Nine Days of Rain, and What Came Through It

I did not water anything for nine days. That is the longest I have gone since I started and it was not a decision, it was weather.

The first group did not notice. The curry leaf, the two aloes, the mint that I have been unable to kill by any method — they took nine days of standing water and are unchanged, and the mint may in fact be pleased.

The second group has yellowed at the base and will recover, and I know they will recover because this happens every monsoon and I panic about it every monsoon and I have now been keeping notes long enough to be able to look up my own panic from 2023.

The third group is two pots. Both are things I bought rather than grew, both were sold to me in the wrong soil, and neither of them was ever going to survive a wet fortnight on a west-facing balcony. That is not the rain. That is a decision I made in a shop in March.

Four centimetres of standing water and rising, a wall shared with a bedroom, and the specific sound of a balcony that has become a shallow tank.

The blockage was leaf litter and about two years of the fine silt that comes off the pots every time it rains, compacted into something with the density of a biscuit. It took ten minutes with the handle end of a spoon and it came away all at once, and the sound of a balcony draining is the best sound available to a person at eleven at night.

I have cleared that drain roughly twice a year for nine years. I have never once cleared it in advance. Every single time it has been at night, in rain, with a torch, in a state of mild emergency, and every single time I have said out loud that I will do it in April.

It is a four-minute job in April. I have now failed to do the four-minute job eighteen consecutive times, which at some point stops being an oversight and becomes a character description.

Readers of this paper will remember that this plant spent five weeks doing nothing at all, was given until the end of the month, and then put out two leaves on a Friday.

It has now gone through nine days of continuous rain — the exact condition I would have said would finish it — and has responded with four flowers and a general air of having been waiting for this specific weather.

I was wrong about it twice. I was wrong that it was dead and I was wrong that the rain would finish it, and both wrongs were confident, and both were based on nine years of doing this.

The useful thing about keeping a paper is that both of those predictions are written down. I could not have quietly revised them. There is an issue from three weeks ago in which I say, in print, that I am giving it to the end of the month.

It arrives at a particular angle in the last week of August and lands on the wall behind the pots rather than on the pots, and it does this for about eleven days.

I know it because the leftmost aloe throws a shadow onto the second-from-left pot, and it does that twice a year — once now and once in a week in February that I have never managed to pin down exactly.

There is no purpose to knowing this. It does not help the plants and it does not tell me anything I could not get from a calendar. I mention it because I am fifty-eight and I have lived in four cities, and this is the only place where I have been still long enough to read the date off a wall.

Nine years is what it took. Not to like the balcony — I liked it in the first month. Nine years to be able to tell the time by it.