil and obscuring our vision, our hair heavy and clothes drenched, mud clinging to the bottom of our shoes. When we got to the cabin where everyone was taking shelter we were dripping rainwater onto the floor and had to wring it out of our shirts. Our parents berated us but we were giggling too much to care.
Indonesian rain is like that: unrelenting sheets of water that wash away anything their paths. On humid sauna days, I would catch the raindrops on my tongue and laugh into the sky. I remember how each drop of a downpour against my roof would echo throughout my house, and the deep ringing silence when it stopped. Sometimes it would rain so intensely I would look out the window and feel like I was underwater, and the wind would blow so hard it made patterns in the air. But the day always seemed much brighter after it ended, like the rain had glazed my world in sugar syrup.
When, at 18, I moved to Melbourne for university, I found myself suddenly alone in a city I had never been to before. Going to Australia on holiday was nothing like living here, and though I’m technically a domestic student, I had never felt more international. In my first few weeks there were a lot of things that struck me. For example: how blue the sky is, the convenience of public transport, how often strangers talk to you, and, most strikingly, how pathetic the rain is. It’s usually more of a drizzle, really. A half-hearted sputtering of droplets that you only notice when one lands right in your open eye. They’re cold and land on your arms but you can brush them away like bugs.
These differences stuck out to me everywhere I went. No matter what I did, I couldn’t stop my brain from jumping straight to comparisons. When you’re in a new place, I found, it’s easy to get stuck on all the ways your life is different. Not all the differences were bad; in fact, most of them were good. But they were differences all the same, and each one I noticed seemed to add itself to the slowly growing pile in my head labelled All the Reasons I Feel Out of Place.
But places aren’t so different, really, if you think about it. Sure, there are superficial differences, but core human principles still stay the same. No matter where you are, people still smile when they’re happy, cry when they’re sad, and neglect to bring trolleys back to the supermarket. The centralities of human experience didn’t shift so completely with a mere seven-hour flight, and once I opened myself up to that truth, things became a lot easier.
I started to notice the little things that stayed the same, like groggily waking up in the mornings and catching little snippets of Indonesian on public transport, or how it felt to sit with some friends and laugh. I still noticed the differences, but suddenly they didn’t feel quite so big. Instead of making me feel like I didn’t belong, I learned to take them as a sign of there being something new I could learn. Then, one day, I woke up to see fog settling low over the ground, and I couldn’t help but think that the dew made the grass look a little like it was glazed in sugar syrup.