The houses turned to tiny islands whenever it was rainy season. They flooded the fields, fortified the side walls, and hunkered down under tin roofs to listen to the plink plink and gush of raindrops, signaling that Allah had blessed them again. Selena snapped pictures from the car window and stared. They swung around busses and telegaris with ease, but the rain impeded their progress nevertheless. Gullies of brown much bubbled up from the potholes and unpaved streets, forcing everyone to slow down. IT was safer this way, her father claimed, but her cousin sighed loudly that they weren’t going fast enough and that there would be tons of traffic up ahead. Everyone else was asleep. Selena imagined that the tiny islands contained just as tiny people, living out their tiny lives at a great distance from the city where they lived. She wondered how the children got to school when their houses were surrounded by water. Maybe these villages didn’t have any children. Only the tallest stalks poked out from above the water line – jute and strong-willed plants, her father said, rice stayed submerged for the majority of its growth. When they visited their village, most of her friends’ families kept chickens and goats, to whom they fed grass and leftover meals to. Only people ate rice, so Selena didn’t know why they had to have so much of it. The watery fields seemed to stretch on forever.