A Slice of Pai

I'm sitting in an internet cafe under a fan, sweating like a pig. That's because it's 39C - inside, under the fan! It's gotta be well over 40C on the street.

It cooled down here for a while when Cyclone Mala stirred up weather in the Bay of Bengal causing a grey and intermittently raining sky to settle over the Pai valley. On the evening of the second full day of rain, a globular insect with flapping lacy wings hatched. Swarms of them filled our room, appearing from nowhere. They flew down my shirt and got tangled in my hair as we hurridly hung our mosquito net. A big, spotted gecko set up shop outside our bathroom window, grabbing excitedly at insects on both sides of the screen. At dinner, the chair by the light remained unoccupied - the air around it frothed with life. Nearby, frogs, toads and geckos chirrupped drunkenly. And then, as suddenly as they appeared, the insects were gone, though their brown winged carcasses littered our bathroom for days afterwards until the ants carried away those I hadn't managed to wash down the drain.

The rain cooled everything down and made the earth smell like it was growing. The river rose, the sandbanks disappeared, and we sat inside playing cards, reading, eating pad thai and discussing whether the clouds on the horizon were dark enough to signal rain or light enough to signal a break in the weather. Break it eventually did, with a spectacular day of brilliant blue sky and skudding puffy white clouds. The blue was so blue it hurt the eyes, and yet the clouds kept the sun from heating everything up excessively. That was a few days ago. Now we have flown rapidly past excessive heat and are into a whole other category of hot. Hot wind. Hot ground. Hot bicyle seat. It's even hot under a fan with a watermelon shake in hand. Everything's hot - it's the Grand Unified Theory of Hot.

I rode home last night at about 11:30. Riding fast, the warm air felt comfortably cool against my skin. I rounded a corner onto our street and was caressed by the scent of jasmine. In the sky, a yellowing crescent moon sank through a patch of wispy clouds. I was so carried away by the beauty of the moment that I barely managed to swerve in time to avoid riding over the flat and very dry toad that's been sitting in the middle of our street for days.

And that's what life is like. Beautiful this, beautiful that - and mind the dead toad.