For about six weeks a year, it rains here at four in the afternoon. Not approximately. Not usually. At four.

The sky goes the colour of a bruise around 3:40. By 3:55 everyone on the street has started doing the thing where they walk faster without acknowledging why. Then it arrives all at once, the way a tap turns on.

What a reliable thing does to a city

Everyone has organised around it, and not through any announcement.

The chai stall near the office has a tarp that goes up at half three. The guy selling fruit moves his cart about four metres, under an awning, and moves it back at five. Nobody coordinates this. It's just what the street does now.

What I find genuinely lovely is that the rain is more disruptive in places where it's unpredictable. Here it's so reliable it stopped being weather and became a schedule. You don't plan around uncertainty, you just absorb the cost of it. You can plan around a timetable.

The twenty minutes

The other thing is that it empties the street.

For twenty minutes nobody is anywhere. Whatever you were going to do is cancelled, by something with no opinion about you and nothing you can negotiate with. It's the one interruption in my day that produces zero guilt, because there's no version of me that could have handled it better.

I've started not minding being caught in it. I get wet, which turns out to be a thing that ends.

And then it stops

Around 4:25 it's done. Steam comes off the road. Everything smells like hot dust and wet concrete, which is one of about four smells I'd keep if I had to choose.

Then the tarp comes down, and the cart goes back, and the street fills in again like nothing happened.

In October it stops, and it doesn't rain at four any more, and it takes me about a fortnight to stop looking up at 3:40.