Afterward, as I was recovering from a vindaloo-induced delirium, I noticed that the wind was blowing through the window and it smelled like rain. I went over, and saw that it was starting to rain. At first it simply trickled, then suddenly all the rain that I had missed over the last four months began to fall. A boy ran across the dirt lot in front of the apartment laughing and with his arms thrown wide open. I have to admit that I started to tear up a little, a little because it had been so long since I had seen rain, a little because of the vision-quest level of food poisoning I had just endured, but mostly because he seemed so happy. I decided to go up on the roof and take a few pictures.
If you'll notice in the first picture, there are no gutters or storm drains. That's because it rains five times a year. This may seem like a reasonable response on the part of the city planner, but the problem is that when it rains, a good bit of the city washes away. By the time this storm was over, the puddle at the edge of the road had encroached within a few yards of the building, and a good deal of the lot was underwater.
