Every year in the first week of June, Raghav Iyer took out the same notebook and wrote the same heading: Onset. Beneath it he recorded the date the India Meteorological Department declared the monsoon’s arrival over Kerala, and beside that the date it actually rained on the balcony of his flat in Seawoods, which was a different thing, and which he considered the only figure that had ever really belonged to him.
He had been an actuary for thirty-one years. He had priced crop insurance in three states, reserved for a cyclone that killed nine thousand people, and once, in a meeting he still thought about, told a board that their flood model was wrong by a factor of two and been proved right the following August. He was, by the standards of his profession, a man who understood rain.
His granddaughter did not care about any of this. Meera was seven, and what she wanted to know, standing on the balcony with her palms turned up to a sky the colour of an old steel plate, was whether it would rain today.
“Probably,” said Raghav.
“How probably?”
He considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. The onset had been declared on the second; it was now the eighth; the satellite loop that morning had shown a band of convection sitting over the Konkan coast like a cat deciding whether to move. “Seventy percent,” he said.
Meera looked at him with the contempt that only the very young can manage. “That’s not an answer.”
He had heard this before, from chief executives, from regulators, from his own wife. He had a speech about it: that seventy percent was an answer, that it was in fact the only honest kind, that the people who said yes or no were either lucky or lying. He opened his mouth to give it.
The first drop hit the railing between them, fat and loud, and left a mark the size of a rupee coin.
Meera screamed with joy and ran inside to tell her grandmother. Raghav stayed where he was. He watched the mark spread and darken and then vanish under a hundred others, and he thought about the notebook, and about the thirty-one Junes recorded in it, and about the fact that not one of them had felt like this.
He did not write anything down that day. It was the first time.