Part I: Outbound
Disembarking the aircraft and
entering an Indian airport, there is a unique smell, one that mixes the heat,
humidity, the counterbalance of airconditioning, and the whiff of
disinfectants. Today I sensed this smell much earlier, walking through the
passageway that led to the aircraft in Terminal 4 at JFK, New York. I thought
it was the mind playing games, for the weather was wholly difference: we had
driven in under an overcast sky and a temperature in the mid-thirties (F). But
I asked my sons and they sensed this too.
About eighteen years ago we had
travelled a similar route, that time my six month old son holding court sitting
in a bassinet in the aircraft cabin, flashing smiles at passengers. My older
son was then three and engrossed in his books. Today I am travelling with these
two young men, heading out to join M who is already in Kolkata. One is
eighteen, the other twenty-one, fast asleep either side of me, using my
shoulders as a pillow. I had picked them up last night when they returned from
college for their winter break. It is not often that the three of us travel
together anymore.
Why does a trip to India feel so
different and not as any other thirteen-hour flight to say, Sydney or Tokyo or
Seoul? Those trips just feel like an extrapolation of a visit to California.
India on the other hand, feels like a serious piece of travel. Twenty-five
years ago this would have made sense since it gave you the feeling of crossing
a certain border: Calcutta looked then like the photographs that you see of
Rangoon today, and the old colonial-mofussil style bureaucracy met you right at
the immigration when you stepped into the airport.
At luggage pickup at Kolkata
airport is a large sign: “Welcome to the City of Joy”. Throughout Kolkata one
sees references to this phrase, City of Joy, given originally by Dominique
Lapierre, author of the 1985 book by the same name, and adopted
enthusiastically by a Bengali audience at a time when India was starved of the
world’s attention so that, when a city like Kolkata was the centerpiece of a
major, though cliché filled book that was then made into a Hollywood movie, a
vestigial colonial mentality immediately picked up the phrase as a moniker for
the city. Today the pendulum has swung the other way, the country gets a lot of
attention and its proud elite appears overtly reactive, arrogant and even crass
in establishing both their Indianness and cosmopolitanism.
A realization strikes me in
Kolkata airport. A voice speaking Bengali in isolation sounds wonderful—there
is nothing sweeter than a few strains of Bengali heard over a vast sea of
people speaking in English in a foreign land: the words waft over as if on rose
petals. However, the effect is quite the reverse when there are many such
voices in the same crowd--yelling at their straying kids to stay close to the
fold, imperious men nodding commands to their drivers, flirtatious bands of
college going men and women--then these phrases abrade against the other and
the romance is fully wrung out of the language. You have not really appreciated
Bengali until you have heard that solo voice abroad in a place where you had
least expected it.
Part 2: Server Down Achey
India is one of the cheapest
places in the world for mobile voice and data and one of the offshoots of this
largesse of instant communication is that a new sentence has graced the Bengali
language:”server down achey”.
Over the past few years I have
gotten myself a 3G dongle and a SIM card for my phone every time that I have visited
India. Getting the authorization for these works in the end, but the path can
be a complex series of actions. Forms are filled up, a passport photo submitted,
and a young knowledgeable man at the mobile counter hands you the SIM card with
the indication that your card is all but ready to go, that it is just a matter
of minutes before you will be connected to the network. He is so assured, the
affirmative nod of his head so definite, that were he a General sending you to
war, you would have thundered into battle convinced that victory was your
birthright. You go home and nothing works. You call a help line
"executive", and they tell you “Server down achey. O hoye jaabey.
Apni chinta korben na.” You hear this a few times, and then some knowledgeable chap
somewhere finally fixes it so that it then works. I would just have hoped that
Kolkata, the literary capital of India, would come up with a few more creative
excuses. Such as, “Bit’er problem dada. Aajkey to message gulo aschey thik'iy, kintu 1 aar 0 gulo bujhlen
to, ekdom ulto-palta hoye jacchey”
I spend the afternoon on the
sixth floor of a building in Ballygunge Circular Road looking down at an older
building about fifty meters away, a government flat complex, rich with memories
from three decades ago. We had gone for lunch to a cousin’s house, and she
pointed out to me the corner flat in this older building where they had lived
as children and where I would often visit as a teenager. A few days before I
left the country thirty years ago I had taken my cousins out for dinner to
Kwality’s at Ballygunge Phari and then at 10 pm walked down along Ballygunge
Circular Road with them to this flat. It is here that my aunt, to whom I was
very close, died. I spend some time looking at the flat quietly. It had’nt changed
much. There was a small park just outside its windows and there were children
who were playing in the park. The sounds--that of the crows and the
traffic--were I thought more or less the same as from that period. Neither the
occupants of that building, nor the people in the park would today remember the
family that used to live there, or the artistically inclined gentle lady who
passed away prematurely twenty four years ago. When a city sits on its haunches
upon your shoulders with its memories, it can lengthen a few moments of an
afternoon.
part III: Shantiniketan
Just outside of Kolkata there is
a complex of sweeping overpasses that one traverses to get to National Highway
2, enroute to Shantiniketan. We
had started at 7 am and within the first half hour I learned that the driver of
our rented car had grown up in the same street of Chetla where I had spent my
teenaged years. So while the car
sped along and crossed Nivedita Bridge, weaving in and out between trucks, he
filled me in on what had been going on in Chetla since. First off he told me that Bhola Goonda,
a notorious Chetla hoodlum from my childhood is now dead, sprayed with bullets
by gunmen as he had breakfast at Sannyasin’s Mishti shop about a dozen years
ago. I had seen Bhola when he was
a rising tough guy, a fearless bad apple, who would generally hang around the
teashops in the area. There was a
time when he became a source of neighborhood rumors for spending time chatting
with one of the young mothers of the locality: she would speak from behind the
window of her apartment and with him standing outside the property and just
beyond the porch. These exchanges
would take place openly in the afternoons for long periods of time when she was
alone at home. I had thought nothing of them, until I overheard the hushed
remarks in the conversation of grown-ups later. We had read the poem, The Highwayman, by Alfred Noyes
sometime around then in school, and its subject matter--the fugitive Highwayman
who would arrive at his paramour’s house while she waited by the window--likely
affected my perception of the swashbuckling Bhola from then on. So that was how I remembered Bhola
Goonda from then on: rising hoodlum of Chetla and conversational companion to
housewives.
National Highway has a fast,
well-built blacktop and very soon we were out of the metropolis and heading
towards Bardhaman, passing dry farmland on either side with occasional small
towns and factories making industrial parts. At one point we passed the town of Singur, the would be
location for the Tata Nano factory in West Bengal. The cheapest car in the world would have been built there,
but an elaborate standoff between politicians, farmers and Tata led to the
plant’s abandonment and relocation. The tract of land that had been earmarked
for construction abuts the highway and we pass half -built boundary walls and
warehouses that, now abandoned, have already started succumbing to the
elements. A little beyond
Bardhaman we exit the National Highway and take a smaller road that headed
towards Gushkara. This would
eventually lead us to Shantiniketan.
NASA has available on the public
web, night-time high resolution satellite images of the earth for the past two
decades. Cities and townships show
up as patches and clusters lit up by electrical lighting. It is easy to see from these images
that habitation in India is heavily clustered around the roadways and grows out
from them. Driving along these
smaller roads, this fact becomes readily apparent. Life springs from the roadside. Business is conducted along
the shops that line it, and there is a continuous stream of local
traffic--pedestrians, two-wheelers and goods laden carts--along the edges of
the road, sharing it with the longer distance car and truck traffic. At times
the narrow road passes through small villages. Little seems to have changed and houses have walls built of
mud with small, forlorn square windows inscribed within them, and with droopy
thatch roofs like a ragamuffin’s head.
Ponds dot the landscape, usually with a cluster of houses encircling
them. Farmland lines the stretch
of road between villages and there are little pump houses every few hundred
meters in the fields for handling the irrigation. Unlike many other jobs, farming seems to have a 50-50
distribution of men and women.
We drive into Shantiniketan, a
place with red earth, on the day of the annual Poush Mela (fair) and into a
major traffic jam that has clogged the entrance to the place. It is one of the major annual events of
the place. Parking our car at the
entrance to Shantiniketan and somewhere at the edges of the adjacent town of
Bolpur, we wait at a busy intersection for our hosts to come get us. As much as life has changed in the big
cities, particularly for the richer sections of the population, little seems to
have altered, to my eyes at least, in small town Bengal. The hodge-podge of storefronts, the
brightly colored synthetic fabrics, decaying, gravitas laden buildings from the
19th century--everything is diffuse, everything bleeds out a little
bit, every object moves into its adjacent space. People hop across the narrow
road blending in with cars; cars drift out to the walking areas by the road and
nudge pedestrians, private space often overlaps with public space. This is not
a place for someone who arrives from the land of straight lines. To the untrained eye, a busy
intersection in small town in India may seem to be at the precipice of a
calamity to the visitor, but in real life, it is usually far from it.
We stand in front of a street
side shack selling chickens and ducks, and, at the entrance to one of India’s
most artistic and elegant universities, Viswabharati in Shantiniketan, founded
by Tagore, one of our first experiences was to witness the execution of a duck
by a butcher, deftly done in the classic style of severing the neck against a
“bothi” or curved knife.
Enormous crowds throng at the
Poush Mela, which is laid out in a large field with folk singers, tribal
artisans selling their wares, foodstuff vendors, Ferris wheels, bookstores, and
agricultural and jute products shops. The afternoon that we drop in, a pair of
singers on the main stage improvises on current affairs. There is an entire of
row of stalls where tribal artisans sell Dhokra jewelry, made using a
traditional metalcasting process.
The jewelers cast the metal in their small workshops using alloys
containing zinc or tin along with copper that enables them to melt the metals
at low temperatures. We don't have much time and by late afternoon exit the
Mela.
We have come to visit M’s eldest
aunt, a lady nearing ninety. She
has outlived her son and husband, who had been a professor of economics at
Viswabharati. In this laid back residential neighborhood called Purba-Palli,
Shantiniketan retains its sense of indescribable gentleness. Slightly run down
single storey houses with deep red floors and wide verandahs are centered in
properties with bouganvillea heavy gardens. Dogs and goats wander in and out of
the properties. A little girl plays with a goat tied to a leash on a
field. A few men split bamboo
stocks for constructional use. These are the traditional faculty housing,
though some of them seem to have been demolished and built up into large
vacation homes for the rich from the cities. Though they are more tasteful
versions of the US McMansions, they appear incongruous in this egilitarian
place. Confined to a wheelchair, the aunt lives alone, spending most of the day
in the sunlight verandah that overlooks the front garden and a large field
beyond. She is tended to by a
handful of women who all have lived there or nearabouts for years: one the
child of a past maidservant who now has a post-graduate degree and is looking
for a job and refuses to stay with her alcoholic father, one a superb cook who
set down a meal of posto, alu bhaja, daal and chicken for us that will remind
you of the sophistication of vegetarian Bengali dishes. The women take good care of her and are
fiercely protective—she is now almost childlike and requires constant
help. She in return, would not
stay with anyone else but them. When the aunt passes away, the house and
property will be sold back to the university. When this happens, the group of
women who have spent decades caring for the old lady and have lived their lives
here will be ejected from the property. It is clear that the aunt was
hauntingly beautiful at one time. He hair is straight and thick even today, and
in her younger days it ran down to her legs. When she smiles, you can see a
hint of humor in her steely gray eyes, in a face otherwise slowed down by
age. Combing her hair for her, one
of the ladies declared, “When she was young she was the prettiest one among all
of her sisters.”
part IV: few quick observations
ADIVASI MASSACRE:
A day before we were to leave for
Guwahati from Kolkata, around 80 adivasi (tribals) men, women and children were
brutally massacred by a separatist group in Assam. This was picked up in the
national news and there was indignation, but mostly in a matter-of-fact
manner. It would have been a
different story if this had happened to 80 Indians in Bangalore, or 8
international tourists in Delhi. A day after the massacre, that included
children being shot through their mouths, I saw a poignant photograph on the
web of a group of Adivasi men standing and ready to protect themselves and
their loved ones. They were armed
with bows and arrows for this is all that they had.
THE LAST MILE PROBLEM:
I am fascinated by the endgame of
getting a SIM card. In the final step to approval the internet, SMS and old
fashioned clerical paperwork have to climax in unison. The account is set on the internet,
then a SMS message sent to the user with a call back number. A man is
dispatched to the user’s house to verify the address. This is all very
spy-like. The wireless outlet
store in the mall is manned by a phalanx of customer support staff. Some of them are very, very good. Some
are terrible. All of them seem to
work extremely hard. The top 5%
are as competent as anyone I have seen anywhere—they can connect more dots than
what they are paid to.
3rd GENERATION
KOI-HAIs:
The behavior of a small percentage
of the Western tourists can be embarrassing—exhibiting a rudeness that they
would have dared not to in any developed nation and taking advantage of the
courtesy of the Indian wait-staff or airline staff. It is not a level playing
field for the staff who accept this treatment for fear of otherwise losing
their jobs. Mark Twain had written about such behavior in his 19th
century travelogue to India. Some traits remain. Perhaps the visitor feels
crowded by the pressures of a high population density. Perhaps it is because
very few of the staff in India like to respond with, “I don’t know” as an
answer and make up on the spot whatever suits their mind, frustrating the
visitor. Or perhaps the Indian attendants are just a bit too fawning. Whatever
it is, it looks ugly on the part of the visitors.
KOLKATA TRAFFIC HAS A PLAN
Thirty five years ago it was
believed that the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority, CMDA-according
to my friend Shuvo--actually stood for “Kaatchi Maati Dekhbi Aay”, given the variety
of ongoing roadwork projects in the city at any time. Whether the CMDA still exists or not, I don’t know, but its
successors have continued that tradition, and the entire city is dug up with
the building of flyovers and new routes for the metro rail that links the city
all the way to the airport. Disruptive in the short term, there is a method to
this madness that can be best visualized by taking snapshot passages through
the city as I have done, roughly @ about once a year. If vehicular traffic increases
exponentially and the growth of roadways sub-exponentially, there is a
Malthusian-like crisis to be had in the future; which is where the growth of
the metro in Kolkata now seems such a clever idea. And so this city of poets and dreamers today have (I feel)
the most pragmatic plan for traffic management among the metros.
COROLLARY: THERE ARE HOLES IN
KOLKATA’S TRAFFIC PLAN
Driving to the airport, a little
beyond Ultadanga and where a giant flyover headed towards the airport was being
built, we saw an enormous construction pit ringed around which a large crowd
had gathered. There was a rickety
emergency vehicle parked and a few policemen who appeared as bewildered as the
crowd that they were supposed to control. It seems that a vehicle, or something,
had fallen into that hole from one on the roads that passed by it. This was not
the first time—our driver pointed out—a few weeks ago an entire bus had skidded
off the road and fallen into that same pit, killing several people. A couple of years ago part of a newly
built flyover had collapsed under the weight of a truck and that vehicle too,
had fallen a good vertical distance.
Part V: Guwahati
The Muezzin’s call at 4:30 am
over the loudspeakers splits the twilight chill of a Guwahati that is quiet after
the night’s revelries welcoming in the new year. The sounds of early morning
traffic have not yet begun, and the prayer comes across deep, pure, and
soulful. Guwahati is like a small
town that has suddenly discovered it is a city. Housing over a million people, it has no distributed sewage
system for human waste and residents are instead forced to install septic
systems in small properties with very little land. Today, the municipality has
vehicles that will pump out your septic tanks. But it can take several days to get an appointment. The
traditional style of cleaning out septic tanks had been a manual one using
labourers, called “sweepers”. I
saw an example of them in action.
First a big hole is dug on the property nearabouts the septic tank.
After this the “sweepers” use their advance payment to go fortify themselves
with alcohol. This is apparently traditional practice as well. They arrive at
the job site drunk and carry out the dirty task of emptying the contents of the
septic tank into the pit that they had dug using buckets and without any
protective equipment, except that of alcohol that numbs their senses against
the stench and the filth.
“Hobo Diya” is a response that
one hears often in Assam, in response to a request for a certain action to be
undertaken. Its Bengali and Hindi equivalents are “hobey ekhon”, or “hoga
shayad”, but the Assamese version takes the phrase to new heights and imparts a
tone that is luminous with ambiguity. Its statement can have multiple
objectives. It can indicate the
deferment, indefinitely, of the request for a decision; it can be a gentler
metaphor for “no”, similar to the Japanese use of “very difficult”. Or it can
simply mean that the responder intends to continue the mindless exercise that
he is currently engaged in and does not wish to get into any complicated
thinking at this point as to its merits or demerits.
We return from Guwahati to Delhi
via the 3 pm flight on Indigo Air. Richard Gere had taken this same flight a
couple of weeks back and had kept the flight waiting since he had arrived
late. This time there is a large
group of religious pilgrims from North India on the aircraft. They appear to be
an extended family. The men are thick necked and beefy, and their sausage
fingers adorned with chunky rings cradle iphones. Most of them have fierce black mustaches, some have orange
colored strings attached to their wrists and some have necklaces. They speak to one another in a rough,
grating dialect. They have come
here to Kamakhya, one of India’s major Hindu temples for a pilgrimage. As the aircraft takes off, right at the
moment of wheels-up, one of them shouts “Kamakhya Maiya Ki” and the others
respond in resounding unison, “Jai”. Onwards to Delhi.
When the aircraft lands in Delhi
I have a text message awaiting me.
It is the name and number of the driver of the car that we had rented. Thakur
was waiting for us outside with my name on a placard. And when you are hitting
the badlands of Delhi it is good idea to go with a man named Thakur.
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