C Y Gopinath: Why there are no flies in Bangkok?

Bangkok's municipality takes cleanliness seriously. Representation pic

What is the one non-human species you would expect to find swarming in their thousands in a city that has more delicious open-air food per square metre than any other city in the world?

No, I'm not talking about Mumbai or cockroaches. Bangkok's street food vendors serve sticky, smelly fruits like durian; steaming woks of colourful curries filled with meat and vegetables; fish and seafood of every variety, from fresh to deep fried; all manner of barbecued meats; and ranges of colourful, sweet sticky desserts. The city is regularly listed among the world's top three for street food, and is 2018's World street food capital according to Time Out's City Life Index. Yet, when I moved to Bangkok from Africa in 2006, I felt something missing.

Mumbai, which I left in 2000, had fed me sinful street food, prepared with scant regard to hygiene or safety, while being celebrated by hordes of flies. Today, it has an estimated 2,50,000 street food vendors, catering to gourmet flies used to nothing but the worst. Their flying food inspectors have pre-sampled every puchka and papri chaat before it reaches you, stamping approval by laying batches of eggs on it.

So how come you see zero flies in Bangkok, which has had well over 3,40,000 street vendors here since 2000, according to the National Statistics Office? That's 1,00,000 more food vendors than Mumbai. But not a single swarm of flies. Just a few confounded strays wondering where all the other flies had gone. What is Bangkok doing right that Mumbai isn't? Or do flies just not like Thai takeaways?

My question obsessed me. I wrote to Dr Christopher Elias, an old Bangkok hand and my boss then, asking him my Big Fly Question: as a public health professional, did he have any theories why there were no flies here? He asked me to check if flies were missing also from Klong Toei.

Klong Toei is Bangkok's Dharavi - its largest slum and market, home to the city's poorest. I went one Sunday with my camera, and sent Dr Elias a telling photograph of a stall the size of a ping-pong table, covered with raw, fresh cut meat, right out in the open - and not a fly to be seen. I felt flummoxed. I seemed to be the only one who knew there were no flies in Bangkok - and no one else had the answer or seemed to care. I found a website called diptera.org, home to dipterologists - people who, for reasons best known to themselves, have chosen to spend their lives studying flies. Here I found emails of about 30 fly scientists and promptly posed my Big Fly Question to each of them. I didn't get a reply for several days, and nearly gave up, defeated - when email dinged in from a Dr Michael Ackland, Honorary Associate Curator of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

"I don't know much about Bangkok," he wrote, "but I do understand flies. They tend to lay their eggs on rotting organic and vegetable matter, so that when the larvae hatch, they are surrounded by lots of food. If the eggs get shaken before they hatch, though, they get stressed and don't hatch at all. I would guess that in Bangkok, they probably move waste around a good deal so fly eggs never get to hatch."

That was it - clear garbage promptly, and flies' eggs can't hatch. One day I studied how Bangkok handles its food waste. The refuse - peels, crusts, bones, fat - goes into a trash bag as she cooks. Pass by an hour later - and you'll see a new bag. The first one is now at the street corner, from where it will have gone an hour later. Bangkok's municipality takes cleanliness seriously and works hard at it.

The BMC, on the other hand, has been plotting ways to palm off their work to the city's housing societies, who are now required to segregate their garbage, and compost the wet part. Those who don't are punished by the BMC leaving their waste uncollected at their gates. Meanwhile, Mumbai's garbage of 9,400 tonnes a day lies uncollected for days. The flies celebrate, going crazy laying orgies of eggs.

Outside my Bangkok home, at 10 sharp nightly, a black truck appears, quietly moving from gate to gate. Conservancy workers wearing boots, gloves and face masks receive garbage, segregate it and quietly purr away. All I have to do is leave my black garbage bag downstairs.

I can't help, but notice - the garbage truck itself is cleaned spotless and disinfected every day. It comes shining and odourless. Makes you wonder, doesn't it, how a city ruled by saffron-worshipping nationalists claiming to be supreme in everything, haven't figured out how to keep flies away from their food?

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

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