All summer the earth of Nathdwara had been waiting.

The ground in Dadaji's little courtyard had gone hard and pale, cracked into a map of tiny canyons. The neem tree drooped. Even the pigeons looked tired, sitting in whatever shade they could find. Meera had stopped running outside in the afternoons; the heat pressed down like a heavy hand.

Then one grey evening the wind changed.

Meera felt it before she understood it — a coolness, a shift, a hush. The pigeons went quiet. Dadaji, who had been sitting at his easel painting the soft blue face of Shrinathji for the hundredth time that month, lifted his head and set down his brush.

"It's coming," he said.

"What's coming?" asked Meera.

He only smiled and pointed his chin toward the open doorway.

And then it began — fat, slow drops at first, smacking into the dust and leaving dark coins on the pale ground. Then faster. Then all at once the sky opened and the first monsoon rain came pouring down over the rooftops and temples and the dry, waiting earth.

Meera ran to the door. But it was not the sight of the rain that stopped her in her tracks. It was the smell.

It rose up from the wet ground in a great invisible wave — that deep, sweet, earthy fragrance that comes only when rain touches thirsty soil. It filled the whole courtyard, the whole street, the whole town. It smelled like relief. It smelled like the earth breathing out after holding its breath for months. Meera closed her eyes and breathed it in until her chest was full.

"Dadaji," she said, "what is that smell? Where does it come from?"

Her grandfather came and stood beside her in the doorway, the spray of the rain cool on their faces. He breathed in too, slowly, the way he did everything.

"That," he said, "is the earth giving up its hidden sweetness. All summer it kept it locked away. Now the rain unlocks it, and out it comes." He was quiet a moment. "The Gita says that fragrance is Him. The pure smell of the earth — that is the Lord, hiding inside the ground under our feet, waiting for the right moment to show himself."

Meera looked down at the dark, drinking earth, then up at the grey, pouring sky.

She had run outside a thousand times. But this was the first time she had ever stopped to wonder who, exactly, she was breathing in.