Also known as the city of angels, the great city, the eternal jewel city, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarma, Bangkok is unlike anywhere I’ve ever been. Here, the wind is made of rain and dank pollution. Red cab after green cab after pink cab. Dodging drips of water off the awnings, I walk with Kelli down a side street following the crack and pop of oil meeting chicken meat that spits from off the food carts, fills the air. Back at the hotel, Riley is trying and failing miserably to rest. We haven’t slept in days, but Kelli and I are hungry. Also, we are curious. Before arriving here, I had thought the city would confuse me. Its complicated labyrinth of streets and little alleys would, I imagined, wholly overwhelm me, but they don’t. My friend is with me and she is pointing to a puddle of deep sludge she stepped in while distracted by a white flower sprouting from a gaping crack in the sidewalk. “Look out,” she says. I look. The flower, singular and beautiful, is under lit by the neon lights reflecting off the puddle surface. The sludge is garbage juice and rain.
About every other block or so, girls on the stoops of Seven- Elevens remind me of my age. I continue past them wounded. Would that I was young enough. That, or I could speak the language right. Undecipherable, the wind is made of voices. We stop at a cart, any cart, and point. Kelli to one pot bubbling with chicken feet and fish balls, I, to another. The middle-aged woman with her hair pulled loosely back says something fast in Thai and the both of us agree. Bending low above a plastic table, for the first time, we eat, though we’re not sure exactly what. Kelli pulls a lime leaf from her teeth and spits it on the sidewalk.
However foreign, this, I think, will quickly become a familiar occurrence. That, and the lights of the traffic flowing past in consistent, rhythmic undulations, coming and going, while the sidewalk also undulates. The burn of curry on the tongue like being bitten there, and the air which carries it in our direction as though the wind had pulled it from a patch of dirt where flowers grow. Above all, however, the persistent dampness of our bodies will remain, this damn humidity, the abundant dirty rain. And it goes on like this, the city, and in all directions, and for as far as one can see, the three of us inside it, here, wherever we are, whatever this place is, however many names.
However foreign, this, I think, will quickly become a familiar occurrence. That, and the lights of the traffic flowing past in consistent, rhythmic undulations, coming and going, while the sidewalk also undulates. The burn of curry on the tongue like being bitten there, and the air which carries it in our direction as though the wind had pulled it from a patch of dirt where flowers grow. Above all, however, the persistent dampness of our bodies will remain, this damn humidity, the abundant dirty rain. And it goes on like this, the city, and in all directions, and for as far as one can see, the three of us inside it, here, wherever we are, whatever this place is, however many names.
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