The air had been holding its breath for a week. That was the first sign for Mei. Not the darkening sky, nor the frantic zig-zag of the swallows near the kopitiam signboard. It was the stillness. The humidity clung to her skin like a second lung, thick and warm, smelling of wet earth and the sweet, cloying fragrance of the tung tree blossoms that had fallen on the asphalt.
It wasn't a gentle tap. It was a single, fat coin of water that exploded on her windowpane like a tiny bomb. A pause. Then another. Then the heavens split open. rain season in malaysia
The rain in Malaysia doesn't fall; it descends like a curtain dropped from a giant’s hand. The roar was instantaneous, a white noise so complete that the honk of a stuck bus and the call of the roti man vanished into its rhythm. Mei watched as the street below her apartment transformed. Drains that had been lazy brown ribbons of sludge swelled into furious, churning rivers. A little boy in a yellow raincoat, who had been walking his equally yellow dog, gave up and simply stood there, letting the deluge soak him, his laughter a silent movie against the glass. The air had been holding its breath for a week
For a newcomer, it was a nuisance. A reason to curse a ruined suede shoe or a traffic jam that stretched from Subang to the city centre. But for Mei, who had lived through thirty of these seasons, it was a kind of clock. It was a time for makan . It was the stillness
Mei smiled. That was the second rule of monsoon season. You eat. The rain was an excuse for the heavy, the fried, the soul-warming. She remembered being a child, huddled with her cousins under a wool blanket, the windows painted with condensation, while her grandmother lowered pisang goreng —fried bananas—into spitting oil. The sizzle of the oil and the drum of the rain had been the only two sounds in the universe.