Theres an alleyway running up to my home which I hate. If I describe it, this hatred will seem quite understandable. There is a pile of garbage which gets stinker by the day, a lot of stray animals cats, dogs and other indeterminate dusk scuttling things which live, fight and die in this garbage, and there is often the stray homeless drunkard pissing against the walls, and cussing the government. And yet this alleyway is a shortcut which makes the trip home five minutes shorter and this to someone who is bone tired and very late, is undeniably tempting in spite of how unsavoury it is.
It had been a terrible day. At noon we had had to stand picketing on Lipton Circus about yet another journalist disappearance. Why oh why did Deshappy always chose blinding midday to stage political protests?? And then he grumbled about the lack of civil society participation. Heck did he not understand the mentality of women, let alone civil society women, we don’t really want years of wrinkles added to our visages in the blazing equatorial sun, due to some poor disappeared sod somewhere who was probably long past it and at peace by now. Its all very well for him he had a large mop of activist hair, white and fashionably unruly and anyway what do men care about their faces getting corrugated….
I was not only late, and migraned this evening,I had missed my lunch and was almost dizzy with hunger so I had gotton myself these prawn wada in a paper bag, from the start of the road, and now could not wait the walk to start munching. This was not good, youre not supposed to eat fried stuff on the road as this makes it possible for pretas to invade your body, according to every old wife in the island. The result of this is you presumably get weak, incoherent and start wasting away, which those ancient days when women had to be fat and fertile, was a fate worse than death. Considering how many of my colleagues would give just about anything to be able to waste fashionably away this has never really been a worry of mine.
So there was I trotting past the intersection with a mouth full of wade, when it happened. I cant begin to describe it to you. My head was blitzing me from the midday sunbath- And now to top it all of, I suddenly felt a hard sore lump in my throat, which moved all the way down into my stomach like an electric shock, and then seemed to race right up to my head..I wondered if it’s all that street food that’s making me feel so queasy today. Or could it be that awful Evening Primrose oil they made me take for my skin? Makes me feel ancient, decrepit…bah…an utter relic..almost menopausal. But this was…this was actually like the first day that I drank too much arrack – first I was singing and feeling light in the head and very frisky and then suddenly I was clawing at the floor contorting into shapes and retching hollowly in a voice that didn’t seem to be mine, but more like some east European demonic entity that you hear on weird YouTube tapings . Fortunately I did not fall to grovelling on the filthy road leading home, but I did pass through a seriously giddy moment when the world seemed to swing around me. This can be pleasant, if you are slightly tipsy but in this case it was very unsettling, the kind of feeling when you get when as they say someone walks over your grave…a genuine cold sweat, if you will.
And the next moment the feeling was gone.
That’s precisely the day the voice started, I do believe.
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4 Demons from the east and the west are curiously allergic to iron and certain other metals. But the Eastern ones don’t care about garlic, they think it just improves flavour. Try and remember that.
5 That’s a blob of fried flavoured dough with a large juicy prawn on the top, very tempting indeed.
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