The Yangon rain arrives with warning. The sky goes a certain yellow-grey, the air sticks to you, the fans slow down. Then it comes down hard, so hard that the road floods in twenty minutes and people stand under shop awnings smoking, unhurried, because there is no point hurrying. The rain there decides your schedule, and you accept that.
I remember walking through it as a child with a plastic bag over my schoolbooks, my uniform soggy at the shoulders. Nobody thought to break it to me that rain could be optional. It was just what happened, twice a year, for months.
In Singapore the rain is shorter and meaner. It can turn up in the middle of a dry afternoon over one road and nowhere else, hammer the pavement for fifteen minutes, and leave. You step into an MRT station dry and come out into what is already the tail end of something. There is less ceremony about it. You carry an umbrella that you will mostly not open.
After a few years the two rains started to blur in my head. I would smell wet earth on the Orchard Road pavement and think of home for a second before I remembered where I was. The sound of the Singapore rain on an HDB window is thinner than the Yangon rain on a zinc roof, but at three in the morning they can fool you. Rain is the least homesick thing a person can miss, and maybe that is exactly why it works.
I have stopped trying to work out which rain I prefer. They serve different moods. The Yangon rain is company, a long loud guest who stays the night. The Singapore rain is a schedule, efficient and punctual. Both of them, when I close my eyes, are home.