Delhi belly

I shot out of bed with the terrible recognition that I shouldn't have eaten the fish tikka. "Delhi belly." It sounds cute, but also awful, my friend observed. I'd like to think the Foreign Correspondents Club was a safe place to eat, he said. I would, too, but I know better. It's a dive. Was it the food or was it the air, full of microscopic toxins a magnitude higher than the WHO consider safe? I hadn't been back long after 10 weeks of breathing clean air: surely it was a shock to the system.  My conscious brain knew, like the past two years, that I'd survive; maybe my subconscious reptilian brain didn't.