hands of raining water

The monsoon winds have begun. The leaves are mostly diagonal. The mornings are rain cool.

It's not an image but a smell: a cake of neem soap just opened and translucent, the drops of oil surfacing, then sitting in wait for second use. Neem flowers frozen then dried; fried an acrid brown and diluted with rice. A memory of heat without the experience of it. Bitterness transmuted on the tongue.