Rangoon, January 9, 2019

Clouds tear open over the buildings of Anawrahta boulevard. Cold drops tumble down through the sunny air. The umbrellas bloom, the heads hunch in. Hurried heels take cover under the awnings – the squinting eyes are looking perhaps for the rainbow. I take shelter in a tea salon, storefront open onto the city that bawls, at the corner of a sign that repeats 30th Street.

The salon fills with a nameless hubbub. The voices scale one another and rise to the ceiling. Fans stir them and grind them fine – great upside-down blender –, regurgitate them into the cups that clink on the trays carried by ephebes with chalky cheeks. We drink our syrupy chai, curdled around the rim, and the city flows between the teeth of the open façade.

The downpour has passed now. A motley procession files along the sidewalk. Old men with hard lives and dented faces. Beauties with silky hair and dresses. Tourists with startled eyes. Children pulled by the arm between the battering-ram cars.

Inside the waiters bawl the orders. Bearded men smoke bewitching dark cigarettes, legs crossed under their longyi. Women in blouses swallow their spiced milk with dignity. An old man with washed-out skin stoops under a beige felt hat. On the walls of white tiles are obscure graphies, scripts with very long downstrokes – longer than the legs of the women and of the Burmese letters. There is nothing to understand – only the opaque rumour of the voices outside and the voices inside, the cry of the horns and of the thunder trucks, the scraping of the spatula on the round plate where the chapatis dance, and the remains of the downpour dripping in silence at the mouths of the shops.