We called him Eat Pray Paul. Because there were two Pauls and they were more or less indistinguishable — both red-faced old dudes who’d been kicking out Cambodia for years, smoking ice, shagging prostitutes and losing teeth until there wasn’t a whole lot left. Both Pauls would wash up at George’s house from time to time, when shit got bad enough and they’d ... [Continue Reading]
Barang Goes To A Wedding
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I knew this only because the holes in the corrugated tin roof revealed swaths of night. The room rattled each time the music boomed, buzzed metallic with each twinge of distortion. I could feel it in my teeth. Dim lights snapped on, and bare feet padded over the floor, the narrow gaps between sleeping bodies. I stared up, blinking vacantly through the mosquito net. ... [Continue Reading]
Wind Horses of Mustang
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“Having a horse here is like having a motorbike in the city,” Bhupendra Sherchan explained the first day we rode out together on the flanks of snow-capped Nilgiri. The day was still pleasant and autumn-like, the light white, the winds as gentle as the sheep eddies in the town’s single unpaved street, but that would change. Come noon, the wind would rise and the daily ... [Continue Reading]
The Angelo Who Isn’t There
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Street 182, just past dusk, and I’m moving through air as thick as swamp water. Moving like a swamp creature—Amazonian and dripping refuse, trailing foreign smells in my dirty jeans and hair. The horns shriek and the engines whine and a cellphone shop blares a high-pitched voice. The night is a streak of headlights and neon, smudged under the billowing smoke of a ... [Continue Reading]