Monsoon

“I know this is irrational, but on the way back home today, were you…?” asks the other intern, who arrived at the Daily house off a moto shortly after I did.

“Convinced that I was going to be electrocuted? Yes.”

It’s absolutely pouring rain when I file my story one evening, and I hang around the office, peering out into the darkness at the noisy streets through the barred windows rattling in the deafening storm, hoping for a sign that rain is letting up. When it has slowed to a drizzle I head out with one of the office’s moto drivers who I ride home with nearly everyday, ready to brave one of the obvious downsides of riding a motobike.

Inconveniently, it starts to downpour as soon as we make it only a few minutes down Norodom – one of Phnom Penh’s main roads - where traffic is nearly at a standstill in the flooded street. Men in plastic ponchos are strolling down the sidewalks, thrusting sticks into the water to poke at the clogged drains.

The driver I’m riding with veers off the main drag, hoping to take side streets instead, but at the end of each street is a gaping lake of a puddle that forces him to turn around and try another. Eventually, he reluctantly putters back to Norodom, saying something to me in Khmer (he doesn’t speak English) and half-laughing to himself, maybe at the ridiculousness of his evening.

On Norodom, moto drivers, stopping at red lights to drop their calves into the streaming water, weave their motorcycles through stopped cars and trucks, whose frustrated drivers rest their elbows on their horns. Along one stretch, with traffic at a complete stop, moto drivers get resourceful, rolling their bikes out of traffic and onto the sidewalk, where they work their way around evenly spaced skinny trees and bob along on the uneven cobblestones. My driver follows suit, pausing once on the sidewalk to shove up his pant-legs to his knees in preparation for the inevitable return to the road.

At the next intersection, the sidewalk ends, and a mass of moto drivers pose hesitantly at the edge of the sidewalk, contemplating the depth of the water pooling below. One brave driver gently nudges his bike off the sidewalk, landing in the water with a heavy plop and a splash, and the rest of the drivers, like baby ducks stumbling off a dock into the pond, follow with surprising order.

My driver, poised at the brink, looks nervously from the sidewalk to the flooded road, and then back again, and in my head I beg him not to, though the alternative is to sit brooding on the sidewalk until the rain stops and the road drains out. I try my very hardest to look totally unfazed – like all the other Khmers looking wet and bored on the backs of motorcycles – as the motorcycle bounces off the sidewalk and as I try not to fall into the river/road.

Observing that the metal fuel tank attached to the side of the bike is casually resting in the swelling water, I’m quite certain that, like the 74 people whose deaths by lightening the Cambodia Daily has reported on this year, I’m going to be electrocuted. When the moto driver drops me safely, albeit sopping wet, at the Daily house, I pay him double, mostly because I feel completely awful that he has to trek his way back to the office to pick up the next marooned reporter.

Another day, at a party on a boat, I mind the rain much less. On the Tonle Sap River, under thick swaths of purple clouds and a cool mist, I sit with a Khmer reporter friend on the top deck with my legs swung over the railing at the boat’s front and watch it pour in Phnom Penh.