Watching the Rain

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe day began at the kitchen table, with breakfast and Mak. Nothing elaborate, just tea, something warm on the plate, and the unhurried kind of talk that only happens when nobody has anywhere urgent to be for the next twenty minutes. Breakfast with your mother, in your own home, on a weekday, is a small luxury, and it’s easy to forget how small and how much of a luxury until you notice you’ve stayed at the table a little longer than you meant to.

The rest of the morning took its cue from there and started slowly. There was no rush at the door and no sense of being chased by the clock. For a while the day let me ease into it, which felt like a fair trade after yesterday.

It didn’t last, of course. It rarely does. Somewhere around mid-morning things picked up, the way a quiet road suddenly fills without any obvious reason, and for a stretch it was busy in the ordinary, steady way. The afternoon, though, thinned out. There weren’t many patients, and the pace loosened. Things got finished rather than merely got through.

Then, as I left the hospital, the rain arrived. It wasn’t a polite shower either. It was the full Klang Valley performance: the sky darkening in minutes, the first heavy drops, and then the steady roar of water that clearly had no plans to stop. And it didn’t. It kept going through the afternoon, past dinner, and well into the late evening, as though it had a quota to fill.

By nightfall there was news of flooding in parts of KL, with roads turned into rivers and cars sitting stranded with the water lapping at their doors. It’s a familiar story in this city, and it never stops being unsettling. You only realise how thin the line is between an inconvenient evening and a ruined one when somebody else ends up on the wrong side of it.

From the apartment, the traffic below told its own version of the story. The cars barely moved and the headlights stretched back into the wet dark. Hours later it was still there, the same queue, the same red tail lights shimmering on the road. Somewhere in each of those cars was someone who’d left work at the usual time and was still, at ten o’clock, not home.

Which made it hard not to feel quietly fortunate. I’d got home early, before the worst of it, almost by accident. There’s no skill in that and no credit to take. It was simply timing, the kind that decides whether your evening is spent on the sofa or stuck in a jam on a flooded road.

So I spent it on the right side of the window, watching the rain do as it pleased, grateful for a roof, a dry floor, and a day that had started with breakfast with Mak and ended with nowhere I needed to be.