Growing up, ‘rainy days’ were some of the best ones. The parents who insisted on sending their wards to school through the rain found them either returned home in soaking uniforms and puddling black Mary Janes, or prancing about in empty classrooms under the watchful eye of temporarily benevolent teachers. On one particularly bad rainy day, a teacher decided to take me home rather than let me wait alone for a car to be dispatched and for it to then wade its way through the river-streets at a glacial pace; barely a dozen people had made it to school that day and I lived on her way home. Willing myself to rise above the shackles of privileged thought, I tried to enjoy my first time on a public bus. A few minutes into the ride, I felt something hot and sticky slide out from between my legs, and an ancient instinct told me to press my mouth and thighs tightly shut. The rain had washed everyone on that bus clean, putting us all on even ground for once. But I knew that the shaggy-haired men jostling too hard against the bodies around them were somehow dangerous, that they seemed angry when they looked at me and my teacher, and that I had to keep whatever was happening to me a secret. When I got home to a worried mother, a maid discovered the red stain on my white uniform and, smiling, gave me some rot about finally turning into a woman.

On my first night alone in America, I stood at a window overlooking the somewhat familiar San Francisco Bay area, listening to the amazing vacuum of sound that is a padded American suburb. I would head to the Midwest the next day, to God knows what. I had never been to Ohio. Who goes to Ohio? It was the middle of nowhere.

I missed the frantic sounds of Calcutta every day I spent away from home, and took healing trips to Chicago and New York City, where I would sit for hours on the dais in the centre of Times Square and let the sounds of the city soak into me like a thick, therapeutic ointment.

I spent a large part of my freshman year sitting with Nicole on her bed till daybreak, just talking and discovering her at times, myself at others. We would watch movies that fucked with our minds and I would go to bed hoping (sort of) not to have dreams about twisting tongues with Hannibal Lecter. She protected me, and in return, I loved her. Nicole sprung from the darkest well I could think of, but she lived under glowing strings of Christmas lights all year round.

Perched on my share of Nicole and Hannah’s dorm room (I spent so much time in there that they allotted a chair to me as my 10 per cent share), I calculated how many hours of sleep I was likely to get that night.