When the Rain Stops

The novel opens at the Adana train station, where prisoner Veli Yüklü, escorted by gendarmes, is being exiled to another city. Sharing his compartment is a poor family: a dying old man, his daughter Emine, and young son Sinan. It emerges they are heading to Istanbul so the man can see a doctor — along the journey, the family's conversations reveal their poverty and the tension between father and daughter over Emine's cut-short education.

Watching the family, Veli recalls a tragedy from his own childhood in eastern Anatolia: two young "forest workers" who took shelter in a village turn out to be armed militants, and when soldiers raid the village, a woman's son is shot dead — she herself then endures a long court battle. This memory becomes intertwined with the history of Veli's own family and country.

Veli recalls that he too was a porter's son, walking miles each day just to reach school despite poverty. While in prison he began writing a screenplay — spending six years on a story called "Suçlu Melek" (Guilty Angel) that he never finished — and now sees the fates of his fellow passengers as material for "a novel not yet written."

As the train crosses the Taurus Mountains, small, humane moments (buying simit bread from a boy vendor, informal banter between the gendarme and the prisoner, the boy's playful mischief) soften the heavy atmosphere of the journey. Ferdi Tayfur's style is dense with metaphor and pathos-laden interior monologue — every small detail is charged with symbolic weight.

The third chapter shifts the action to Istanbul. Veli is released under an amnesty and moves in with his sister Asiye and her husband Nazım, whom he barely knows. At the same time, the reader learns of a traumatic event that befell Emine after her own move to Istanbul: an older woman named Billur, who seemed to take a caring interest in her, gets her drunk and attempts to assault her — Emine escapes, but is left deeply traumatized.

At this point the novel sets up two parallel threads: Veli's attempts to adjust to a new life in Istanbul (working as a house painter for his brother-in-law, chafing at being called "kaynço") and the aftermath of Emine's trauma. The chapter title names both threads together ("Lives Crossing in Istanbul: Veli, Emine, Asiye, Sinan"), signaling that their paths will fully converge later on.

• Chapters are long and dense, heavy on dialogue, but the interior monologues are pathos-laden and repetitive — a rhetoric reminiscent of arabesque song lyrics
• The narrative voice mostly follows Veli, though it occasionally shifts into the thoughts of other characters, including Emine and even fellow train passengers
• No translation exists (Turkish only), but the dialogue preserves an eastern Anatolian dialect throughout