It begins with the scent of rain on warm skin. Not her perfume—which was always just soap and the clean, starched cotton of her sari—but the smell of her return. The front door would sigh open, and that first damp, earthy breath would travel down the hall, a herald announcing her. I’d run to her, press my face against the cool, wet silk of her pallu, and breathe in the universe: petrichor, sweat, the ghost of office ink, and beneath it all, the warm, enduring note of her.

This is how I learned love: not as a grand declaration, but as an atmosphere. It was the climate she created. The quiet fan whirring in the August heat as she sat by my bed, her hand a steady, cool weight on my forehead, charting the continents of my fever. Her touch was a language. She spoke with her hands—kneading dough into soft submission, plaiting my hair with a firm, gentle rhythm that felt like a silent song, smoothing worried lines from my father’s brow with a thumb. Her palms were a map of this devotion: faint silver lines from old cuts, calluses from holding pens and pressure cookers, skin slightly rough from washing clothes by hand long after we had a machine. I used to trace those lines as a child, following them like rivers that led back to her heart.