My madeleine
So I was walking through the Foggy Bottom neighborhood the other day, and it was hot, hot, hot.
How hot was it? Why, thank you for asking. As a matter of fact, having spent several years in the tropics with too much time on my hands, I have an exact inventory of the order in which various bodily zones begin to sweat. This was a penultimate sort of heat, coaxing perspiration from #124, the base of the spine, but not #125, the eyelids.
Anyway, as I stopped to wait for a light to change, there was a sudden whiff of...something...and I was instantly and vividly back in Bangkok. Seriously: I could practically hear the traffic, my stomach started rumbling for some pak boong fai deng, and I instinctively looked down to avoid cockroaches. Which is when I saw that I was standing right next to a manhole cover, its superheated effluent invisible except for the way its miasma distorted the air it displaced.
I was reminded of those simple "recipes" on the Jelly Belly box: y'know, two coconut jellybeans plus one banana = banana daiquiri. Cities have simple recipes for evocation, too: one very hot day plus the smell of treated sewage = Bangkok. Readers are invited to submit their own.
Please note, this is not meant to disparage Bangkok -- especially when one considers the recipe for Mumbai: one very hot day plus the smell of raw sewage.
How hot was it? Why, thank you for asking. As a matter of fact, having spent several years in the tropics with too much time on my hands, I have an exact inventory of the order in which various bodily zones begin to sweat. This was a penultimate sort of heat, coaxing perspiration from #124, the base of the spine, but not #125, the eyelids.
Anyway, as I stopped to wait for a light to change, there was a sudden whiff of...something...and I was instantly and vividly back in Bangkok. Seriously: I could practically hear the traffic, my stomach started rumbling for some pak boong fai deng, and I instinctively looked down to avoid cockroaches. Which is when I saw that I was standing right next to a manhole cover, its superheated effluent invisible except for the way its miasma distorted the air it displaced.
I was reminded of those simple "recipes" on the Jelly Belly box: y'know, two coconut jellybeans plus one banana = banana daiquiri. Cities have simple recipes for evocation, too: one very hot day plus the smell of treated sewage = Bangkok. Readers are invited to submit their own.
Please note, this is not meant to disparage Bangkok -- especially when one considers the recipe for Mumbai: one very hot day plus the smell of raw sewage.
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