Saturday in Bengaluru. In software, Saturday means sleeping late, moving slow, expecting things to be light. This one wasn't.
By afternoon it was already full — the heat, the work, the kind of tiredness that doesn't come from one thing but from everything accumulating quietly. The day had weight before it even asked permission.
My six-year-old had a dental appointment that evening. And with him, there's no such thing as a quiet moment between now and then. Every small curiosity needed an answer. Every small discovery needed a witness. He doesn't know I'm tired. He just knows I'm there.
Six-year-olds don't read the room. They are the room.
Around 5 PM, we were getting ready to leave. And then — I heard it before I saw it. That Bengaluru sound. Sudden, certain, not asking permission.
My first thought was practical. How do we get to the clinic now.
And then I saw him.
He'd been waiting for this. Not the dentist — the jacket. For nearly six months, his rain jacket had been sitting in the cupboard, waiting for its moment. Real rain. The kind you go out in.
I don't know how I knew. But I did. This was the jacket's moment.
Let's go. Wear the jacket. We're going right now.
Watching him put it on, I forgot what I was carrying.
Five minutes on the bike in the drizzle. Him in the jacket. Me with nowhere to be except exactly there.
After the dentist, he danced. Not dramatically. Just the small shuffle of someone who has rain on his face and no reason to stop it. And watching him, something flashed — my own teenage years. How we used to run out when it rained. How carefree felt like a natural state, not something you had to earn back.
It came and went in seconds. But it came.
I dropped him home. Then I did something I hadn't planned.
I went to the filter coffee shop down the road. Sat down. Drank one cup, then ordered another. Sat with the second cup longer than I needed to.
That's how you know the day turned — when you stop counting what's left.
He gave me my evening back. He didn't know that. He was just wearing his jacket in the rain, jumping in the puddles, being exactly where he was.
That's the whole thing.
If something's still sitting heavy — /talk is a quieter room.
Or put it down somewhere — the Un-Do List.