The Mesopots have a tradition of urban ingenuity that goes back 6,000 years to Ur and Kish. They built fantastical structures—towers and ziggurats, buildings seven stories tall of sun-broiled bricks painted in unexpected combos: pastels of green, blue, pink, and yellow.

But the buildings of Assama are unique. Nobody else in our planet’s freaky past has ever constructed works of art and architecture whose chief ingredient was excrement. It is not only feces that the Assamans make practical use of; they are a relentlessly retentive people who hate to part with anything of themselves. They preserve toenails (ground) for curatives, hairballs (plaited) for amulets, and urine for use as a skin conditioner.

Pondering such eccentricities as well as my own predicament, small wonder I can’t sleep. I pace my cell in the hot, dead-aired dawn, which holds the fierce stench not of my surroundings—in Coproliabad one grows used to that in about two weeks—but of death.

My death, of course. It’s in the blue-black air, a raw, acrid chemical stink. It’s in the dirgy music strummed on a two-stringed gourd of a guitar and plunked with a jagged shard of coconut to the beat of two coconut shells bouncing off each other like cymbals, while a discord of rackety voices sings my disaster, in the process rattling my fillings and scaring off the bustards poking through the garbage.

I glance at my watch, a gift of our Assamic sovereign, in fond commemoration of our eternal friendship (ha ha), sealed when he and I were young, just two years ago; it is 4:18. In precisely twenty-three seconds the dawn’s first flash of lightning will send me reeling, and I steel myself for the thunderclap to follow, and then the blessed rain that washes away if only for a short while the smell of death, the plink of gourds, the eldritch keening.

Now don’t get the idea that I’m taking literary license, invoking the pathetic fallacy so dear to John Ruskin and the lesser Romantics, to distort all nature into harmony with my plight. It is a fact that every day this time of year, at twenty-three seconds after 4:18, the entire Parthenon of animistic godlings and demons, trolls and sprites and the spirits of dead chiefs that predated Muhammad, flex their bronzy thews and proceed to gang-piss on Assama. The earliest invaders clocked their movements by it; the lightning, the thunder, and the rain are the sole consistencies of this drowsy, turbulent land, ceaselessly full of surprises, none of them pleasant, all of them keeping you from ever feeling at home.