💬 The smell of a plastic raincoat takes me straight back to school

Jeddah doesn't get rain. We got 4 minutes of it in January and people filmed it. So I forget about the smell until I'm home in July. This year my mother's raincoat was on the door hook. Yellow, plastic, with a hood that never stays up. I picked it up to move it and stopped. That smell hit me before it got anywhere near my face. Rubber and wet cement and something a bit sour. I'm 8 again, standing at the school gate in Santoshnagar with my bag over my head. My raincoat was the same yellow. My brother's was blue and he cried because he wanted mine. The auto never came until the rain slowed. We stood there for 40 minutes watching puddles fill up. A man selling roasted corn kept his tray under a plastic sheet and sold out twice. My mother walked in and saw me holding it near my face. She said, put it back, it's old. I said it smells like school. She sniffed it once, shrugged and said, it smells like plastic. My brother heard from the next room and shouted that the yellow one was supposed to be his. He's 34 now, has a beard and a car loan, and still wants it. It rained on my last evening. I wore the raincoat out to the gate just to see. It was too small in the shoulders and the hood slid back at once. I stood there anyway. A neighbour's kid stared at me like I'd lost my mind. She was 6 and I'm 38. The raincoat is back on the hook. My flight was the next morning.

For me it is the smell of a school bag after the first rain, a bit like wet cloth and tiffin. Mine was a blue bag with a broken zip that my mother stitched twice. We lived in Tarnaka then and the road outside the gate turned into a river.

The smell of wet notebooks from getting caught in the rain on the way to school does this for me instead.