Catwalk slum (excerpt)

...The city was a mob. A riotous mob of indifference or was it malevolence? Traffic moved somberly because of the mob; which halted at traffic lights where it could breathe. As the lights turned green a torrent of people swept across the road in a bouncing froth of light-weight calicoes and jaded colours as if some invisible sluice gate had been let open and if it wasn’t clapped shut the flow would seep everywhere, becalming the vehicles in an eddy of pedestrians. The sun was out and a blue sky mottled with wisps of white smirked down upon everything; gleaming off the shiny bonnets and the metallic paintwork and shriveling the puddles leftover from last nights rains. The air carried the faint tang of mulberries which jostled with a jungle of bewildering smells all competing for the attention of my nostrils.

The city I came to realise was a distillation pot. A concentrated broth of humanity and thankfully all within comfortable distance as I sat in my taxi. The window was down and with me were my three best friends: Mr Fume, Mr Heat and Mrs Din. The sun burned and the air was thin and meager and the grit from the exhausts was building intimate acquaintances; sticking to my sweat and making me clammy. A giant billboard bottle of ‘Sprite’ loomed overhead; cold, spottled with condensed droplets and promising refreshment and tugging at my parched throat. I was suddenly overcome with an urge for a drink – an ice cold bottle of Sprite for my thirst. I ordered the driver to stop over for a moment. We parked beside a street stall and carried out our transaction through a slit in the window.
The streets were thronged with people traffic on either side. A river thick and miry with domed bamboo hats bobbing up and down like corks. They were a small people of pale skin, black matted hair, petite breasts and pear shaped bums; clad in loose clothing that did nothing to allude to the supine forms underneath. The clothes were or seemed ill-fitting; almost as if everybody wore the same size and all stitched by the same tailor too.

The taxi bumped and ground its way through the narrow streets lined on both sides with buildings that looked like flat pack furniture. The bottom sections were in shade and the tops draped in the warm gauze of morning sunshine. People stood out on the balconies putting their washing out to dry or stretching their muscles. We entered a neighbourhood of rotting bin bags besides rotting buildings. Children playing in the stink with moth eaten faces with eyes set so deep within their orbs; and somewhere within, a flicker of life; a sign of the faint being driving the engine of these desiccated and moribund creatures.

The taxi stopped outside my hotel. ‘Hotel Hanoi IV’ – it too a crestfallen affair; a 4 storey squat concrete building with a baked 'Ryvita' frontage and a brass plaque that read: ‘plenty rooms available’ that was screwed to the pillar - 3 of the 4 screws were missing leaving it dangling morosely. The steps leading to the hotel were in a pose of contorted collapse and wore the look of antiquity lest they should dissolve under my feet and were lined with some sorry looking potted plants; weedy and wizened. It was such a pathetic attempt at comeliness it made me wonder whether the rooms fared any better. I paid the driver and then caught her eye:

She was a lonely creature and was walking down the pavement in such an unexpected elegance of get-up and go that in the first moment I took her for a sort of vision. A creature indeed for you had to be there as witness! Oh! A white dress made translucent by the sun that created a silver haze around her, sunglasses, hair out, so refined, so elegant, so sexy, so gushing! so weird – for she was walking besides the gutter oblivious to the shit and smell around her. It was like watching a shampoo advert. Her demeanour and confidence rebuking the squalor like a slap on the wrist and she had the look of vacant glassiness; then she saw me and her eyes crystalised with recognition followed by a curling of the lips - hence her thoughts so betrayed. It was the sight of this instrument of manly torture so at odds with everything else that had captured my imagination and set forth some unforeseen seismic activity within me. Bewitched, my mind summersaulted to lofty places; beyond the silver lining. I smiled at her as she walked past and nodded my head in acknowledgement. In acknowledgement of what? – Such a fool I was! If ever there was one that walked this earth!

So what was the meaning of it? Acknowledgement of her beauty perhaps? The thing of interest was that she probably lived in this squalour. She was of it! Born and bred in it no doubt. Her beauty and get-up had given her metaphorical wings so to speak so she could fly to a world of make pretend. A world made real by the attitudes and humours of others towards her. And she knew it. For elegance and beauty speak to men’s hearts directly do they not? - Transcending the fabric of our lives and the roots that bind us to the soil. Inspiring feelings that tug at the primordial torrent that seethes within us; elevating a woman to a throne beyond her earthly bounds.

I wondered where she lived. I imagined her bedroom. Probably no larger then a broom cupboard with leprous walls and mildewed ceilings and a few items of furniture; perhaps a small mirror, a little bed and a make shift wardrobe of skeletal frame draped in cloth behind which her few precious items of clothing resided; 2 dresses perhaps that she wore in revolution and then the little window in her room that looked out onto the clotted gutter. The window she looked through every day; her world. I imagined her as a little girl; pretty and naïve playing in the filth. Did she ever dream of escape? Of course she did. Everyone does. I looked around. The whole area wore the face of abject poverty. How many more were there like her I wondered. How many princesses were there in this catwalk of slums...