Rain over the island
Thai builders are working on a construction project beside my apartment block. I watch them sometimes from the balcony, like mice skipping over the concrete structure with its steel rebar spikes jutting out of every surface. At the moment, the project looks like a giant hedgehog that’s losing its needles. The workers scuttle off to a covered place when the rain heaps over the island. I love it when it rains here. The scorched earth, sand, and jungle get drenched in water that collects in pools and flushes through the filthy rivers and streets.
The other day at ten o’clock in the evening, I sped to the spa, scything through the sheet rain on my scooter. I was wearing only my swimming shorts and I sang loudly to myself as I shot down the road, the torrent providing ultimate anonymity. As I picked up speed on a long downhill section, the rain droplets bit into the bare skin of my torso and legs like millions of splattering flies. I slowed when I reached a flooded section of road, but not soon enough. My scooter hit the water and aquaplaned. I lost steering as my tyres skimmed over the surface. Luckily, they hit tarmac and an uphill section which provided the adequate grip to get me back on track.
Ton Mai is an open-air spa with straw-roofed sections and loungers. When the rains come down, the droplets pepper the surface of the swimming pool in tiny explosions. As I completed my three minutes in the cold plunge, the cascading rain warmed my hair and face.
On the way home, the night echoed with the coos of ladies and ladyboys of the night, glowing over their phone screens under the cover of roadside tiki huts. When I flew by an establishment named BJ Massage, a lady with bulbous lips and breasts reached her hand out into the road. The enhanced sections of her body, squeezed into a tiny, soaking tube dress, scattered my evolutionary radar. My nervous system must have thought it was passing through a mythical water-world of sirens. Business is surely quieter when the rains come down. I shot by, narrowly avoiding the flooded section of road from before, and enjoyed the emptiness of the streets and the quiet ride home.
How interesting and earthy. And your radar usually seems so tightly focused.
delightful prose esp the bit about the 'scattering of your evolutionary radar'!