Under One Umbrella

Chapter 1: Week One: Drizzle

In Seattle, nobody carries an umbrella. This is the first thing the locals tell you, usually within a week of your arrival, with an air of confiding something sacred. You do not carry an umbrella in Seattle. You wear a hooded jacket and a faint expression of stoicism, and you let it fall on you, because it is not rain, exactly, it is just the air being wet, and people who carry umbrellas are tourists, or Californians, or both. Ananya Deshpande had been in the city for three weeks, and she had never in her life been so insulted. She had grown up in Pune, in the Western Ghats, in a house with a tin roof and a balcony from which her father had taught her to read the monsoon. She knew the smell of the first rain on hot earth. She knew the difference between a shower and a cloudburst, between the long gray sweep of July and the sudden, thundering August afternoons that turned the street into a river. She had stood in rain that came down like a wall and laughed. And she had arrived in Seattle, on a work visa, in the first week of October, with a UX research contract and a very large, very sturdy black umbrella, to discover that the sky here wept in a thin, relentless, apologetic mist that clung to your eyelashes and never once had the courage to commit. It was a Thursday, at twenty to six, at a bus stop on Third Avenue. The mist had thickened into something almost deserving of the name. She stood under her umbrella, among a crowd of hooded strangers who looked at her with polite, pitying amusement, and waited for the 5:44. A man was standing at the edge of the shelter, in the full wet, without a hood. He was tall and rumpled, in a waxed canvas jacket that was clearly several years past waterproof, with dark, damp, curling hair plastered to his forehead and a rolled-up set of drawings under one arm. Water ran down his face. It dripped from his chin and off the end of his nose. His glasses were so thoroughly beaded with rain that he could not possibly have seen through them. He was holding the drawings against his chest with a tenderness that suggested they were a small, sleeping animal. Ananya looked at the drawings. She looked at the sky. She looked, with mounting anxiety, at the drawings. "Excuse me," she said. "Your plans. They're going to be ruined." He turned. He blinked at her through his ruined glasses. "Oh," he said. "No, they're fine. They're laminated." "You're not." "I'm, ah." He glanced down at himself, a little startled, as though noticing for the first time that he was wet. "I'm Seattle. It's fine." "You are standing in the rain with no hat," said Ananya, with some severity, "and no umbrella, and no dignity. You are dripping on my shoes." He looked at her shoes. They were, in fact, damp at the toe. "Sorry," he said, sincerely. "That's, I'm really sorry. I just don't use umbrellas. It's sort of a local thing." "I have been told." She sighed, in the deep, long-suffering manner of a woman raised by a mother. And then, without entirely deciding to, she stepped sideways and held her enormous black umbrella out over his head. The rain stopped falling on him. It was, for a moment, quite remarkable. He went very still. "Oh," he said, in a different voice. "Thank you." "It's only an umbrella." "It's huge." He peered up at it with an expression of frank wonder. "What is that? That's not an umbrella. That's a roof." "It's from Pune. They are built for the monsoon." She said it with perfect, unconcealed pride. "This is a drizzle. This is not weather. In my city, you would have to be a fool to stand in this." He looked at her. Something had changed in his face. It was a slow, delighted, entirely unguarded smile, lopsided and a little sheepish, the sort of smile that arrives on a man who has just discovered that someone is going to be rude to him on purpose. "I'm Theo," he said. "Ananya." The 5:44 pulled up with a hiss of air brakes. The doors opened. He got on. She got on. They sat on opposite sides of the aisle, at different stops, in different seats. He got off at Pine. She stayed on to Capitol Hill. At the door, he turned and raised a hand, with his glasses still beaded and his drawings clutched to his chest. "Thanks for the roof," said Theo. She did not smile. She inclined her head, a queen acknowledging a subject. But for the whole of the ride home, she found herself looking out at the rain, which was, if she was honest, not entirely without charm.