Tuk-Tuk for Two

by Adam Fletcher

began the extensive thanking, handshaking, and gratitude-displaying that my culture mandated.

leaking blood and pus from a mosaic of hand wounds,

He was a man who was sure that not only had it already happened, but it was about to happen again. A man who always thought he could smell fire. A man whose silver linings turned out to be lead.

We’ve hand-selected the most shit-kicking, ass-bruising, coccyx-busting, flea-bitten, hellhole roads this land has to offer.

She had a lot of stories about dates but far fewer about relationships. Which I guess are just dates that don’t end.

Is it fair to ask someone to love you if you don’t love yourself?”

We’d seen many of these four-legged, vacant-eyed VIPs stumbling around like town criers, ringing the bell around their necks, announcing the news of their own arrival, silently cursing humans under their hot breath for what they’d bred them to become. Why

It was a frightfully good impression. Any better and I’d have been so confused I’d have milked myself.

They were obviously brothers, different chapters in the same book of biology.

I declined to mention my Achilles heel, or perhaps my Achilles high heel: women.

Ego stands at its door and decides what’s allowed in.

She was wrong, and full of riches. Everyone else could see it even if she couldn’t. I just needed to show her somehow.

that in the West, we see slim people as the physical ideal because they represent self-restraint in a world of abundance.

As well as light, she radiated interestingness.

That was a lot to ask of someone. Especially someone who would wait to see what the public thought of her before deciding what she thought about her.

“If you criticise my driving again, I will kill you. But it will be with my hands and a smile on my damn face.”

“Not everything you love loves you back.” I thought about Evelyn and her job.

Four waiters with nests of plates and bowls crashed into his back, creating a multiarmed, multimealed dinner Krishna.

Ordering in India is a culinary hook-a-duck: everyone gets a prize but no one knows what.

This was a spectacular question. I wanted to bask in the rays of its glorious inspecificity.

But it had been a long day with far too much me in it.

They were, somehow, all the most handsome.

“UHHM,” she said, with another deafening, clunky blink.

tearing greasy strips off a tennis-racket-sized piece of garlic naan.

I was sitting with its fruit.

Worked out fine. They’re responsible for at least twenty people existing. Including me.”

It’s like planning a loft extension without owning a house.”

He was rockier than a famous mountain range.

We’re all memoir writers. All trying hard to rewrite the messy happenstance of our lives into a story that we can live with. One that makes sense to us, more or less. Something neat and linear with clear arcs of progress and achievement. Something that makes us feel in control. That we’re not with Alice stumbling lost around Wonderland.

I had about as many sharp edges as a bouncy castle. The only thing I self-medicated with was waffles.

And just wait for Mangalore. It’s not a city, it’s a city-sized traffic jam.

So, well-named?

They’re in-between places visited by in-between people.

Where Evelyn and I now stood, countries had taken turns conquering and blowing up each other’s sacred buildings.

Everything has sort of become everyone else’s problem.” “Perfect description of my world view.

Weren’t you more likely to meet people when not in a glass-and-metal bubble engineered precisely to keep them out? Wasn’t nature easier to appreciate at walking speed?

Bad ideas are everywhere. The world is literally drowning in crud. It’s neck-deep and sinking in nincompoop.

a Dodo Idea in the wild, running amok through people’s lives, whether it’s airport security, the rabbit-proof fence, the Berlin Wall, the mullet, the five-day workweek, Piers Morgan, or kombucha.

a Dodo can slip through and out into the world and stink it up like a dog’s fart in an elevator.

Could the Raj slap a gun or two over the arms of some of its servants, sorry, subjects, and send them over to help? Raj was happy to; people he had.

What begins with a raise of an arm and the clearing of a throat matters. For while ideas might be simple, the world never, ever is.

The sun was retreating from the sky in a practised manoeuvre called dusk. Day three had stretched more than an octogenarian before a marathon.

In the hostage negotiation that is Indian traffic, you rarely know how long you’ll be held.

Everyone and everything that existed was here spilling from stall fronts and shops. You wanted it? They had it. You didn’t want it? They had it anyway. Things that lit up. Things you blew. Things that whistled. Things you threw. Things that lit up when you blew, whistled, and threw them. If China had thought of it, it was falling from the tops of brown cardboard boxes hosting orgies of shrink-wrapped plastic.

One thing two things Red things blue things

There was space yet we were not filling it. This was unthinkable. Unforgivable. The honking was a wild, ravenous, all-compassing thing. An orchestra of annoyance. A symphony of dissatisfaction. A ballad of betrayal.

Indians seemed to accept that privacy was like a solid gold toilet: nice in theory but unaffordable. And if you’re always being watched by someone, does it really matter exactly how many someones?

There are over a thousand languages spoken in India—more than a hundred widely so. Pamir and the man tested several to see which they had in common; language speed-dating. Remarkably, they couldn’t find one,

I wanted to be far enough into the future that this was just a funny anecdote, a story I’d told so often that I no longer felt it.

he did all these things with great ceremony and showmanship, as if he were the star of a one-man play entitled I Will Save the Day.

As if we were actually just one wrong turn away from getting so lost in the woods of ineptitude that we’d end up in the oven of a woman whose house was made of gingerbread.

scratching at the air like a cat.