Of all things that writer Milla Chaplin Rae loves about Mumbai, it is the city’s weather. “I am British,” she tells us, when we join her at a pool café below her Worli residence, “We are used to experiencing grey conditions for most part of the year. So, I love living in some place that’s hot.” The city’s extreme weather suits her, she confesses. 
 
Rae, who is originally from Jersey in the Channel Islands, has had a peripatetic life—for most part of her 20s and 30s, the marketing and communications professional travelled to Beijing, New York and later, London. But it was in Yangon, Myanmar, where she truly felt she belonged. Months into moving, she met her future husband, Dylan, an Australian national. The couple married, and were blessed with a baby boy, Jasper, in December 2020, in the middle of COVID-19. If going through a pregnancy in the middle of a pandemic, and in a place in the back of beyond, wasn’t worse, the family found itself in the thick of a military coup two months later.