Kangleimaichou

After this gate this place, where you had experienced a different life, everything would be below and small enough for you to gauge it through an oval window, then everything would be blocked out by thick monstrous clouds, indicating it was all over.  The lady at the check-in counter looked at your face and asked if you had only a rucksack. She had been quite annoyed with other passengers who had been asking if they could check in their huge flat-screen TV boxes. She had managed almost twenty of them, and then noticing you with just a sack and a young  face below long ruffled hair and a long beard , all that she could do was to pity.  When you were on board you were directed to a business class seat. Why not a lager , and some strong coffee afterwards. Through the oval window you could see the place, partly veiled by thin sheets of clouds; the snaking river and its tributaries; the skyscrapers; the crisscrossing elevated toll ways. Now you thought about ...

Imagine waking up in a well-furnished-serviced apartment, don’t think about the lean dark maid in colourless sari, overlooking just-built roads filled up with cars, then after a shower in well-pressed clothes hanging about your clean Scandinavian furniture with a mug of coffee in your hand, planning the day in your head. The carpeted corridor is empty, the lift is decorated with looking mirrors and it’ s just nice with the lift operator in company-issued uniform smiling at you only to reveal his stained teeth, and when he salutes you. Down in the office where everybody wears serious expression which matches their decent clothes, you exchange trendy jargons. On your desk you have three wide-screen computers planted and below them your smartphones are strewn as though they are disposable sheets; you know one among them costs someone’s , living somewhere, annual income. The world from this place is always moving and things can be done easily; when you have to deal with a police...

In a bicycle-rickshaw, in one of the Indian cities, one was driven into a crumbling place where the streets are below flattened and hardened mud with trapped plastic waste. The sky was occupied by noisy rooks as though soon they would form a sheet which could blanket the entire sky.  As the man furthered in thick wafts of stench struck one’s face, but the man showed no willingness to hurry me out from the place, instead he maintained the same speed. I said to myself while my nose was covered with a handkerchief: perhaps he is tired and I shouldn’t ask him to hurry me out from this place wrapped in stench. I said nothing. The man slowed down to fumble in his shirt pocket for his Chinese mobile phone. The speed returned and the man issued out happy-sounding words. The thick stench hanging all over the place; the noisy rooks above; the landscape which looked would collapse anytime, all these didn’t matter to the man.  He was one of those who are forced to leave his village t...