I don't have time to write right now, because I am only in town for a day and have to repack before i fly out to the Andaman Islands.
1. Chronology (for a visitor)
I’ve seen echoes of time
reverberating from alabaster and steam,
pumped from the red earth
into dark hands, bowls, mouths,
the clout of a man
hanging by a white thread
slung across a sunken chest.
The ghosts of the unborn children
draped like laundry on a rickshaw’s torn roof.
In the shade of a Bodhi tree
old men in saffron secure a place
in their grandfather’s heaven,
chanting ti the roar of traffic.
The bawling of a herd of goats
trapped in the alleys of cement and glass,
the young bride, the blood-red smear on her brow,
sitting on the kinetic metro,
her emerald sari a cocoon of silk
encasing her generation in dichotomy.
2. Mosquito Bite (For the mosquito who bit my &#^*@)
Literally on that little spot, so hard to reach.
Lucratively I let myself scratch
the heat reaching 100 degree Kelvin, the satisfaction
kinetic, just enough to justify
touching myself in public. Jubilee!
I can scratch as I jauntily walk, though
I am internally nearly insane with hysteria
as my hyperactive awareness of the hidden welt
heightens, and I groan. Go to Hell, mosquitoes!
Greedily you gorged on my blood,
gluttony growing into a fully-fledged
feeding frenzy, fastidiously filling
your entire mouth with energy
that emanated from my heart.
I cannot enumerate my Ebonic terms
used to describe your disgusting existence,
your dirty and diligent hunt for
hemoglobin-derived sustenance.
You deserve worse than death,
but I cannot catch you, for your wings
have carried you far from here
where you craftily and cruelly prey
on creatures who cannot culturally
calm the itch. I hate you!
3. Waiting (for the men who think all white woman are whores)
Waiting for a friend. Waiting in the puddle
of amber street light, shirt buttoned
past the collar bones, the scorn plain on the face.
Just to be clear.
The crowded Vespa, seated with four, their
oiled hair long, slicked back in confidence,
slows as it passes. Three hoots of glee
for the two white women on the lip of the fence,
five whistles for a sexual prospect, four
insults for their shocked refusal.
Ten minutes for the second proposition,
two dropped jaws for a 1,000-hair mustache,
one middle middle finger for his lack of comprehension,
two blasts of the horn in defiance for the looks of surprise.
Seven drunk men with eleven words of English,
“sexy,” “name,” “Obama,” “Pamela Anderson,” “yes.”
“no?” “where,” “come,” “my place,” “yours?”
500 rupees for a creamy white night,
eight promises of love, five unwanted grabs.
Two hard slaps for one late friend,
three find that everywhere already closed at 1.
4. Rs. 150 (for the taxi driver who ripped me off)
It’s dark and rainy, sheets of eye-stinging drops
pour down, the trees crying sap and feathers
and the tide no longer follows the moon.
I am not alone, but it is little consolation
when the young men leer from the stoops,
their eyes feral and ignorant,
their tongues spurting innuendos and threats.
The cabbie sees this all, his sharp eyes
read the fear on my face.
One hundred and fifty rupees is too much,
But it’s late and his wife is waiting,
his children are hungry, cold.
We climb in, trailing drops of water
Across the cracking vinyl, the mats,
And shut the door; the handle rattles.
The engine shakes like a nervous horse.
I shake, relief and anger blurring together.
I get out and ring the bell, hand him
His money and see in his eyes
He will be going home to no one.
5. Cracker (for the street children on Diwali)
The little one cowers behind a desolate taxi
his eyes full, and shut tight against the burst
of magnesium, sulfur, and barium slicing the sky
like a bullet in the name of justice.
The air is thick with smoke, the smell
of acrid incineration sticks to the tongue
and the shadows of the apartment launch-pads,
the sky ablaze with gun powder and flash paper,
a green parachute rocket gliding above the skyline
the red flares signaling a battle won, lost
to lore of a goddess lurking in the alleys of Kalighat.
The tall one lights a rocket with a cigarette,
his eyes reflecting the sparks waltzing across the street,
the pirouetting whistler shrieking its agony
as the smog-muted echoes of explosion and flame
crackle and sparkle over a thousand tiny faces
gazing up from trash heaps and ashy curbs,
from flaps of black plastic tens and
the space between the wheels of an abandoned car.
As the golden flames rain down,
bouncing off foliage and dead cable,
the little one laughs, finally understanding
how beautiful destruction can be.
6. Pull (for the rickshaw drivers)
Like a herd of scarred oxen, they surge
forward across the roaring four lane,
their sinewy limbs straining under the weight
of moral taboo and history’s dictation.
Stopping at the corner; the knot, the slap,
the stick of watery smack,
pulsing through labyrinthine veins,
straight to the heart of India,
rich and white, pulled through sewage
and clouds of petrol exhaust and coal.
Let them bear your burdens, escort
you to the five star hotel, to the market.
Let them dwell in the past, trapped under
ribbed nylon and splintered wood.
Tuck in your toes as they pass,
those manicured toes that slip under wheels
bruise blue for those too careless to move,
who try to step too soon into the roads to Delhi,
the alleys of Chennai, the Ghats of Varanasi.
Desperation makes animals of us all.
7. Millet (for the village children outside Agra)
My mother was half my age again when she covered her face, rode a tired and ancient pannequin,
made her home anew, like a nesting hen hardly more than a fresh-feathered chick.
Her skin was youthful, moist, tight, but quickly became hard and dusty.
cracked and rough like the sturdy hut she keeps.
The stamped earth, older than us all, is my terrain,
as permanent as wedlock and as coarse as a father in his cups.
I hid in the rows of stalky millet, lost in an eternity of farming a thankless land,
the sky bleeding into a distant horizon, hazily taunting the zenith to the stretching grain.
My brother, his English as broken as Mother’s spirit, explains to the white woman in green
how he takes the goats out to graze, and she nods, sorrow and ignorance in her sky-colored eyes.
I watch her, feel her pity skim my thin shoulders and stiffen. Keep your pity, I want to tell her.
It does me little good, your bleeding heart, your fair skin.
They built a school, a two roomed cement thing
where I went every day to be beaten and taught of mathematics and grammar,
a cement square on the sandy hill with two windows that framed a snapshot of the fluffy clouds,
whose water kept no promises to feed my sisters , my mother.
I am expected to marry soon, to leave for another village with a beaten track for goats,
to sacrifice myself for my husband, my children.
To bear and to birth, to bend to the timelessness of the grains
like my mother did before me.
8. Elegy (for a dying woman)
Laying, smudged, a thumb on the pulse,
as it flutters against the folds of skin,
thin and papery like a letter
read too many times.
Hollow and brittle, like an era
shed by an advancing adder.
Clouded by memory, cruelly
branded on blurring corneas
(those eyes are exploding voids.)
A pair of hands, tracing brow and bridge,
pulling, pleading, pressing palms.
Remember. Read my body.
Each scar a story, a sonnet of experience,
sliced into skin with searing vitality,
each line a gesture of genuine emotion.
Each inch lost or gained, a push or pull,
a decision declared into the wind.
As the chrysalis collapses,
the rice paper rapper frays, fades, and is left empty:
a wishing well, full of falling pennies
that never reach the bottom.
I realize it's been a while, and you're probably all figured had gotten lost in the jungle or in a desert somewhere, but, in fact, I am well and exactly where I should be: still in Kolkata. But only for another 10 days. I have not written in my blog since I went on my first big adventure in India at the end of September, a train trip to Varanasi (the "oldest living city in the world") whose narrow streets and Ghats (massive stairways leading down to the holy Ganges River) are pregnant with holy men in orange, incense, cows and tourists with dreadlocks, Agra (a shithole with two of the most beautiful pieces or architecture known to man, the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort, which is like honeycomb made of white marble,) and Jaipur ("the pink city" because of the color the old city walls turn at dusk), in the desert state of Rajasthan which overflows with jewels and camels. So. I did that.
I had a literally psychedelic experience in Varanasi (a little accidentally) experiencing a local "speciality" called Bhang, which it turns out is a pungent marijuana derivative (didn't know THAT at the time) and had me seeing colors and patterns as I got body-checked by a cow with VERY large horns and j-walked through a funeral. The trick here is that Hindu funerals are always cremations, and take place in Varanasi on special ghats, and are more ritual than an electric incineration at a crematorium. In Varanasi you make a pyre out of wood (different woods are different prices. Sandal wood, for example, is the most expensive) and put the shrouded body on top, cover it all in flowers and herbs, and... light it. right there. So the two burning Ghats (one big, on the north city of the city near the well full of the God Shiva's sweat, and one small to the south) fill the air around them will an ash comprised of death and costly wood. This would have been an intense and overwhelming experience had i been in my right mind, however as it was i was in a group of ten, five of whom (myself included) were hardly able to see straight, and the other five were preoccupied with leading us back to our hostel to we could collect our things and make our train to Agra.
Agra was a different matter. The city, as was rumored, is awful. dusty, and poor, and the tourists there are an entirely different breed. they are not the friendly, hippies who flock from south america, Scandinavia and california, they are the wealthy, cargo-pants wearing tourists from Florida and Britain. Likewise, the con men are a different breed. they do not offer palm readings and blessings as they do in Varanasi. they offer rickshaw rides and foot tall marble replicas of the Taj. Other than the fort, which as I said was a fairy tale of honeycombed marble and a charming courtyard overrun with (aggressive) monkeys, and the Taj mahal, which was worth every penny i spent to get (for non-indians that's about 15 dollars. for Indians it's about 2) Agra was a dump. The group had split up for sleeping purposes, all couch surfing around the city, and my surfing buddy, Hannah, actually had lice, we found out in Agra. Bad lice. So we spent one night sleeping on mattresses on the floor of a nice middle-ages man's house. He took us out to see the school he's building in the village, and we saw a temple of some obscure Hindu sect that has been in construction for 50 years, and will go on being built for another 50 (and it's is BREATHTAKING). The next night, after our Taj and Fort trip, we all got together and ate Pizza Hut and went to bed, to prepare ourselves for our 5:00am train to Jaipur. Unfortunately Hannah and I were moved to a different room in Mr. Naidu's house for that night, a room that we all three discovered has no electricity (his house was under renovation) and no screens. This means we had to cocoon ourselves to keep any of the bigs away (no fan, no screens, no insect repellant plug-in=MOSQUITO INVASION) and as a result were sweating so profusely I think that saying i got half an hour of sleep is an over statement. It was the only time i've ever been looking forward to getting up at 4:00 am. (Han went so far as to get up and take a shower in the dark around 3...) Once at the train station (half asleep with very large backpacks) a man came up to me and started talking to me with hatred in his eyes (in Hindi) and about 2 inches from my face. ok. that was weird. So we moved away. This did not deter the man, because he came up again and started hitting me repeatedly in the face with his rolled up newspaper. out of nowhere. I almost stared crying it was so confusing. Luckily Indians to not permit such things (side note: there is not rule about fault and insurance in car accidents here, so usually a fist fight ensued with such things. same with muggings, sexual assault. The community will literally beat the criminal as a form of "street justice") so he was pulled off me and we jogged to our train and got on. phew.
Jaipur. A great success. Stayed with wonderful people: a jewelry dealer, Sanjay and his charming wife Anu, and their 7 year old daughter, Lakshita. We had a room to ourselves with a nice bed, a fan, and their terrace was beautiful. We spent a fortune on jewelry (mostly for presents! I promise!!) wandered the old city, and saw two of the historical sights, Hawa Mahal (the women's palace! more honeycomb marble) and a renaissance astronomical observatory with a lot of HUGE funky instruments used for finding zeniths and azimuths and angles of stars. We also took an hour long auto-rickshaw (little three wheeled vehicle with open sides. comfortably seats 3. usually seats 8--we got t10 in once) ride to a village thing called Choki Dani, which was part Epcot, part petting zoo, and part Medieval Times and ate some "real Rajasthani food" had our palms read (money comes in an out of my hands very quickly, I'm fiercely independent, and my lucky rock in moonstone. also, i'll have two kids, one boy and one girl) and went home. We were there for three lovely days, total. Then a train to Delhi for lunch and train change, and then a 17 hour ride, in AC home to Kolkata. I had forgotten how humid and smelly it was.
So. Then life proceeded as usual. We went on a small weekend trip to the hills as a program the second to last week of October, saw spiders bigger than my hands (and a LOT of them, which put a big damper on the small hiking venture), went to the planetarium for fun, watched some movies, skipped class once to go buy a bathing suit with three of the girls, and continued to make some friends. It's really hard, actually, to sum of the whole experience of being here. Partly because i am finally getting used to it, and don't notice things. I saw a dead puppy on the sidewalk yesterday, and was hardly fazed. That doesn't seem like me, but it's how you have to be here. We've gone out a few times, out dancing/clubbing, made some new friends, like Evan, a south african I've kind of been seeing in Calcutta, and Devina, my good friend from Loreto College, where we had one class.
Now, however, all of the Americans except Hannah, andrea and I (the three form Kalamazoo College) have left town, some home, and some are traveling, so we find ourselves struggling for social endeavors. hannah and I have become a rather inseparable due (as much as we can, since there's a 20 minute sketchy walk between us) since we also have service together now. She was also at All Bengal Women's union in the orphanage, but while she stuck it out longer than I did, the depressing feeling of being completely useless got to her, so now she has replaced Rhiannon and my co-teacher of our english class. The class, however, I am THRILLED to say is making huge progress. Today Rumi (notoriously redundant and grammatically flawed) wrote me ten concise and perfect sentences. they have their final exam coming up on the 25th (created by yours truly) and they are now divided into two categories: those who want to do well, and those who don't care. I of course find it very hard not to throttle the latter, since i get up every morning to teach them and it wastes my time if they're not going to do their homework and pay attention. It's like teaching middle schoolers sometimes.
As a last hurrah before the IPSL group split up, though, Ishani (from Boston, but Indian, by ethnicity) invited Hannah, Andrea, Kseniya and i out to Gujarat (due west of Calcutta on the Pakistan border, south of Rajasthan) to stay with her aunt and uncle for a few days. So we flew out there, saw a Bollywood film (Ishani translating fairly well) which was a remake of Aladdin. there were villains, dancing, lams being rubbed, karate, and, of course, a heroine who looked so white, it was hard to remember she was indian (did i mention the ads for "skin whitening cream" everywhere in India? No wonder they like Michael Jackson so much.) We drove to Udaipur in Rajasthan, did a brief moment of hiking on some granite boulders beside the road at Sunset (the sunsets in that part of the country are majestic, orange spectacles, and the whole village gathered below to see what the three Goras and two indians were doing--Andrea, though hispanic, is CONSTANTLY mistaken for an indian) Udaipur was completely gorgeous, by far my favorite place yet. we ate well, slept well, saw a fantastically enchanting palace, a temple, a market, and step-wells. (see photo!)
Anyway. On the night of the 30th I'm off to Darjeeling with some Americans I've met, and then further up to Sikkim to see some REAL Himalayas. on the 10th I'm flying out to the Andaman islands with Andrea for a week to meet up with Dan, Rhiannon and Ashley. The Andamans are like the Caribbean in look and feel, but in India. and cheap. really cheap. Evan will be flying out for the weekend, and now that i have that bathing suit that i skipped class to buy, I'm in business. A three day boat ride (still don't know WHEN since the Indian Shipping Corp can't get their shit together) home to kolkata, and on the 21st I'm catching a flight to JFK. phew. on month and counting.
part of me is completely thrilled to be coming home. The part that is tired of getting groped and asked out, and stared at, and is tired of curry, and fish with too many bones, and seeing dead puppies, and being asked for money, and bad internet. The other part of me is not ready to come home; the part that will miss the vibrancy here, the sound of the taxis (yes, it's growing on me) the colorful sari's, the affordability of it, my students, the rum-balls at Nahoum's (if you're in Virginia Beach for Christmas you will be lucky enough to experience these delectable things, unless airport security decides to be a pain in the butt.)
also, i gave myself a haircut last night and now have bangs (I tried to get a piercing and the piercer didn't have a barbell long enough. i tried to get a tattoo, but he didn't have the right colors, and was charging wwaaaay more than i could spend. so. scissors is the next best thing, i guess)
