Trotting Through Turkey

Imagine a sun-bleached Istanbul where minarets pierce a sherbet sky, their shadows slicing across courtyards scented with saffron and secrecy. Into this perfumed labyrinth lurches Snub—ginger cowlick flaring like a catherine wheel—brandishing a suitcase stuffed not with visas but with the reckless rhythms of the shimmy. Eunuchs scatter like marbles; odalisques freeze mid-pose, their kohl-ringed eyes widening at the jitterbug apostate who pirouettes across marble cooled by centuries of whispered intrigue. Each hip-thrust detonates tradition: silk veils slip, pearls skitter, and the grand eunuch’s turban unspools into a serpentine banner of comic revolt. Yet every gyration bruises the palace’s gilded equilibrium; laughter metastasizes into dread when the sultan’s favorite, a moonlit beauty named Leila, attempts the forbidden dance and collapses, her laughter fracturing into a sob that echoes through the harem’s latticed corridors. By the time Snub is chased out across the Bosporus at twilight, the city’s skyline quivers like a struck tambourine, and the viewer is left holding a bittersweet souvenir: a postcard of joy stamped with the postmark of catastrophe.