sitting in a Thai food joint,

couched in the atrium of a Bavarian-themed mall

in Bangalore, India

I smelt a scent —

obviously not fish sauce or coconut curry —

rather some kind of plastic, maybe in the menu lamination,

that transported me back to elementary school,

a parochial school in the Midwest in the 1970’s,

it was a plastic I’d have guessed had long ago ceased being made, 

given the lack of such spontaneous dislocation,

I squeezed my eyes shut because travel is expensive,

but olfactory teleportation is free.