On the nature of two downpours

Baba jan,

Here, the rain does not arrive as an event; it merely resumes. It settles over the cedar shingles and pastes hemlock needles against the slanted glass of my skylight, so that waking up feels like looking out from the bottom of an overturned boat.

Yesterday on the telephone, you spoke of the dry winter in Fars, the cracked bed of the river, and the dust blowing off the hills around the tomb of Saadi. I listened to your cough over the WhatsApp delay—that thin half-second of digital silence where the ocean between us actually lives—and looked down at my boots, soaked through from crossing Grandview Park.

I remembered the sudden winter storms of our courtyard: how a cloudburst would batter the corrugated zinc awning, and how you would hurry out in your woollen waistcoat with a length of wire to unclog the drain before the brick patio drowned. Rain there was an interruption, a heavy, fragrant guest that smelled of lime plaster and cold soil. Here, it is a permanent condition. It cancels shadows. It bleaches the wooden fences into silver bone.

In my afternoon seminar, I tried to explain Walter Benjamin’s idea that translation is not a vessel carrying meaning safely across a border, but an echo that allows the foreign tongue to unsettle the native one. My students, damp in their heavy jackets, nodded politely while the radiator clanked against the wall. But tonight, under this steady, unpunctuated drumming on the roof, I wondered which of us has been translated. Is it the boy who once ran indoors when the sky split open above Shiraz, or this quiet man who brews his tea in an attic by the Pacific, letting the gray water become his default syntax?