Balige, July 8, 2019

At dusk it crowds at the doors of the restaurants. It besieges the kiosks that line the sidewalks. It harasses the cooks with shouted names of dishes. People wait for their orders with imperious airs. In this country the kitchens are in front, the tables behind: the noodles leap in the wok under the porch, pirouette on the spatula of the agile uncle, land on squares of waxed paper: take away for the customers roped together on the bench like patients.

Under the big drops of rain, in the falling darkness, I carry off my mie goreng on the white scooter. The hotel is far and the road, dangerous. The visor becomes a beach of flashes and magnifications. I leave Balige and must climb, scale the height of Silangit. The headlights of the trucks dazzle me and seize me. The deep potholes wait for me in the bends. What little energy the day has left me, I burn up in the deciphering of the lights, the decoding of the kaleidoscope, the sweeping of the roadway, the gauging of the dangers that come. Under the lashing downpour I negotiate the curves, I attack the climbs, I overtake the tortoise trucks and their black fumes. I go blind and by luck and by chance: I might well die here, I tell myself, tonight, on this road, in this rain. Like that dead dog and its toothed grimace, right there at the edge of the ditch. I could croak under the wheels of a truck coming the other way, under a one-eyed jeep I’d have taken for a motorbike, near a wheel-eating pothole that would have sent me scraping against the asphalt.

But suddenly the climb eases. Through the streaming vision, I see dawning the three luminous letters, white on red, that gaze at me with their owl eyes: it’s my hotel, OYO.