Pai

Before the sun comes the air is humid warm and genuinely tolerable. There is a wetness to it, a reserve of damp, but nothing quite resembling a chill. It has either only recently stopped raining or it has rained at some point during the night for how long so difficult to know. There is always rain threatening to come. The clouds hang over the mountains like covers, like table-cloths, as if dropped and then having settled in the particular configuration you behold as you look at them now. The colour of these clouds is an unfixable mass of metally greys, pewters and leads, reflections, sub-hues and faints, and then whiter as if a ribbon around the fringes where they sink down and obscure the tops of the hills. 

The air is electric. You can see for miles across the valley, from one side to the other across the relentless charged green.  You could hear sounds arise right across from that other side but there aren’t many sounds in the air that far away. There are no planes for example. Only the sounds of the wildlife and birds coming up closer by. There are the sounds of one motorbike chugging by on the road just in front. 

Flocks of tiny little birds flit around in the lemon trees, totally twitchy, opening and closing their beaks as they hop from one bush to the next. They might well be sparrows but there are far more of them than you’d get than in the drier moderation of Europe.  They are all over the vegetation, occupying every last space in any tree they chose to invade, but then they will move in concert to the next one, or a group of them starts up, closely followed by the next until they have all vacated this last bush they were in. 

Every so often a pelican or a stork will land on the top branch of the highest tree in the vicinity suggesting a sense of majesty slightly greater than that warranted by so modest a bird. It recalls somehow a vulture. None of the trees are that high although the big bird seems to use it to look down on the smaller birds and surroundings. The branch on which it just landed cannot hold it and this large bird is always likely to move off almost as soon as it comes, unevenly balanced, precarious. It flies off in an ellipse and might just pointlessly settle back on the branch it has this second vacated. There are also our familiar black crows and pigeons of a much svelter shape than the ones we are used to. They seem poorly fed. 

The rice fields are soaked and the electric green stalks rise like bristles taut, erect and strong. Like those of a stiff broom. 

Now the sun is coming up slowly without warning, covertly, still behind clouds. As the sun comes through it seems to bring out a butterfly, flying low and in circles, usually just black and striped yellow. There are also dragonflies but they are hard to get a fix on unless settled on the ledge of the balcony so you can see them whilst still. The sun can start to rise for a long time without you feeling the remotest change in the heat. Existence still bearable. It is perhaps only 10 o’ clock. Then without knowing when, how and why, just a single ray of sun must have got through, and you are in a blanched spotlight. You are being burnt and scorched. The feeling of the sun is like being scraped across the back and neck, like something very sharp. It is pesky and annoying. It is uncomfortable. It takes a moment of cognisance before you understand what is happening here, what has just happened. Innocuousness has led to two full drops of sweat just by your sternum by the concavity of your breastbone threatening to burst out onto the inside of your T-shirt and leave two wet marks. There is no going back. The sun has won through now. It will be relentless unless interior cloud cover moves in from inside the valley and it threatens to properly rain. 

The reverse seems to last as long as the sun seemed to be behind bars. That is to say the sun is slow to relent in the evening even as you see it very close to going down behind the opposite hills. Even just ten minutes before receding completely, it burns, is still harsh and sharp but when it does finally go you feel the air gets its chance to calm down. 

But then it persists in remaining light until the very last moment. The very top of the sun’s disc without its corona is all that remains but is more than enough to keep illumination. The eyes adjust easily. It is hard to even know or notice how or if the light is genuinely fading. You can still see everything. Now the chanting from Wat Sai Kao starts up, now you feel the imminent approach of the insect explosion and your mind will tell you it will soon be dark. The cicadas start up from only one side of where you are sitting until perhaps they’re quite sure that it is dark bringing in the other half from the other side too and behind but there are sometimes gaps and the sound is not always panoramic. The frogs punctuate the trilling. Once all this has started it means the chanting has stopped. One set of sounds gives way to the next prefaced by a relative silence. The insects respectfully wait their turn before commencing their own chanting in earnest. It is really starting to get dark.