I USED TO TAKE DURIAN for granted. A fruit could be had for a few hundred bahts in my Bangkok childhood. There were seasons when it seemed like durian was everywhere—after every dinner, a few morsels of the creamy, yellow flesh. Not again, I cried. Now, a few hundred bahts might afford me a kilo out of the many that a durian might weigh. One durian recently went for $38,000 at auction.
There used to be another reason other than price that made fresh durian unattainable to me: time. When I returned to Thailand during the new year holiday,
