A smell that instantly takes me back is the smell of rain on hot, dry earth, just as the monsoon begins. I'm a forty-year-old software developer living in Hyderabad, but I grew up in a small village in Telangana.
These days I mostly notice it on the balcony of my flat in early June, when the first clouds roll in after weeks of heat. Even in the city, if there's a patch of soil or an unpaved lane nearby, that rich, earthy smell drifts up the moment the first drops hit the ground.
The memory it brings back is of being about nine, sitting on the veranda of my grandparents' house with my cousins. Every year we'd wait for the first rain, and as soon as we smelled it, we'd run outside barefoot and dance in the yard while my grandmother shouted at us to come in. Afterwards she'd make hot pakoras and sweet tea, and we'd sit wrapped in towels listening to the rain on the tin roof.
The smell is special to me because that house doesn't exist anymore; it was sold after my grandparents passed away, and the land is now a petrol station. So the smell is almost the only thing that can return me to that time completely. It also signals relief, because summers there were brutal, and the first rain meant the crops would grow and everyone could relax. Now I take my own daughter onto the balcony when it starts, and I tell her these stories, hoping she'll have her own memories connected to it one day.