postcards from the other side of the world

Kibbutz

Ze’elim, Israel

January 17, 2007

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting to happen on my first visit to an Israeli kibbutz, but I certainly didn’t expect the first ten minutes to include drinking beer with 43 Israeli soldiers in a country-western theme bar, watching hair-metal videos from the Eighties.

Before going I really didn’t have much more than the faintest clues as to what a kibbutz was. I knew some of my Jewish friends in high school had visited them over summer vacations to improve their Hebrew. I knew they were vaguely Socialist in origin. But I also was under the impression that there was a religious element involved – something like a monastery or ashram. But I really had no idea.

I had only been told that this particular kibbutz was in the middle of nowhere. And nowhere was exactly where I wanted to be. I had work to do, and needed only privacy and quiet. I wanted to get up every morning, go sit on a rock in the middle of the desert far from where anyone could hear me, and sing my guts out. I was told it would be primitive, isolated. I was also told it would be cheap. When you have no permanent address and live mostly in hotels, cheap is good. As it turns out, I nearly didn’t get the chance to find out what a kibbutz was. I barely made it onto the bus out of Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Terminal.

The Central Bus Terminally is an enormous and extremely poorly designed building. Because of bad signage, you can’t find where you need to go to catch your bus, and there is nobody to tell you. There is nobody who will even tell you where you need to go to ask where you need to go to catch your bus. I spent twenty-five minutes figuring out which floor I was supposed to be on, and there were six floors. None of the escalators were functioning. I was carrying a lot of luggage. After I finally found out which of the several hundred gates my bus was leaving from – and of course it was leaving from the 6th floor - I had to haul my suitcase, recording bag, and guitar up six flights of useless escalator steps. I don’t know who designed this building, but they should have their license to practice architecture revoked. Better yet, they should either put their talent to better use designing mazes for lab animals, or be banished to some small uninhabited island where they can’t cause the general public any more confusion. Tel Aviv Central bus station is like an enormous piss-scented shopping mall for human rats. It is worse than bad architecture, it is an insult to the entire concept of designing buildings.

By the skin of my teeth I made it on the bus, the last passenger on the last bus to Ze’elim that night. Being last onboard was beginning to become my trademark. I hadn’t had time to locate, let alone use, a restroom before boarding, so I really needed to take a leak. I understood now why the station had smelled of piss. People had given up looking for toilets and simply relieved themselves in dark corners. Or perhaps they were venting their opinions of the architect’s work.

There was no toilet on the bus. Somewhere in the middle of the ride I was supposed to change busses at a place called Be’er Sheva. Any town that had the word “beer” in its name couldn’t be that bad, I had figured. For two and a half hours, I had fantasized about the urinal that awaited me in Be’er Sheva. But instead the bus transfer took place in a deserted parking lot just off the highway. There was no place or time to urinate. I was the only person changing busses. Everyone was already on board the other bus, watching and waiting for me.

It was 10:30 at night, so I couldn’t see what was passing outside the window, only lots of black nothingness that was broken only by strange amber lights indicating modern settlements of some kind. They all appeared to be surrounded by security fences breached only by ominous guard posts, next to scary, automatic metal gates. But these were not enough to distract my mind from the fact that my bladder was full to far beyond capacity. Forty more minutes passed. Then we turned off the highway and passed through a security gate like the ones I had seen. The driver shouted, “Ze’elim!” This was it, my stop: the kibbutz.

I hopped off the bus and the sound of its engine and grinding gears faded into the night. I was left standing alone on a small paved road beneath the stars. There was a faint whiff of cow manure, but the few buildings I could see looked quite substantial, and university-like in design. It was as if I had somehow been transported to an agricultural college in rural Nebraska. I badly needed to piss. I found some bushes and urinated for what must have been at least 3 minutes straight. Then I found a phone booth and called Udi, my contact at the kibbutz. It was Udi who had arranged for me to stay here. Udi was a friend of Uri, from the Israeli band Boom Pam, who would be playing guitar on my record in a couple of weeks. (So far, less than five days after landing in Israel, I knew an Uri, an Ori, a Yudi and an Udi.) Udi helped his father run the bar and booked the bands that occasionally played there. Yes, the kibbutz had a bar. So far, so good. Udi picked up the phone and said I should go to the bar, order a beer, and he would meet me there in a few minutes.

It took me a bit of stumbling about in the dark before two kind residents of the kibbutz passed by and pointed me in the direction of the bar - or The Pub, as they called it. Though called a pub, it was decorated in a style I can only describe as Mid-Seventies Montana Country & Western. There were murals of cowboys and bucking broncos on the wall outside the entrance, which consisted of a couple of saloon doors. Where the hell was I?

I experienced a Clint Eastwood Moment as I came through the saloon doors. Conversations seemed to stop as everyone in the place checked out the new boy in town. Even “Here I am, Rock You Like a Hurricane,” which was blaring from the sound system, seemed to momentarily stop, like a saloon piano in a cheesy western film. Every face in the place wore an expression that revealed it had seen every other face in the place a hundred times – except mine. I was clearly a foreigner: dressed strangely and carrying a lot of luggage. I entered as discreetly as I possible, plonked my bags down at a table near the door, and went over to the bar to order a beer. Glum soldiers examined me morosely over their pints of Gold Star. They had noted my guitar case and no doubt assumed I was to be the entertainment for the evening. They were probably worried that I would soon subject them to a mediocre 2 hour set of Dylan covers. 

There was only one bartender, a burly man in his mid-fifties in a plaid felt shirt and cowboy hat, who clearly fancied himself some sort of Middle Eastern cowboy. I later found out that this was Udi’s dad, Tzvika, the guy who ran the joint. I assumed by the way he was dressed that he was also the one who had decorated the place. I took a shine to him immediately when he turned off the metal and cranked up the Hank Williams (I’ll take Hank Williams over Stryper any day of the week). We got to talking. Turns out he was born in Brazil. His mother was originally Russian and his father from Germany. Both had been forced to leave Europe during World War II. They met in Rio in the late Forties. Tzvika immigrated to Israel with his mother when he was nine, after his parents divorced.

Eventually Udi showed up. We shook hands and he welcomed me to the kibbutz. Udi didn’t much resemble his father; he was slight of build, and vaguely rasta-like in dress and hairstyle. I had to wait for a bit while he helped his father Tzvika at the bar. By now a lot more military people had trudged in and the bar was full of them. They all carried machine guns and were dressed in standard-issue olive drab. The more devout among them even had matching green yarmulkes. I wondered if any of them would get drunk and start shooting.

After an hour or so, the bar emptied out somewhat and Udi was able to take a break to show me where I would be staying for the next nine days. He helpfully grabbed one of my bags, and we set off through the darkness along a series of concrete paths. We soon came to a small cluster of buildings that under the security lights looked like a cross between a small trailer park and a moon base. Four white prefab caravans surrounded an empty central courtyard. All had solar panels and water tanks attached to their roofs.

Udi fished for the right set of keys to unlock the door and then showed me around my new digs. The accommodations were spartan but completely adequate. I had four rooms in my new trailer home: a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and a second bedroom I had no use for. My furniture consisted of a bed, table and two chairs. There was a fridge to keep the beer cold, a rack to dry the clothes I washed in the sink, and a portable heater to stave of the chill of the night. I would pay $20 a day, all meals included. This was exorbitant by the South Asian prices I was used to, but certainly cheaper than staying in Tel Aviv. There I would have paid at least twice as much, not including food. Plus, here I had the desert. And that was what I was really after: solitude and nothingness, a place where I could concentrate and work uninterrupted, a place where I could sit on a rock and sing into the sky and nobody could hear me.

I had considered staying in one of the so-called “Bedouin camps” that proliferated in this part of the Negev Desert. But most proved to be overpriced desert spas where you slept in a tent and pretended to be a nomad – like Lawrence of Arabia in Palm Springs. I was a nomad, but I was no Bedouin. I had a laptop and a lot of expensive electronic gear with me that I could not afford to replace. I needed power for these things, I needed to keep them dry and free of sand, and I needed something more secure than a tent to leave them in when I left for my daily desert rehearsals. So when the opportunity to stay at the kibbutz came up, I leapt at the chance. From the description Uri had given me (middle of nowhere, cheap), it sounded perfect. But what the hell was a kibbutz? I wanted to find out.

I had the opportunity the next morning after meeting my new neighbor, Kwan. It was almost noon when I finally emerged from my trailer. I had slept badly, as I always do when arriving at night in an unfamiliar location. I had dreamt of Pakistan and angry dogs and soldiers and Bushwick. I figured out how to open the windows and aired the place out a bit. Though it was January, it was warm here when the sun was out. It only got cold at night. A thin, Asian-looking guy was leaning back on a white, plastic chair, sunning himself immediately behind my bedroom. I found a rock to prop the front door open and went over to say hello. This was Kwan.

Kwan was from South Korea. He, like me, had been traveling around the world for some time. He and his wife were riding out the winter in the kibbutz for a few months before continuing on to Europe. They worked on the farm in exchange for free food and lodging. That was the deal here: socialism, pre-USSR. Sounded fair enough to me. Kwan seemed like a nice guy. I explained what I was doing here and told him that if my music ever disturbed him or his wife, they should let me know. He agreed and, when I asked him how to get to the desert proper, gave me explicit instructions. Nice as he was, Kwan had an extremely poor sense of direction. He had indicated to me the exact opposite way I needed to go to leave the kibbutz
This forced me to circumnavigate the entire place, but it also gave me the opportunity to get some idea of what it was all about. The reason I had to walk around the entire complex to leave was because there was only one gate; the whole settlement was surrounded by cyclone fencing topped with razor wire. Even in the cheerful morning light, it gave me the creeps. Where was I housed – in some kind of prison camp? There were several military bases nearby. Could the Israelis inhabiting rural areas like this still live in fear of invasion? Were they locking the world out, or themselves in? I wanted to think the razor wire was so that nobody could break in under cover of darkness to steal a cow or tractor. But I wasn’t sure.

I attempted to put these thoughts to the back of my mind and enjoy the walking tour. The kibbutz boasted a couple of industrial-sized barns: one for cows, one for chickens. There was a factory where they manufactured tractor tires. There was a large central building containing offices, as well as a cafeteria ample enough to feed a small high school. Scattered around the grounds were the living quarters: a suburban-looking lane lined with bungalows, a modern dormitory, some older and shabbier wooden buildings, and ten or twenty modern trailer homes like the one I was staying in. For recreation, residents had a natural hot spring, a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a football pitch. Or they could hang out in one of two drinking houses: the C & W flavored “pub”, or a smaller private clubhouse, for residents only. I later found out that the kibbutz even used to have its own falafel stand, but it had burned down the previous year and had not yet been rebuilt. The grounds of the kibbutz were lush. There was plenty of grass and shrubbery, as well as palm and several species of flowering cactus. Immediately outside the perimeter fence lay fields of vegetables like carrots and potatoes, and huge tracts of orchard in which trees branches hung low with enormous lemon and grapefruit.

It wasn’t until I finally found the main gate and left the kibbutz that I realized all this greenery had been created by human hands alone. Walk for ten minutes and you were suddenly in the midst of a seemingly endless desert. The kibbutz was but a small oasis: everything outside its reach appeared as dead and barren as the surface of the moon. Nothing lived there but a few stubborn trees, a thin stubble of hardy grass, and millions of tiny, white-shelled snails. A few days later on Google Earth (Udi kindly lent me access to the computer in the pub’s office to check my email from time to time), I saw that the cultivated areas surrounding the kibbutz formed perfect circles of green large enough to be photographed from space. (If you want to see where I am sitting at this instant, go to Google Earth. GPS coordinates: ).

I crossed the alien desert landscape, snails crunching beneath my boots every few steps. I was heading toward a dry stream bed, where I had been told I would find my rock. But when I arrived there, there was no rock, only lots of sand. What stood before me weren’t exactly dunes; it was more like a maze of jagged hills composed of compacted sediment, cut through by deep gullies that had eroded over thousands of years. With all the snail shells, it resembled an ancient seabed, long abandoned by the sea, left high and dry to suffer the brutal persistence of the elements. I descended into one of the gullies, and suddenly the aspect changed: I might have been in Afghanistan - or on Mars. This was my rehearsal room. I played for four hours, singing to the sand and the snails, until the sun descended in a furious orange ball of flame. I packed up and quickly left for fear I wouldn’t be able to find my way home in the dark.

* * * * *

Later in the week, I got the lowdown on the history of this particular kibbutz – and kibbutzim in general - from Pnina, a long-term Ze’elim resident and colorful local character. According to Pnina, a kibbutz was supposed to be a Socialist collective: all who lived there were expected to contribute equally, and share equally in the products of their labor. She said that while many kibbutzim were founded in the Twenties and Thirties by young European Zionists seeking to forge a new way of life in “their” ancestral homeland, the history of Kibbutz Ze’elim began in 1947 during a second wave of immigration to this part of the Negev at the end of WWII. The founders were a group of young Hungarian holocaust survivors. Over the years, different youth groups from elsewhere in Israel, as well as France and Morocco, joined the cause.

After several years of early struggle and setbacks, Ze’elim was eventually able to eke out an unsteady existence from the soil of the Negev. The kibbutz ideal went through a brief resurgence in the early Seventies when they became a refuge for members of the counter-culture. Most of its long-term members either arrived or were born here around this time. The number of permanent residents gradually grew from a meager 40 in 1947, to over 400 today. In addition to its resident population Kibbutz Ze’elim – like other kibbutzim – hosts many visitors from other countries.

As long as they obey the rules, vistors may stay as long as they like – some for as little as a week (like me), some for several months, or even years. Most of the visitors during my visit Ze’elim were students taking a break between high school and university (I met several from Ecuador, traveling in a group of ten, plus Mat from Germany, and Tayler from the States). They exchanged their labor for a free room and board, and exposure to a foreign culture. Then there were “travelers” like Kwan and his wife, who were using their stay as a sort of vacation within their vacation. There were also “guest laborers” (I met a group of six from Thailand) who seemed to be trying to gain a foothold in Israel, with hopes of eventually immigrating here.

The politics running the kibbutz had shifted gears over time; from a straight Socialist-Democratic approach at its inception, to a philoso phy probably best described as Socialist Realism. The kibbutz had long been hemorrhaging money, so some of its industries were handed over to a private company which had formed from within its membership. Income from extensive agricultural endeavors are now offset by commercial operations such as the hot spring (or Hamam), the pub, and tourism. The hope is that a healthy dose of capitalism will change the financial situation for the better. So far it has not. But still the kibbutz limps on, an oasis of jaded idealism in a bleak Middle Eastern landscape.

* * * * *

Udi proved to be a better man than most: a few days later he hooked me up with a Bedouin friend since his childhood, named Selem (pronounced Se-LEEM). Selem was a nice guy. He picked me up and drove me to his farm, 40 minutes from the kibbutz, in his Nissan four-wheel drive pick-up. We arrived an hour before sunset, so I just had time to check the place out before nightfall. Darkness seemed to descend more swiftly here in the desert. The farm had no electricity, only a generator which Selem made clear was for special occasions (like watching the TV). I was introduced to his wife, Selma, and his mother. Selem had 3 children; a girl, Lala, 10; and two boys: Madi, 13, and Kaed, 16. (Kead was still working at the carwash, so I didn’t meet him until later.) After the introductions, Selem said I should feel at home and treat the place as my own. So I walked around and took a few pictures, with Madi following curiously but discreetly 20 steps behind.

Selem’s farm had 50 sheep, 4 dogs, 3 cats, 2 donkeys, and a camel. According to Selem, the Bedouins of the Negev were now only semi-nomadic. Most Bedouins here were all pretty much settled on farms, and only migrated with their flocks to better grazing grounds in the spring. Selem’s kids stayed in school year round, and his wife and mother looked after them while he was away with the sheep. Most Bedouins in this area still had camels, but these ships of the desert were now relegated to the status of mere pets - or more likely, status symbols; a 4-wheel drive truck was a far more effective beast of burden these days.

While there was still some light Selem showed me my room, before driving off in his truck on some mission or other. I was housed in a sort of converted cowshed. There was no heat or power, but it was clean and comfortable enough. The shed was built on white foundation stones that appeared to have been appropriated from an ancient structure. One of these limestone blocks had carved decorations that looked distinctly Roman to me.

Selem’s wife Selma brought in some tea, which I drank with Madi, the youngest son. I settled in, and, after it got dark, practiced my songs by the light of a kerosene lantern for an hour or two, Madi sitting quietly across from me and watching my every move. He had probably never met an American before, let alone one that played the guitar and howled like a dog. But he was a forgiving audience - he seemed to find everything I did entertaining – although at times I felt a bit like a Martian that had landed in someone’s backyard.

A few hours after dark Selma brought a tray of food she had prepared. The meal that followed probably ranks among the best cuisine that has ever passed my lips. Madi and I devoured it. There was home-made flat bread cooked on an open fire, served with eggs, tahine, potato soup, and stewed spinach. There were no utensils; you simply tore off a piece of bread and formed it into a sort of spoon, then dipped it into the bowl of your choice. I was in heaven. Selem and Selma’s oldest boy, Kaed, showed up after getting off work at the carwash. He sat down on the floor with us to help polish off the food.

By around eight most of the family seemed to have settled in for the night, except for Selem, who had not yet returned. It had suddenly grown very cold, so I happily made my bed. Thin mattresses were strewn on the floor, Bedouin-style. I stacked three of them up into a comfortable pile. There was no heat or fire, but there were plenty of thick, heavy blankets. I burrowed into my bed and found that I was quite warm despite the chill.

The next day I would play my guitar and sing surrounded by the hills and stones of the naked desert. But that was tomorrow. Tonight, as I drifted toward sleep I thought of the stones the building I was lying in had been erected upon. The white limestone blocks reminded me of Jerusalem. On a brief visit there three years ago I recall being awestruck by the puniness of the old city. It was really only the size of an average American shopping mall. Could this be what all the fighting was about – a couple of thousand rocks? I remember thinking how much less it would have cost – in both money and lives – if someone had simply dismantled the whole place, packed it into boxes, and shipped it to New Mexico or Australia. There was plenty of room in either place for at least five Israels or Palestines. Then, with a gentlemanly, UN-officiated coin toss, they could have decided who got to keep the land of his forefathers, and who got to live in the land of Cheers re-runs and “All You Can Eat”.

I was sound asleep when Selem returned and popped in to check on me at about 10:30. I told him I was as happy as a Negev snail and soon fell back to sleep. At one point around 5 am I got up to take a leak on the edge of a field behind the cowshed. I stood under the great dark dome of the sky, a billion Biblical stars splayed out across it. As often happens when looking at the stars, I couldn’t help but think of my own insignificance in the face of all their haughty grandeur. But I also marveled at my luck: just to see this many stars but once in a lifetime felt like a privilege – a privilege that made life worth living.

Not far away, a dog barked. Further in the distance a generator clacked away with sullen insistence. All along the horizon the sky glowed eerily with the lights of small settlements. Even in this sparsely populated corner of the world, civilization was encroaching from all sides. Eventually the world would run out of room for all these humans.

Always be Polite, Never Tell the Truth

                  

Everything started off smoothly enough, as everything usually does before going horribly wrong.

Disasters of any magnitude rarely seem to come with any huge preamble. Okay, perhaps volcanoes are an exception, giving off a puff of smoke or two, a low grumble. When volcanoes erupt, it’s as if the earth is being kind enough to give a polite cough warning you that it is about to pummel you with pumice, bury your home in lava and ash, and incinerate you in a pyroclastic flow. But volcanoes, as I said, are an exception to the rule.

   

Bad things usually happen to good people without any warning whatsoever. Earthquakes throw children from their beds in the middle of the night, before crushing them beneath huge chunks of what was once their apartment building. Meteorites crash through suburban roofs without so much as a how-do-you-do. Fires strike unexpectedly. Boats sink in sudden storms. Planes crash out of a clear blue sky. Disasters always strike when you least expect them. That’s why they call them disasters.

 

My little disaster began - smoothly enough of course - at Attaturk International Airport, in Istanbul. At least I assume it’s called Attaturk International. To be honest I can’t really remember, though I’ve been through it several times. It’s the only airport in town, so to me it’s just The Airport. But it’s a pretty safe bet that if something is located in Turkey, it’s named after Attaturk. The Turks love him. Enormous historical photographs of him hang everywhere, Big  Brother-like, in Istanbul. He gazes down on you out of the past like a man with a stern vision of a bright future for his nation.

 

Attaturk, in case you didn’t know, was the father of modern Turkey. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, every government in Europe was saying to themselves, “I’ll have me some of that!” The British, the French and the Russians were squabbling over who would get the biggest pieces of the pie. Attaturk led the army that drove all the greedy bastards out, and founded the world’s first secular Moslem state. This simply means that, even though the fledgling country Attaturk had created was already 95% Moslem, he had the good sense to keep religion and politics separate. This is why the Turks love him. Well, most Turks.

 

There are some ultra-conservative Moslem politicos now rearing their ugly heads who would like to turn Turkey into another Iran. But most Turks don’t want that. They  lean toward Europe and away from the Middle East. Most Turks – and certainly nearly all Istanbulis – would like Turkey to remain secular, be a part of Europe, and stay as far away from the mess next door as possible. So this is why most Turks love Attaturk, and why there are so many pictures of him in Istanbul. The huge black and white photos act as visual reminders of the original idea of Turkey. Attaturk was a man with a vision, and the pictures are supposed to remind you of that vision. He also had great taste in hats. I’ve heard rumors that some men name their penises after him. But I digress. Back to the story.

 

I had arrived at The Airport more than two hours early, as required. I had removed all liquids and sharp objects from my carry-on baggage. I checked in, got my boarding pass, passed through immigration and security with no problems. I bought some smokes and a bottle of Rafi at Duty Free. I located 114, the gate from which my flight would leave, and still had an hour and a half to kill. There was a bar one minute’s walk from my gate. They had free power outlets for charging laptops and cellphones. You could smoke there. Perfect.

 

I sit down, plug in my computer, light a cigarette, and order a pint of Efes. Life can’t get any better. I do a little writing, in between chatting to a guy from Holland going to Mexico and a Filipino girl on her way to Bangkok. I smoke a few cigarettes, toss back a few more Efes. I look at my watch. The flight leaves in 20 minutes, boarding ends in 5. No problem: the gate is just a few meters away. I pay my bill, pack up my computer and leave the bar. Seconds later I arrive at gate 114, and show my boarding pass to the security guard. Big problem.

 

“Hiyir!” (No!) Says the guard. “Hiyir 114! 323!”
I re-examine my boarding pass. It clearly states that the flight leaves from gate 114. I show it to the guard.
“Hiyir. Gate change. Now 323!”

   

They had changed the gate at the last minute. There had been no announcement. They had simply changed the gate number on the monitor. And gate 323 is at the opposite end of the airport, over a kilometer away. I had 5 minutes to get there. I made the international gesture for “call them and tell them!” to the security guard, and I ran.

I ran carrying my guitar and a heavy laptop bag containing all my computer and sound gear. I ran like a man who exercised regularly, who isn’t 41, who doesn’t smoke and drink too much. I ran like my life depended on it. I passed computer monitors saying that boarding for my flight had already ended. But this did not discourage me. I had to make this flight; it was the last flight that night. The next plane to Tel Aviv was at 8 am the following morning. I may have been a fan of Attaturk, but I did not intend to spend the night at his airport. I ran like the wind. And I made it. I was five minutes late, but I made it to gate 323.

 

When I arrive at gate 323, panting heavily and drenched in sweat, there are still people waiting in line to go through final security and have their boarding passes checked. Disturbed by the sound of my labored breathing, they turn their heads to look at me. Some smirk, a few chuckle. I am a familiar figure of fun: The Guy Who Doesn’t Know. I am the guy who doesn’t know that they always change the gate at the last minute for flights between Turkey and Israel. At this moment I fail to see the humor. I have just run over a kilometer in under ten minutes carrying heavy luggage. I am pretty fucking pissed off.

 

“What the hell?” I blurt out to the flight attendant as she happily examines my boarding pass. “Why did you change the gate without warning anybody?”

 

“Security,” she responds cheerfully.

 

“Well why wasn’t I warned when I checked in that the gate would be changed?”

 

“Security.”

 

Right. Whatever. At least I won’t be sleeping on the floor tonight. I board the plane and take my seat, still sweating like a rapist. The flight takes off 15 minutes late. The trip is only an hour and a half. Land of Milk and Honey here I come.

 

* * * * *

 

Arriving at Ben Yehuda International, Tel Aviv, I had a different surprise awaiting me: a five hour interrogation by Israeli Immigaration officials. Everything was shalom and smiles until the Pakistani visa in my passport sent red flags shooting up like Hezbollah rockets.

 

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to speak to an Immigration Officer,” I was politely told. “Please go wait in that room over there.”

   

I did as requested. I went and sat in the waiting room. And I waited. And waited. And waited. There were four guys sitting in the room with me. All of them wore expressions that told me they had been through this before, and that it was not going to be fast, easy, or fun. It reminded me of going to jail in New York, except not so crowded and without the pervasive smell of urine.

 

“What are you in for?” I asked the guy sitting across from me, just to lighten the mood in the room. He didn’t laugh. Turns out he had been to Iran for a kidney transplant a few years back, and now was treated like a criminal whenever he returned to Israel. Apparently even having Moslem organs is suspicious to these people. The other guys in the room didn’t speak English. We all spent a lot of time examining the patterns of tiling on the floor.

 

Finally my name is called. I go sit in another room and am asked to wait by some junior level Immigration geek.

 

“Sure,” I say cheerfully. I am a friendly American traveler, from a country strongly allied with Israel, here to make a record, spend some cash (lots of it, actually). I have nothing to fear. I am an artist, here to work with Israeli musicians. What do I have to hide? Alot apparently.

 

I wait some more. I read The Economist and listen to some Bollywood on my iPod. Time passes. Much time. Then the junior level Immigration geek returns and asks me some boring questions, taking note of my answers on a blank sheet of paper.

 

He: Why did you go to Pakistan?

 

Me: To see the country and record some drummers.

 

He: Why did you have to go to Pakistan to record drummers?

 

Me: Because that’s where Pakistani drummers live. I also went to India. (He
wasn’t interested in this.)

 

He: What is your home address?

 

Me: Well, I don’t really have one, actually. I’m currently living in Bali.

 

He: Bali? In Indonesia? (Big Mistake Number One: Indonesia is primarily a Moslem country)

 

Me: Yes, but most Balinese are Hindus, if that’s what you were thinking.

 

He: If I what is what I was thinking?

 

Me: Never mind.

 

He: Where are you coming from?

 

Me: Istanbul. I went there to spend New Year’s with my girlfriend’s family. (Big Mistake Number Two: Girlfriend from Moslem country)

 

He: Your girlfriend is Turkish?

 

Me: Yes,  but she is not religious.

 

He: You don’t have a home address?

 

Me: No, not really. (Big Mistake Number Three: Homeless) I stay in hotels. (I should have lied here and given my mother’s address in New Jersey) I used to live in New York, but I left. I’ve been traveling the world for 2 years.

 

He: Why did you leave New York?

 

Me: Well, honestly, I got sick of it. New York is too damned expensive. And then when Bush got back in, I got really depressed so I decided to leave the States.

 

He: You don’t like President Bush?

 

Me: Actually, I think he’s the worst president we’ve had during my lifetime. (Big Mistake Number Four: Bush-hater)

 

There was a long pause while he considered my answer. Then he said, “Please wait here,” and got up and left the room.

 

I waited, and then waited some more. This time while I was waiting I didn’t read or listen to music. I began to worry. My flight had arrived at 1:30 am. It was now 4 am. This was getting serious. Was I going to be deported? I had been to Israel twice before to play concerts – the stamps were in my passport. I had never blown anything up on previous visits. Did they think I had now become a Taliban sympathizer after visiting a few Moslem countries? Could they really believe I was some kind of shoe-bomb wearing terrorist? I mean George Bush is a bad president. 70% of America now understands this to be true. It’s too bad it took America such a long time to wake up to the fact, but did stating that fact really make me a national security risk?

 

I’ll spare you most of the rest. It was mere repetition for two and a half more hours. They kept sending in higher and higher-ranking pen-pushers. I was interrogated by four in all. The last was a super-bitch from hell who would have felt quite at home in Nazi Germany. They all asked me the same questions again and again – an old cop trick to see if your story remains consistent. I had nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide. I had told the truth the entire time. My big mistake. I kept telling them, “I’m just a musician! Open my bags! They're filled with instuments and recording gear! I’m here to make a record! I’m spending thousands of dollars! I’m working with Israeli musicians! I don’t care about religion! (My Only Lie: Actually I hate religion: It has caused more problems than it has solved.)

 

They asked me for phone numbers of people I knew in Israel who could confirm my story. I only had two: the number of my hotel, and the number of a girl I would be subletting an apartment from. Nobody answered the phone – it was now six in the morning. Eventually during the last interrogation session, fueled by fatigue, boredom and desperation, I took out my guitar and started playing a new song: Three Legged Dog. I don’t know whether they hated the music or were so shocked by my audacity that they let me go. They finally let me go. They gave me back my passport and said, “Welcome to Israel.” Some welcome.

 

15 minutes later I had located my checked bag (thankfully, no one had stolen it during the five hours it had been sitting, unguarded in the baggage area) and reached my hotel by 8 am. I checked into The Bell, a sketchy place near the end of Allenby, nestled comfortably amongst all the go-go bars and prostitutes. After all the evening’s stress, I really felt like a drink. A few all-night places were still open so I bought a bottle of beer. But I didn’t have the energy to pop the cap. Instead I threw my bags on the floor of my room, collapsed onto the bed, and slept.

 

Shalom.

Sick Days, Sufi Nights, Drugs, Guns, and Transvestites

Lahore - Peshawar - Khyber Pass
August 1, 2006

The bug is back, bigtime. In deference to the delicate sensibilities of certain readers of this newslettter, I'll spare you the unpleasant details of my ongoing gastrointestinal affliction. Suffice to say that I've enjoyed much more quality time with General Musharaf ("The General", for short), the aggressive little gecko who lives behind my toilet, than I would have preferred.

The room smells of mold, stale cigarette smoke, and an unhealthy whiff of vomit. And all these odors are poorly concealed behind industrial strength air freshioner. Every morning a leathery, bearded old goat bangs vigorously on the door to collect the day’s room rent, as if he’s worried I may expire before settling my bill.

I've travelled  around the subcontinent a few times now, and not only has my spelling not improved, my resistance to local bugs hasn't either. I've never had this many stomache complaints before. It wouldn't bother me so much if I wasn't wasting so much of my time puking in cheap hotel toilets. It all started in Amritsar, and the little bastards have never really left my system.

Maybe it's a Punjabi thing. I'd been trying out much more street food of late, just because it smelled so good. I think my stomache troubles may have stemmed from the ever-present dust, which finds its way into everything at this time of year, just before the monsoon.

I've spent the last week lurching from my bed to the salad bar at Pizza Hut across the street. Oh, the shame of it.

Yes, they have Pizza Hut here. Pizza is trendy all across Asia at the moment. It’s right up there with dog food – both are big status symbols. I have also seen KFC, McDeath, and Dunkin’ Donuts. KFC is particularly popular, as Punjabis are big chicken lovers.

All of these American fast food chains are very expensive by Pakistani standards. Families dress up for a big night out at McDonald’s. As loathe as I am to support the forces of American gastronomic imperialism, salad, bread and water seem to be the only things I can hold down – even temporarily – and Pizza Hut has the 100 rupee all-you-can-eat salad deal. I stagger across the street to eat there every day for a week until the stomach bugs abate.

These days and nights are punctuated by regular power cuts. Every couple of hours the city turns black. Most businesses have their own generators, but in my ignorance, I have chosen an establishment without back-up power. So my nights' work are regularly interrrupted by forced breaks. All I can do is smoke, listen to the streetlife outside, and wait for the power to come back on.

Surprisingly, I've found the blackouts useful and productive. I had to go out and track down a few candles so I could still see my keyboard. Now when the power dies, I light a candle, lounge in the semidarkness and allow my mind to wander. The dissonant voices of the muezzin crackle above the low rumble of auto rickshaws and the shouting of men unloading the night delivery trucks.

Words and melodies seep from the sweat-stained walls in flickering light into my semi-consciousness. Ideas which wouldn't ordinarily show their faces in the piercing light of day, or under the sickly green flourescent glare, materialize in the shuddering semi-darkness. A sort of honesty emanates from this place. 

* * * * * * * * * * *

Sufi Night: Small village. Carnival atmosphere. A village fair, with Pakistani-style wrestling in the afternoon; greased men in loincloths attacking each other in the dirt, surrounded by a ring of local fans. Excruciatingly bad PA. Play-by-play announcements seem to emanate from a 20 foot tall distortion box.

Later, the competition is between Sufi music groups. The reek of hashish pervades the graveyard in which this weekly rite is held. Transvestite dancers writhe suggestively among the graves of saints.

One man/woman, in an orange dress, makes a very convincing lady. As the lightest skinned guy in the crowd, I was immediately the object of his/her attentions, much to the chagrin of the other men present. For them, this was as close as most of them would come to touching something resembling female flesh - flesh that did not belong to a wife or sister. I'm still not completely convinced that the transvestite in orange was a man. But in this country, he must have been. I was told he/she was mine for the night, if I wanted to pay. I declined.

The other transvestites are easily identifiable by their five-o-clock shadows, and, yes, moustaches. The musicians are extrememly loud, and I've been playing punk clubs for 20 years. Multiple drummers with two-headed drums attack them with sticks. Percusssionists back them up with metal bars clanged together like deafening castanets from hell. It is part religious celebration, part village festival, part rock concert, and part go-go bar.

Back at the hotel, a bit stoned on hash, I edit some of the earlier music sessions, and later managed to fit in a quick recording session with a local flute virtuoso. Good stuff. He didn’t stop playing, and I didn’t stop recording; I just pointed at a new instrument when I’d got enough on tape.

My guts are feeling well enough again to leave for Peshawar. Seven and a half hours on the bus. This vehicle features a variety of tortures: flatulent businessmen, but no smoking and no toilet;. Jean Claude Van Damme movies dubbed in Urdu and played at top volume: the height of luxury.

Thank god for the cheap and easily obtainable Pakistani Valium, or I may have gone postal. You even get a free sandwich made of wonderbread and processed yellow cheese. Somehow you get the feeling that the finest culture and cuisine America has to offer is just not making it over here.

Then on toward the Khyber Pass. Men, everywhere. Too many men. Who needs them? Men are dull. Give me a woman any day. Where do they hide? Wherever they are, I hope they’re having more fun than the men, who always look cranky and miserable, holding their guns; probably undersexed.

* * * * * * * * * *

I finally arrive in Peshawar , the last stop before Afghanistan . I immediately hook up with a local guide of dubious repute who claims he can get me “anything”. I give him my list. It’s a short one: Musicians and beer. Within minutes we are in a motorcycle-rickshaw and headed for the Smuggler’s Bazaar.

Anything is available there: mostly guns, drugs and liquor. Predictably the beer negotiation takes 2 hours and several cups of tea to complete. In the processes the owner of the establishment tries to sell me almost every form of contraband you can imagine, including a suitcase full of large, flat pancakes of heroin sealed in Saran Wrap. The value of this case I can only guess at, but it would probably worth a couple of million on the streets of LA.

When I show no interest in the H out come the weapons: Kalishnikovs, Uzis, pistols of all stripes (both real and copied), walking sticks with concealed daggers, James Bond-style pens that shoot single bullets. I am tempted to buy one of these, but after the harassment I received over the camel bone, I am a bit wary about attempting to smuggle small firearms on an international flight.

At one point a grenade launcher was furtively produced from beneath a bed, then quickly hidden away again. They hand me an automatic weapon and take my picture: a souvenir. This is what most tourists come here for: to handle the guns, and ogle the drugs. Finally the deal is settled:  a case of beer for 2 bucks a can (highway robbery here, but what can you do?) To sweeten the deal, he throws in a token but hefty lump of opium (purely for “research purposes”, of course).

* * * * * * * * * *

Later, I record some brilliant local folk music at someone’s house: down-home and countrified. The main instrument is a 3 string banjo-like contraption. Percussion provided by giant metal bars whacked together like industrial castanets. It sounds like dirty delta blues if you added harmonium and eastern vocal trills. All very strange. They rock like nobody’s business. Unfortunately, every song is basically the same tempo, same groove; so their lack of versatility is not so useful for my purposes. But these are not session cats, they use music to get closer to God. I pay them handsomely, but these guys are not interested in any illicit tips.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Now I have to make my big decision: to Afghanistan or not to Afghanistan . It's not an easy decision, but it’s not looking good.

Both of my Kabul-based advisors say no, do not come. Tourist touts and guides, usually eager for the American dollar, are even wary. Of course they offer to do it for triple the usual rate, but this is not unusual. In the third world, money is valued above life. The road from the Khyber to Kabul is no longer safe, even for local traders. Vehicles traveling the road have been attacked.

The violence, previously contained in the south, is reportedly moving swiftly north toward Kabul . The southern warlords (read druglords), best described as the local mafiosi, don’t want any pesky foreigners spoiling their business. They are heavily armed and anxious to profit from this year’s bumper opium crop. And these goons don’t fuck around. You could wake up one morning with your torso in one village, and your head in another.

Public opinion has rapidly turned against Karzai. They used to call him the “Mayor of Kabul,” due to the limited reach of his influence, the area immediately surrounding Kabul . Now he’s just a local joke: an American puppet, increasingly forced to resort to the time-honored Afghan practices of corruption and cronyism, in an attempt to keep the lid on the roiling vat of chaos that the country has become.

The Taliban have gained strength again because people trust them more than the druglords. Now NATO is moving in and the skirmishes between the international forces and the Taliban are transpiring closer and closer to the capital. Following a truck accident in May in which several innocent bystanders were killed and injured by an American driven vehicle, riots enveloped the city. Foreign businesses were looted and torched. Tourist hotel windows were sprayed with machine-gun fire. Bodies have begun to be found on the streets of Kabul .

To add to the fun, two Israeli soldiers have just been kidnapped by the Hezbalah in Lebanon . Now the Israeli army has decided they have a good excuse to start shelling Lebanon to wipe out the Hezballah once and for all, incurring unknown numbers of civilian casualties. To say the least this news is not being covered favorably in the Pakistani press. According to most people I’ve spoken to, Israel is viewed as a US colony in most of the Moslem world: the Jews don’t belong there, the country doesn’t belong there, and officially it doesn’t even exist. Long story short: light skinned, non-Moslem, Americans are not likely to be greeted warmly in Afghanistan .

But at the very least I want to make it to the Khyber Pass. I have come this far; and I feel I owe it to myself to catch at least a glimpse of the place, no matter how fleeting. I hire a driver and an armed guard. The guard is mandatory, as the pass is located in tribal areas, outside the jurisdiction or control of the Pakistani government, army or police. The driver is a clubfooted clown, the type that drives with one foot on each pedal, and feels that overtaking other vehicles on blind corners will compensate for a small penis. I have felt safer driving with my half-blind, delusional grandmother than with this suicidal lunatic.

I am not allowed to stop and take pictures. I’m told the local men will shoot you if they think you are photographing their women. Who would bother? Every inch of flesh is covered, and at this distance you can’t even see their eyes. The local ladies resemble large black potato sacks, lumbering down dirt paths beneath heavy burdens, as their men-folk loiter about, toying with automatic weapons like children with birthday toys. Still, I manage to sneak off a few shots.

I came here to learn more about Islam and its adherents, but I find myself feeling more and more distanced from these people.

Well, here I am, finally: The Khyber Pass. My feelings are mixed. I am excited to be here at last. I had originally planned to travel from Delhi to Istanbul overland - a two and a half month trip which would have taken me from Rajasthan (in northern India) , through northern Pakistan , Afghanistan , across Iran and Turkey .

Crossing the pass into Kabul had long represented in my mind the symbolic peak of my journey. But things haven’t quite worked out as planned. I have made it barely a third of the way. Bad luck, dental delays and intestinal distress managed to turn all my plans into dust.

But I am not disappointed. I did what I could with what little time I had available: I learned a lot about football: locked in an Amritsar hotel room with only the World Cup and the shits to stave off the interminable boredom; I escaped being drugged and robbed in Jaisalmer; I entertained thinly veiled marriage proposals from Punjabi farm girls; I ate opium and jammed with Thar desert gypsies; I slept alone under the stars; I danced with transvestites among the graves of Sufi saints; I took many pictures; I stood in the rain with crowds of ecstatic people as the first rains of the monsoon erupted from the sky; I made a healthy start on a novel; I recorded six music groups, gathering enough rhythm tracks for the next Firewater album; I was robbed only once (a cell phone), but otherwise managed to hang on to my computer and other pricey recording gear. I made some new friends. Weighed with these measures the trip was a success.

But in terms of ground covered, it was a dismal failure. In order to complete the original plan, I’ll need to return next year, starting in Kabul , and continue on west from there. I still  want to experience Iran and rural T urkey . I want to do more recording, writing, seeing. And I’ll do it, providing things have cooled down a bit by then, and the Middle East “conflict” hasn’t erupted into world war III, But for now the clock has run out. I’m due for a date with a beautiful girl and a Turkish dentist in Istanbul on August 1^st. It’s time to head west, back to “civilization”.

Suddenly the guard grabs my camera and hands me his gun. Time for the mandatory souvenir photograph. For now my trip ends here: standing on the cusp of the Hindu Kush with a machine gun in my hand.

***************************************************

Apologies for any typos. I'm back in Istanbul and I've had a few too many of those Efes beers I promised myself at the journey's end. The Bosphorus looks amazing tonight: inky black smeared with milky streaks of light; huge ships snaking their way through the narrow passage. 

 

Some old men were singing folksongs up the hill, where I buy my smokes. I stopped and listened for a while, and they didn't mind. I'm still glad to be alive.

Bye Bye NYC

I’m preparing to leave NYC for good (for now) in a couple of weeks, and it feels right. I’m going to travel overland from Delhi to Istanbul, by way of Pakistan, Afghanistan (I hope), Iran, and of course western Turkey. The trip will take 2 months and I’ll be covering a lot of ground: about 2,800 miles (4,500 km) as the crow flies. I won’t be using wings.

For everyone who thinks it’s crazy (Ma) for an American to visit these places at a time when respect for America is at a low ebb (to put it mildly), let me tell you I have my reasons. The first is that I want to research a book. It’s unclear yet what form the book will take, but I suspect it may be equal parts travelogue, confessional, and black comedy. If the truth gets too ugly I may be forced to take refuge in fiction. That’s about all I know at the moment.

I plan to write in a more immediate style. So be warned, the next slew of words will be less polished and more frequent. I want to record everything, the whole experience, with honesty. So I’m going to try to repress my natural tendency for obsessive self-editing, and attempt to improve on the snail-like frequency of past missives. I’m hoping the new approach will result in more immediate and detailed writing. Expect plenty of grammatical blunders, embarrassing personal revelations, and other gibberish. I hope you can bear with me.

Another reason I’m going is that I simply want to see the places I’ve been hearing about on the news since I was a kid. Our country has been meddling in this part of the world for as long as I can remember, and I still feel as though I understand nothing of the customs, the culture, or the feelings of the people who live there. I’m sick of getting my news from the news. I want to see for myself the result of our elected officials’ foreign policy. I want to meet an Afghan face to face and find out what he has to say. And I want to cross the Khyber Pass into Kabul. I want to see the sunrise on the Hindu Kush.

I’m also hoping to track down and record with musicians along the way. Whether this is possible I don’t know. But I’ve jacked up the laptop for recording, and I’m packing a microphone and a travel guitar. We’ll see if I get any takers. I will also be taking a lot of pictures. So with less than 2 weeks to go, I’m paring down my possessions to just those things that fit in a backpack. The rest is getting thrown into storage or into the street. (I would have left already but dental necessity precluded it; Afghanistan may be known for many things but the quality of its dentistry is not among them.) Assuming I survive the trip -- and the chances are good, if I don’t do anything too stupid -- I’ll wind up in Istanbul on August 1st for a celebratory beer, on a terrace overlooking the Bosphorus. Wish me luck.

The Walls Have Eyes

The Walls Have Eyes
Originally uploaded by Tod A.

See more photos from this series at http://www.flickr.com/photos/postcardsfromtheothersideoftheworld/

The Dead Rat

One damp morning about a month ago I awoke to the usual cacophony of crows and staggered from my marble-floored Kolkata flat to my office job, just one flight down. That particular morning was one of the few upon which I thanked God (if there was one) that the office was just one flight down instead of one flight up; or, worse, in a different building altogether; or, unthinkably, on the other side of town.

The previous night had seen copious drinking. My friend Debashish had been over, and we’d managed to dispose of all of his whiskey as well as several bottles of my beer. Fortunately all I really had to do was pry myself from the monsoon-sodden sheets, dump a little cold water over my head, and let gravity drag me down to work. And yet even this presented certain challenges to a man in my condition. On that particular morning I was glad of the close proximity of the office.

At other times I was prone to do a lot of complaining – to myself, of course – that the people at the office knew my every movement. I am a fairly social person by nature; but in India I found that I had fight to maintain any sense of privacy, at least in the Western sense. The average Indian grows up in a house full of relatives – some close, some more distant – so the concept of privacy is never a part of the picture. Everybody feels it is their right to know what you are up to at all times of day. Anyone who doesn’t willingly provide said information is considered secretive and strange.

Admittedly as an English-speaking American in Calcutta I’d had it pretty damned easy. I had been at the job for 2 or 3 months re-writing (read ‘plagiarizing’) British and American textbooks for the Indian market. I was paid $500 a month and given a snazzy three-room apartment with kitchen, private bathroom, and cable TV -- pretty luxurious for India. Though the $500 salary may not sound much by western standards, it was more than double what any Indian employee at the company was paid. My apartment was more spacious than my boss’s house, and I mostly had my place to myself; whereas he shared his place with an extended family that included various in-laws and grandparents.

Unfortunately plagiarism wasn’t exactly the kind of work that set my creative spirit on fire. And in light of the weird and peculiarly Indian flavor of English evidenced in advertising, on television, and the English newspapers, I began to see my job as largely irrelevant. When one billion people had been conditioned to understand that a newspaper headline reading ”Pass-outs Uptake Going On “ referred to admissions for postgraduate study, and not to a failing de-tox program -- who was I to tell them any different? Indian English had a bizarre poetry that I quite enjoyed. National newspapers with millons of readers would regularly provide gems like this one from an art review in a Bangalore paper: “Since centuries, the different facets of nature have been the tried and tested means, where one usually doesn’t go wrong.”

Clearly something had gone wrong; but why should I spoil everyone’s fun by telling them? Besides, I was badly outnumbered. I was the lone lunatic on the beach struggling to turn back the tide; and no, not just the tide of hopeless grammar. I became well known in my neighborhood as the unstable crank that insisted people wait in line at the liquor store instead of plowing into the crowd like it was a rugby scrum. I was the uppity foreigner who picked fights with motorists when they drove straight at me with horns blaring, expecting me to leap subserviently out of the way like every other poor sucker in the country who was to poor to pilot a dangerous weapon with a license to kill.

I began to fall victim to the sense of futility that every foreigner inevitably experiences on having spent any stretch of time in India. It wasn’t the poverty that bothered me. It wasn’t the garbage or the open sewers or the cockroaches or the starving dogs or the human shit in the gutters or the smell or the flies. It wasn’t or the millions whose bedroom was a patch of cement, whose shower was a hand pump, and whose toilet was the gutter at the side of the road. The thing that really began to depress me was the way that middle- and upper-class Indians dealt with it. For the most part they dealt with it by doing nothing. And like them, I started to grow cynical. So I began to take liberties.

I knew that the company needed me more than I needed it. This was obvious. I was working for a school of English and I was the only fluent ‘native speaker’ they had. I was part teacher, part editor, but mostly mascot: I was the token whitey, the obligatory gringo. I knew if I was ever fired I could find work just about anywhere on the subcontinent – or anywhere in South East Asia, for that matter – inside a week. People in that part of the world desperately wanted to speak English. And by the pure luck of my birthplace, I had what they wanted. So, feeling slightly guilty about it, I took liberties. For the sake of my own sanity I had to.

My appearances at headquarters became fewer and further between. Instead of working in the crowded and noisy office where honestly I found it difficult to concentrate due the general level of chaos that accompanies any Indian endeavor, I worked upstairs alone in my air-conditioned flat. And instead of wearing the company-prescribed uniform of business slacks, polished shoes, shirt and tie, I strolled about in Army surplus shorts, a T-shirt and sandals. But hell, it was 100 degrees and near 100 percent humidity every day. I may have been willing to work for the publishing black market, but I was not willing to die for it.

Although I kept to myself and played by my own rules, I got my work done. And let’s face it, I was the only one on the company roster who could do my job. So I took liberties, and my aberrant behavior was reluctantly tolerated. Indians are conformists as a rule. Individuality is not so much frowned upon as regarded with a face that registers both confusion and pity. Anyone who goes against the grain must be either dangerous or crazy or both. In my neighborhood I was regarded as a loose canon; at the office, an object of envy and mild scorn. Indian society, as you may know, is highly stratified. Even today, nearly fifty years after the official abolition of caste discrimination, the Indian social system operates much has it has for the last three to five millennia, though this would only become clear to me on the morning I spotted the dead rat. As much as I did my best to avoid the office, it was made clear to me that I needed to show my face at least once a week. And it was on one of these occasions that the dead rat incident occurred.

****

As I made my way down the stairs, struggling under the weight of the aforementioned heavy hangover, I paused for a last-minute cigarette on the landing. Whilst flicking my ash out the window I happened to spy a couple of rotund ladies avoiding some small gray item on the sidewalk, immediately in front of the street entrance to the office. Leaning over the windowsill, I identified an injured rat in its final death throes, following some apparently tragic accident.

Perhaps it had fallen from the roof of the building or had been hit by a car. Maybe it had been captured by one of Calcutta’s many crows and then accidentally dropped. At any rate, at the moment I spotted it, it was clearly dying, its spine hopelessly twisted, as it writhed in pain on the sidewalk. Employees, business partners, and students arriving at the school, were forced to either squeeze around or leap over it on their way into the building.

I finished my cigarette and entered the office. “Hey, there’s a dying rat blocking the front door,” I said to the receptionist by way of salutation. “You want me to move it?”

“A dead what?” she asked, joining her eyebrows.

“Rat. Not dead yet, still dying.”

“Oh!” she said, screwing her not unattractive face up in disgust, and didn’t give it a second thought.

I made my way through the cramped and brightly painted reception area and into the academic offices, where I was supposed to do my work. The portly Malabika was on her way out as I was coming in.

“Mr. Tod,” she said, flashing her familiar unconvincing smile.

There was no love lost between Malabika and me. After three months I still had no idea what her job description might be. She acted as a sort of receptacle for odd jobs. But no matter what she turned her hand to it invariably yielded disaster. As her unceasing blunders had resulted in many additional hours of work for me, I felt I owed her no contrived pleasantries. I was convinced that she was either somebody’s unwanted cousin or the daughter of an investor in the company. She for her part was convinced, I am certain, that I was an utter charlatan engaged in bilking the company of large sums by needlessly changing letters of the alphabet from upper to lower case, and by moving irrelevant commas and periods around.

“Malabika,” I said, my expression fairly dripping concern, “there’s a rat in dire need of medical attention lying in front of the entrance to the building. Is there anything we can do?”

Malabika’s English was none too good, and my saying things I knew she wouldn’t understand was my little way of torturing her. Of course it wasn’t Malabika’s fault that she was simple and short on talent, but her existence annoyed me. Plus, she was fat and spoilt.

“Ah?” she said, perplexed as usual.

“There’s a rat dying at the front door. What should we do?”

“Uh!” she said, her saccharine façade crumbling. “Tell Indro.” And she waddled off in disgust.

Indrojit, or Indro for short, was my favorite person at the office. His English was not great, but he was genuine and friendly and was always picking up new phrases. In return, he taught me a little Bengali (or Bangla), the language of Bengal. Indro had a sincere and winning smile, the kind you instantly know you can trust. He did all the accounting and also managed the office -- and was only 22. Indro was sharp and worked hard; he was obviously going places, though how far he could go at this shambles of a company was anyone’s guess.

“Indro,” I said, as we went enacted the ritual of the five-part New York hipster handshake I had taught him, “I’m sorry to bother you with this, but there’s a rat in front of the office, and, well, considering we’re just launching the business here, maybe, is there somebody who could get rid of it?” (The company had just moved the office to the relatively swanky neighborhood of Bollygunge.)

“A rat?” he said. “A dead rat?”

“I’m not sure if it’s dead yet. But it’s not looking too healthy either. And it seems to be, well, not exactly attracting new customers.”

“Oh, Mr. Tod. You are never serious. Is there really a rat, really?”

“Yes, really. Should I go down and move it? I would have done it already, but to be honest, I’m feeling a bit queasy this morning,” I said.

“Kweeshy. What is it meaning?” He asked.

“Not entirely tip-top. Not sick, but not exactly…” I began.

“Oh, Mr. Tod. You are drinking completely too much beer, isn’t it? Of this I am convinced.”

“Well, you know…editing is thirsty work.” I mumbled lamely. “But about the rat…it’s probably not good for business.”

“I will inform The Peon immediately. Don’t worry. Rat is taken care of.”

“Are you sure? Because I don’t mind doing it, if nobody else is going to.”

“Mr. Tod. I will see to it. Avit will take care.”

“Are you sure?”

“Definitely.”

****

Avit was an unassuming, gracious and graceful guy (introduced to me by my coworkers as “The Peon”) whose job it was to make the tea, open doors, run errands, and generally be bossed around by people with half his IQ, like Malabika for example. He was employed by the school, and it was his duty to do these things for all the employees. I eventually discovered that his name was Avit.

Living in Calcutta I had had servants thrust upon me. Lots of them. I use the word servants because that is how upper and middle class Indians refer to them, and that is how they are treated. While India’s privileged classes were prospering hand over fist largely due to the I T and “outsourcing” boom, there was still a significant underclass kept in a position of financial dependency and servitude. Middle and upper class people (my friend Debashish included) had no qualms about shouting orders at someone who, by accident of birth, bore the misfortune of serving them.

Maybe it’s my American middle class upbringing; or maybe it’s my Yankee blood; but I have never been comfortable being served. For those unfamiliar with the term Yankee, we are Americans who hail from the Eastern Seaboard, usually of distant British extraction, who pride themselves on their independence and self-sufficiency. Like most Yankees, I prefer doing things for myself; being served always makes me feel slightly guilty. Even maids and waiters make me vaguely uncomfortable. I insisted on saluting Avit as I opened doors for him, and thanked him when he served me tea. This amused and confused him no end. He was used to being barked at. I think he thought I was crazy, but harmless.

Avit was a Brahmin. The office had been forced to hire a Brahmin servant because the boss and some of the employees were also Brahmins, and Brahmins can only have their food prepared by fellow Brahmins. Most modern, educated Indians would of course never admit this, but it is true. While it may seem strange to a Westerner that a member of the highest caste could still be a servant, it is only because of lingering contamination issues.

India’s caste system is so vast, so intricate, and so indelibly printed on the national psyche, that for foreigners comprehension of it proves elusive. There are four major caste groups. They are, in descending order: Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants), and Shudras (menials). In addition to these there is one group considered so abhorrent by the other four that they are not even included in the system. These are the Untouchables, outcastes, or Scheduled Castes.

But within these five major groups there are an almost infinite number of sub-castes. For example, as one of my coworkers explained, even within the warrior caste a distinction is made between the descendents of former cavalry officers and former foot soldiers. He, from the infantry caste, had fallen in love with a woman from the cavalry caste, and there had been considerable inter-family upheaval before the marriage had been allowed to proceed. This was considered quite progressive thinking for the time.

Everyone within a given caste can identify by surname a person’s subcaste, as well as the relative position of that subcaste within the greater hierarchy. Multiply this by 30,000 and you’ll begin to get some idea just how vast and intricate is the subject. For most modern educated Indians caste no longer officially exists. Everyone knows about it but nobody wants to discuss it. Caste is the elephant in India’s sitting room: the thing that’s too big to ignore, but too embarrassing to bring up; caste is the dead rat that nobody will touch, malingering there in plain view, ever so slowly rotting from within.

*****

The day wore on. I was waiting to meet with my immediate superior, a woman named Smita, who despite her utter lack of proficiency in English, oversaw the academic department. Smita may have been no academic, but she was a crack businesswoman. She kept the leaking ship that was the company afloat through sheer force of will and lack of sleep, guiding it erratically yet determinedly through murky entrepreneurial waters.

However, due to her inability to ever decline a phone call, Smita was only ever available to her employees in blocks of time not to exceed two minutes. A fifteen-minute meeting with Smita took at least an hour and a half, due to the ceaseless interruptions. I sat down outside her office door to wait my turn.

The job of designing the layout of the new office had of course been assigned by default to Malabika, the person least qualified for the job. She had proven herself to have as little natural talent in this endeavor as in anything else. The office was claustrophobic to say the least. Somehow Malbika had managed to transform a beautiful, airy space with eleven-foot ceilings into a claustrophobia-inducing rabbit warren of people, desks, chairs and inefficiency.

The reception area door was blocked by the chairs in front of the receptionist’s desk. Office doors opened into the corners of rooms or onto the backs of cubicles. Everything was in the way of everything else. Nobody could ever find what they were looking for, especially the person they needed to talk to. Workspaces had seemingly been assigned at random. Doors were spring-loaded to slam shut. As you could rarely get all the way into a room without asking someone to move their chair, logjams of people developed in doorways.

The office was in possession of one stapler, one tape dispenser, and three pencils. This was not because pencils and staplers were prohibitively expensive in India, it was only due to bad management. Malbika’s ultimate dream was to install a costly intercom system in the office. This was not so that employees could communicate with each other, but so that she could boss the servants around without having to get up off of her fat ass.

As I sat in Smita’s office waiting for her to end yet another interminable phone call, it struck me that all this incredible inefficiency was simply a way to turn one person’s job into three. India, being a country with no shortage of people, had to find a way to keep them all busy. On construction sites workers carried rocks by hand, one by one. In Indian supermarkets there was one person to advise you on your purchase, one person to remove items from the shelves and place them in your basket, one to take the items from your basket and put them in front of the cashier, one cashier to ring up the sales, one person to bag the groceries, and one to check your receipt at the door.

Even the two-minute blocks of Smita’s time uninterrupted by phone calls were punctuated by people poking their heads into the office to ask her endless questions: Have you taken your lunch? Where is Sangita? Mr. Chowdhury is waiting to see you. Have you taken your tea? Do you have the stapler?

True to form Indro stuck his head into the room to ask Smita an urgent financial question. As she was already on the phone, I took the opportunity to ask him for an update on the rat situation.

“Rat? Yes, sweeper should take care of it.”

“Wait, so Avit hasn’t moved it yet?” At least two hours had passed since I had first reported the existence of the rat.

“Mr. Tod, no!” He laughed heartily at my cultural naïvite. “Avit is Brahmin. He cannot touch. Avit will tell sweeper.”

“Oh. Well, what’s he waiting for?”

Before Indro could answer me, Smita got off the phone and they immediately launched into a highly animated ten-minute discussion in Bengali. The English phrases ”cash”, ”check clear” and “payment” popped up frequently, so I assumed it was yet another cash-flow emergency. Resigned again to waiting I recalled my first encounter with the sweeper, my introduction to the Indian servant class; it had taken place without warning and probably had scarred us both for life.

He had arrived unexpected early one morning: a surly gent with a straw broom. I was new to Calcutta, new to the job, and new to India’s lingering caste system. I had only just moved into my new digs. It was 8:00 am and the air temperature was already topping 90 degrees. While showering I had been hit with the melodic inspiration for a new song. Thinking myself in the privacy of my own flat, I had rushed from the shower and picked up my recently purchased Indian guitar (“A genuine Givson,” the salesman had boasted), and was in the process of strumming and crooning away stark naked in the center of the bedroom, when an aggressive mustachioed man burst through the door.

Only the distant cawing of crows broke the pregnant silence in the room. He stared at me; I stared at him. He looked at the guitar -- which thankfully covered my genitalia -- shook his head in disgust, turned abruptly, and left the room.

“Hey! Have you ever heard of knocking?” I called feebly after him.

After our initial encounter we never spoke. But he came every Saturday at 8:00 am without fail, and always entered without knocking. Instead, his arrival was always preceded by lots of banging and coughing in the hallway, after which he would come in and pretend to sweep out my room, leaving as soon as possible. As I peered from underneath the soggy sheets feigning sleep, I could tell by his sour expression that he was convinced all foreigners were inherently perverse and devoid of musical taste, which of course we mostly are.

The impending financial catastrophe seemingly averted for one more day, Indro shut the door behind him and I finally got my allocated two minutes of Smita’s attention. Apparently I was to leave the next morning on the 6 am Doon Express for Dera Doon, clear on the other side of the country and 36 hours away by train.

I took the news in stride. I often found myself being packed off at a moment’s notice to someplace on the map I‘d never heard of where on arrival I would be informed that as honored guest I was expected to give a one hour lecture I hadn’t been asked to prepare on a subject I knew next to nothing about. 150 Indians would listen politely as Mr. Tod From America waxed polemic on The Future of English in a Global Economy. This was actually one of the more entertaining aspects of the job.

I gleaned what few scraps of information I could from Smita between phone calls, and headed upstairs to get down to my editing work. I had a book to finish before I left the next day: Business Conversation Skills, or something equally riveting. I ran into Avit and Indro in the stairwell.

“So did Avit tell the sweeper about the rat?” I asked Indro. I referred to Avit in the third person only because addressing him directly would have called for a lot of hand gestures and pantomime.

“Yes, definitely.”

“And so the sweeper is going to remove it?”

“Actually, sweeper is having family difficulty,” he said apologetically.

“Difficulties?”

“Actually he must attend cremation service for mother.”

“His mother died?”

“Yes.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. Then, remembering another imminent death, and after probably too indiscreet a pause I said, “So the sweeper probably won’t be in today?”

“No, sweeper not sweeping today.”

“So, about the rat…”

“Someone will take care.”

“Yes, but if he isn’t in….?” I asked hopefully. “Today? Tomorrow?”

“Actually he will not be in office for next three days.”

“But the rat. We can’t just let it lie there. Why don’t I just go and move it?”

“Mr. Tod, no!” he said, truly shocked at the suggestion. “Someone will take care!”

“Who?”

“Definitely.”

*****

I had to infer that the job of removing the rat would fall to Toilet Man. He was the third servant with whom I had regular contact. We enjoyed an amicable though utterly silent relationship. I never discovered his name; nobody at the office knew what it was, and he spoke no English.

Toilet Man was probably of the Untouchable or scheduled castes. I assumed this because only the scheduled castes will perform this type of labor; dirt and detritus are their exclusive domain: they are the latrine cleaners, the rag-pickers, the garbage men.

Toilet Man would show up bright and early every morning to slosh water around in my bathroom. Every attempt I made at trying to convince my boss that I really didn’t require servants, let alone a person whose sole purpose seemed to be to make my bathroom damp before I had a chance to do so myself, was met with hysterical laughter.

“But Tod, it is their job!”

Although not all Indians are lucky enough to have jobs, caste ensures that everyone has a place. While it is the concern of the upper castes to handle matters of governance, high finance and the all important concerns of Bollywood gossip, it falls to the lower castes to deal with the ugly reality of refuse.

Upper caste people simply cannot be sullied with so base a question as what happens to their garbage after they toss it nonchalantly to the ground; some lesser person will surely deal with it. If they don’t, and if the negligence of these baser humans means the upper caste person has to step through piles of stinking garbage and human excrement on their way into the mall to buy a new sari or cellphone, then so be it. It is beneath their dignity to appear to notice such things.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many elements of the Indian system of waste disposal that, despite their more unpleasant aspects (primarily sight and smell) make an awful lot of sense. While westerners shove their trash into black plastic bags with the unconscious mantra “out of sight, out of mind”, Indians throw their garbage on a heap for all to see. Very few Westerners give much thought to what happens to their garbage after they dispose of it; in India the system is all too transparent.

At morning’s first light the ad-hoc recycling process begins. The first to arrive are the Untouchables. They pick through the rubbish, gleaning those items that can be re-sold or re-used: cardboard for slum housing; newspapers to be refashioned into paper bags; plastic bottles for water vessels. Everything deemed valuable or viable is thrown onto their wooden carts and wheeled away.

Next come the carnivorous scavengers: the dogs, the cats, the rats, and the crows; these devour all they consider edible from the waste pile. Much audible commotion between species usually accompanies this process, but since all creatures have their place in the great order of beings, somehow it all works out. Later in the morning arrive the lackadaisical cows, who lazily chew up whatever vegetable scraps remain.

By this method, most human waste in India is recycled. All that endures is the ugliness and the stench. That, and the plastic bags. No creature, bipedal, quadripedal, or avian, has yet found a secondary use for these things, so they lie in the dust until they are either blown away upon the pre-monsoon breeze or washed away by the ensuing rains through the open sewers, until they are caught on branches and find a final resting place festooning the trees along the canals.

*****

Around 7 pm I finished my editing for the day and ventured out to grab a few beers before returning to pack for the next morning’s trip. I had already decided to quit the job on my return from Dera Dun. I was sick of Kolkata, sick of working in an office.

I made my way back from the liquor store along the “footpaths”: the granite slabs, patches of brick, and jumbled blocks of concrete that passed for sidewalks in Kolkata. Bats darted after mosquitoes in the fading light. Lower class women in saris pulled water from the corner hand-pumps. Rickshaw-wallahs dozed in their vehicles. And the crows kept up their ceaseless din.

As I approached my building Toilet Man was on his way out with a plastic bag brimming with last night’s bottles (the deposit he received returning my bottles was my way of tipping him). Something small and gray was swinging from his other hand. He flung the rat (now certainly dead) across the road into the pile of garbage. When I left for Dera Dun the next morning at dawn, all that was left of the rat’s body was a pale skeleton wrapped inside a thin pink envelope of skin and fur, picked clean by the crows.

Calcutta

Kipling called it The City of Eternal Darkness. Kipling, of course, was a shill, a propaganda-monger for the British Empire, and a hack poet to boot. But on the subject of Calcutta he may well have got it right.

Arrival: First Impressions

Descending from the night sky, May 13, 2005, my first impression of Calcutta is that it resembles less the 4th most populous city in India, and more a sprawling refugee camp. Open fires pierce a landscape of shadow and smoke like peepholes drilled upward through the crust of hell. It is as though the shallow landscape has suffered multiple puncture wounds and is bleeding flames.

Strings of streetlights glimmer unevenly like broken strands of incandescent plastic pearls lying in the depths of a great swamp. And this isn’t just hyperbole run rampant; in 1698 the city was in fact built on and around a swamp (by British merchant Job Charnock). When the annual monsoon hits hard, Kolkata soon reverts to its original state: a land partially underwater. I still have this to look forward to, I am told.

But the monsoon hasn’t hit yet. It’s coming, the taxi driver tells me, but it’s late.

When I fall into the taxi at 1 am the air temperature is still hovering well above 100 degrees. The 98 percent humidity level makes it feel like about 115. I’ve landed, left the sky behind; but still there is a sense of floating, as if I haven’t really touched down yet. The ancient Ambassador heaves me away from the airport and out into the seasick streets. The traffic, flood-like, builds mass and momentum at each confluence of roads as I submit to the current that pulls me from the rutted and squatted farmland toward the center of it all: Calcutta.

Calcutta, Kolkata, whatever. The Communist Party came to power over 25 years ago, and has held onto the reins ever since. They renamed the city, along with assorted streets and monuments, for no apparent reason except perhaps as a kind of thumbing of the nose at the departing British. Lower Circular Road became the far less wieldy Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Road, named after an Indian freedom fighter (and Hitler sympathizer, by the way). As a comment on the Viet Nam war, Harrington Street, home to the US embassy, became Ho Chi Minh Sarani.

You can’t say the Bengali Communist Party doesn’t have – if not a sense of humor – at least a highly developed sense of irony. But as amusing as I find most of the name changes, I feel compelled to voice the opinion that perhaps re-paving the roads (rather than renaming them) would have been time more productively spent. Whatever.

The ancient taxi pitches and rolls on through potholes and dustbowls like a foundering schooner in a summer squall. Images loom suddenly out of the darkness and disappear again: cows, old men on bicycles, pariah dogs, rickshaw-wallahs, angry crows devouring a midnight snack of trash.

Whole families crouch motionless in corrugated steel sheds like stick-figure nativity scenes, huddled round a single Holy TV set. Men fill buckets of water at corner hand-pumps. Children shout ‘Hello!’ and play dodge-em in the dark. The details accumulate; the information wells up as the city closes in around me. But at first it doesn’t compute; it reads as gibberish, resembles chaos: a maelstrom of dust and smoke, garbage and construction debris, vehicles and animals and people and sewage, music and shouting and confusion.

Nothing here is static. Things that appear motionless are merely caught in a state of perpetual transmogrification, like some sordid act of creation or dismemberment captured accidentally in a flashbulb’s glare. Objects that are in other cities solid and permanent – like streets and buildings - here seem as fleeting and temporary as the ghostlike people that inhabit them. Roads are suggestions of what one-day may actually become roads. Buildings are shadows of structures that once were buildings. Every object in Calcutta appears to be undergoing a process either of construction or demolition; often it’s hard to tell which; sometimes it’s both simultaneously. Everything is perpetually poised on the verge of rising from, or reverting back to, dust.

Shopping

I’ve been here for two months now and I still haven’t really gotten the hang of the place. For one thing, the concept of convenience has yet to hit this part of India. Buying anything at all in Calcutta can be a trying endeavor, unless you know in advance exactly what it is you want to buy and where to seek it out. There is no comparison-shopping here. Calcutta convenience stores are like shadowy caves hung with plastic packets of who-knows-what, holes hacked into the block-long facades of weathered and dilapidated buildings. I am not yet familiar with the local brands, so I guess at things and I point. No matter what it is I’m attempting to purchase, I never fail to draw a crowd.

Proprietors love me: I’m good for business. I can walk up to a completely deserted shop and begin a transaction, and within seconds there will be at least five Indians gathered around me pretending to want to buy something, meanwhile observing me with great interest. Apparently there is nothing more fascinating than a foriegner trying to buy a bag of peanuts. 

Liquor stores (or wine shops, as they are called here, though they sell no wine) aren’t much easier. Alcohol is perfectly legal in India, but apparently sternly frowned upon. Shifty looking men (never women) line up outside well-hidden holes in the wall, clutching bags and sneaking furtive glances over their shoulders. If you stand less than three inches away from the man in front, some jerk will cut ahead of you. Usually upon reaching the jail-like grill that fronts every wine shop the men will gasp for a pint of whiskey, shove it into their pants pocket and skulk away.

Sometimes it will be a couple of large bottles of beer, and here is where having your own bag comes in handy. If you don’t have a bag, the man behind the steel grate will laboriously wrap each bottle or can in newspaper, lest someone spy through the transparent plastic bag he gives you that you have purchased the demon alcohol. Of course the newspaper cylinders are a dead giveaway. On the way home, people spying your purchase will either leer knowingly or turn away in disgust.

Why the wine shops simply don’t hand us our liquor in a black bag, I do not know. Perhaps the public humiliation is due penance for our crime. Nonetheless, our dirty transactions completed, we men of the bottle look guiltily about before sloping off into the night to indulge our not-so-secret vice.

Nightlife

Bars too seem to be a guilty pleasure here. On first arriving I was cheered by the multitude of establishments with the word ‘saloon’ emblazoned above their Wild West saloon-style doors. ‘My kind of town,’ I remember thinking. Sadly, these turned out to be not saloons, but salons: beauty parlors. ‘Fine,’ I thought. ‘As long as they serve cold beer.’ You can imagine my disappointment on learning the bitter truth.

In fact, you could tally the total of Calcutta’s bars on the digits of one and a half extremities. And remember, this is a city of 4.5 million people. In my experience bars in this town have invariably proven to be either immensely depressing or fabulously dull.

So my (ahem) spirits were temporarily lifted upon the discovery of an ‘old man bar’ in my neighborhood that, in its desperation, had hired a midget in a general’s uniform to stand outside the place to drum up business. This seemed worth investigating. Call me what you will, but I am a sucker for midgets, and the prospect of a genuine, old-fashioned midget-bar in the neighborhood seemed too good to be true. It was.

I endured two solid hours of buttonholing by drunken advertising executives with nary a woman - or even another midget - in sight. ‘What are the ladies like in America’, they asked me. ‘They are feeling sexy all the time, yar?’ After a brace of beers, my boredom with this line of questioning began to express itself in belligerence. ‘Why don’t you use more midgets in ads?’ I demanded of a soggy-looking clutch of ad men. “Everybody loves them. And isn’t everyone sick to death of babies and dogs already?” None of them could provide me with a satisfactory answer.

Eventually, bored nearly to tears, I made my escape. Passing the midget at the door I saluted and slurred, “Let me take you away from all this, Admiral.” There was a significant pause filled by the cackling of crows. “But why?” he replied earnestly. “It is my livelihood.”

Fauna

In contrast to the dearth of actual saloons here, there is a surprising amount of other wildlife. Geckos roam the walls of my apartment (palacial by Kolkata standards), dining on mosquitoes as I sleep. I awake each morning to a parade of small, red ants devouring the crumbs from last night’s dinner. Large black centipedes lazily patrol the marble floors. (I don’t know what they live on; I’m hoping it’s ants.)

In the parks hundreds of flying foxes hang from the trees like strange fruit, each one fanning itself with one leathery wing through the torturous heat of the day. At sundown these giant bats shake off their torpor and take to the air en masse in search of food, an image straight out of a horror film.

And of course there are the usual city-dwelling pests like rats and cockroaches. But these last seem to be kept in check by the crows. Locals maintain that the annual monsoon floods hold the rat population at bay, by sweeping them away once a year down the Hooghly toward the Bay of Bengal like so many silverfish down a drain. But I like to think it’s the work of the crows. The crows are everywhere.

Though the common house crow can be found throughout India, there must literally be hundreds of millions of them in Calcutta alone. Like the cows, rats, goats, cats and dogs that roam Calcutta’s streets and alleys, crows live off piles of garbage left lying in the streets, but are much more vocal than the other scavengers in their complaints about the quality of the cuisine. They bitch and moan outside my window, morning, noon and night. They build their nests from scraps of newspaper and electrical wiring.

The crows of Calcutta have a certain cocky style that has won my admiration, despite their ceaseless carping. Black and greasy, like 1950’s juvenile delinquents, they loiter on every tree branch, telephone cable, roof, wall, and street corner. While the dogs sprawl about in the heat, stoically panting, and the cows mill around looking, well, a bit cowed by all the chaos going on around them, the crows never lose their cool; they never let you forget that they own this town, and you are on their turf. They are cranky as hell, and they remind me of me right now.

Weather

It might not surprise you to learn that it is hot here. Walk out the door and your clothes are soaked with sweat within minutes. And when I say soaked, I mean sodden, saturated, sopping. It’s too hot to walk around. It’s too hot to write. Hell, it’s too hot to think most of the time. It’s too hot to do anything. They keep telling me the monsoon is coming (and with it the cool weather), it’s just late this year. Sure, sure. And if you believe that, I know a beauty salon that serves ice cold Kingfishers. Thank god for air conditioning – when it’s working, that is.

'Load Shedding'

Things don’t function here like in other cities; things function intermittently, if they function at all. The power goes on and off with a regularity that could be clocklike – could be, that is, if any clock in town told the same time.

While the power always seems to stay on in some places, huge swathes of the city can become veiled in darkness for hours at a time. Indians call this ‘load shedding.’ Because these all-too-frequent events extinguish the fans and the air conditioner, they certainly result in me shedding a load of sweat. Even when the streetlights are out, night drivers don’t use their headlights, for reasons known only to themselves. Taxis materialize out of the steamy void, their horns bleating at lackadaisical cows, crows, dogs, people and all the rest.

City of Horns

Ah, yes, the horns. People drive with their horns here; they use them with greater frequency than New York drivers employ their middle finger. People blow their horns as warnings and as threats. Driving in Calcutta is like a citywide game of chicken in which drivers seem to point their cars directly at oncoming vehicles whilst attempting to blast their opponent aside with the pure force of decibels. Ironically, the back of every truck and bus boasts the slogan ‘blow horn’. As if drivers here needed any encouragement.

While bus and taxi drivers are clearly the biggest instigators of horn-related noise pollution (the relative silence instilled by a recent transit strike proved this theory correct), ordinary commuters are forced to respond in kind. As a result drivers use their horns so often that the old-fashioned, one-push-one-honk model is simply no longer effective enough to get the job done; the number of horn-blasts a human can generate per minute no longer suffices.

Necessity has given birth to new technological terrors, such as what I have dubbed, for lack of any better name, the Gattling Horn. Like the early machine-guns its noise resembles, the Gattling Horn produces a rapid-fire, staccato blast of horn bleats at every touch of the button. As the sonic arms race between taxi drivers and commuters accelerates, Shiva only knows what terrifying new weaponry lies down the road.

Taxis

Calcutta taxis are a challenge in other ways too. The taxis have meters, but the number that comes up on the meter is not the amount you are supposed to pay. Over the years the fares have risen (along with inflation, presumably), but the meter rate has not. The local government apparently considered it impossible to adjust the meters every time inflation struck, so rate adjustment cards were issued. Rate adjustment cards are supposed to solve the problem by translating what the meter reads to the new going rate. But there are two different types of meters: a fairly modern-looking one with a digital LED display, and the old fashioned type that sits outside the car and has numbers painted on metal wheels like a 1930’s cash register. So along with the two different meter types go two different rates, and hence two different rate adjustment cards.

If it sounds confusing, it is. But basically, you only have to remember two things. The first thing is that the taxi driver will invariably try to stiff you. The other is that the amount they will try to stiff you for usually amounts to a handful of American pennies. So there is little reason to get too upset. You can ride from one end of town to the other for about 2 dollars, and I do this often enough, just because I can afford it.

Miss Management 2005

The most frustrating part of living in Calcutta so far has been envisioning how nice the place could be -- but isn’t. I’m not suggesting turning the city into Hindu-Disney. But, come on, people! Power, sewage and sanitation are pretty much the bottom-line basics of modern urban management. It’s indicative of the Communist Party’s ineffectiveness that they blame the British for the overloaded 100 year old sewer system. At least the British actually built a sewer; all the Communists have done is re-name it. If you can’t get your shit together to get the garbage picked up or cover the sewers after 35 years in power, maybe it’s time to give somebody else a chance. The middle ages ended a long time ago.

But before you get the impression that the Communist Party is all bad, I should say that they have done many great things for the peasant farmers that make up the majority of the population in West Bengal. However, as Communism is great equalizer, if some were to rise others had to fall. The result is that what has been good for the majority has not been very good for Calcutta. But I guess that makes the Communists only half bad.

I actually met the Mayor of Calcutta at a school opening ceremony I attended as part of my job. As a farangi (foreigner) I was naturally assumed to be an honored guest and was seated next to him in the VIP section. (I’ll take respect wherever I can get it, no matter how misplaced it may be.) He hadn’t actually been elected Mayor yet at the time. If he had I certainly would have given him an earful, and we likely wouldn’t have got along half as well as we did. It’s probably for the best that I didn’t start ripping into him about the lousy job his party has done for the last 30 years. You never know when you’ll need to call in a favor.

My Job

So what the hell am I doing here, you might well ask, in the City of Eternal Darkness? Good question. The answer is that I edit English textbooks. To be completely accurate, I’m a professional plagiarist. Here’s how it works: a skills-challenged typist (or typo-ist, as I refer to her – she must be somebody’s cousin) inaccurately copies copyrighted work from previously published textbooks onto a floppy disk (a floppy disk!) and hands it to me to edit. I correct the grammar, change the names from Steve to Sanjib, then hand it over to the printer to produce ‘original’ Indian textbooks.

Do I feel guilty about my participation in such a flagrant violation of international copyright laws and intellectual property rights? Nah, not so much. Imported books are expensive here. And the people who will profit from my crimes will be financially strapped teachers of English, not gazillioniare corporate execs. The pirated material I conspire to produce will be cheap to buy: probably one tenth the cost of the European or American originals. Plus, the content we’re talking about here is only bogus conversational business English, not fucking Proust. I can still sleep pretty well at night.

(At least I can try. It’s still hotter than the devil’s bollocks. They say the monsoon has hit the south already and might be here in a week. Whatever. I’ll believe it when I can leave my apartment without losing precious bodily fluids by the pint.)

As for the job itself, my co-workers are friendly enough, but mostly they are dull as paste. All are either married, overweight, obsessed with food, or all three. Few of them seem to possess definable skills that would justify their being hired by anyone, let alone this company. Everyone is somehow related to somebody else; nepotism appears to be the sole justification for employment. Not that I deserve to have been hired, mind you; my chief qualification appears to be my scanty grasp of the English language and my pasty white skin.

Second Thoughts

Well, I’ve been here for a couple of months now, and probably the most heartening and enlightening thing I can report is that, despite all my bitching and moaning, Calcutta is really not such a bad place after all. Yes, Kolkata (Calcutta), the universally acknowledged asshole of the world, is dirty and smoky and miserable. But in many ways the city can be disarmingly sweet and charming. Its residents are certainly far friendlier than my neighbors in Bushwick ever were. Sure, as a card-carrying Ugly American, I have my share of crass and cross remarks to make, my gripes to bear. But really, dear readers, most of Calcutta ain’t much worse than the Lower East Side on any given Sunday morning following a Lower East Side Saturday night. You would just have to add a few cows to the picture.

Yes, it’s a godawful wreck of a town, but Calcuttans are proud of their city - proud of its history, its artists and poets, its well-meaning almost-saints and native sons and misbegotten souls. Mother Theresa and Rabindrath Tagore and Bose served and won their fame here. Yes, people still go hungry: there’s a homeless guy and a skinny puppy who live on my street toward whose dinner I contribute on a regular basis. But the falling-down buildings retain a kind of crumbling nobility. And the people, despite all their annoying, gawking ways, can be forgiven for staring. Because, like me, they are really only country rubes suckered in by the big city dream. It’s a dream we all still seem to be struggling to remember.

Monsoon

Maybe I’m slightly less cranky these days because the monsoon has finally come. It arrived in an instant of sweet reprieve after a month of not-so-silent mass supplication. For weeks the temples have been booming with prayers for rain. The sound of chanting and bells echoed through my neighborhood as silent heat lightening taunted us from a distance. Now it is here. The monsoon has come. And now that it is here all doubts have been blown asunder.

The temperature (stuck for incomprehensible weeks at levels far exceeding those inside the human body) plunged by 20 degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of minutes. Refrigerated breezes blew in under cover of an eerie premature twilight. Crows lost their cool, grew silent and jittery. The cloud formations were the biggest I’d seen since that one monolithic storm I drove through out on the plains of west Texas.

One moment, it was sweltering misery as usual. The next, the monsoon clouds rolled up out of the southern sky like something huge and ugly from a child’s nightmare: a floating black mountain range of cumulus crawling with giant electric spiders; a dark, roiling monster snorting fire. The rain crashed down suddenly, like a curtain on a bad play. People quit the street: bit-part actors yanked into the wings by invisible crooks. The real show was about to begin.

The lightening flashed upside down: spectral skeleton hands shooting upward out of the ground into the electrically charged air; terrifying time-lapse trees bursting forth from the horizon, branching and flowering in all directions, then dying out across the depth of the void. And all of this captured by my eyes through the rain, hanging overhead as thick and impenetrable as the saturated tresses of a woman’s hair.

How can I accurately describe the thunder? The sound of it. The way it made me feel. I can’t really. It didn’t rumble or roll so much as it stumbled across the sky. You felt it in the depth of your body, rattling your bones. You had the feeling the gods were either very angry -- or nearly ecstatic. Yes. Very drunk and very happy. I certainly was. I stood half naked on my veranda belting out ‘Singing In the Rain’, letting the cool spray soak me, slugging down Kingfisher and smiling from ear to ear as the crows took cold showers and clung to the branches like soggy rats. It was more than a relief, it was a release.

Maybe I’ve just got used to it all. Calcutta, that is. Kolkata. Whatever. They say you can grow accustomed to just about anything: cockroaches, heat, chronic discomfort, defeat, creeping damp, dust, deformity, poverty, whatever. Whatever life might throw at you, they say it only takes a little time to lower your standards and adjust. Maybe I’ve reached that point. But maybe not. It feels like time to move on.

Tod's Thai Top Ten

An Alliterative Special Edition

In no particular order:

1. BEST STREET NAME: Tie between Rat Porn Street and Soi Ding Dong (Ding Dong Lane). Seriously – I kid you not -- these are real street names.

2. BEST STUDENT’S NAME: Tie between Treetip Kumchumnum and Supaporn Loetwatthanasukan. (‘Supaporn’! Sounds like an English retail pornography chain!) Truly, you cannot make this stuff up.

3. BEST BEER: Beer Chang (Elephant Brand Beer); No debate here. Chang boasts a 6.4 % alcohol to water ratio and will set you back a mere 50 cents a can. What’s not to like?

4. BEST WACKY ENGRISH T-SHIRT SLOGAN SO FAR: This one is a photo finish: The winner by a nose is ‘Pirate of the Month,’ closely followed by ‘Summer of Milk,’ ‘Loud Monkey Music’ and ‘A Group of Puddles’ (which, incidentally, features a drawing of some poodles).

5. BEST WACKY ENGRISH BAND NAME OF ALL TIME: ‘Big Ass’, by a fairly comfortable margin of victory.

6. MOST UNAPPEALING SNACK FOOD (in ascending order): Runners Up: Dried Fish Strips and Squid Flavored Potato Chips; Third Place: Deep Fried Grasshoppers; Second Place: Deep Fried Flying Beetles; and the Winner is (no real surprise here): Deep Fried Larvae!

7. BEST THING EVER SAID TO ME BY A THAI PERSON: First Place: "You very long." (NOTE: We were both clothed, she was my mother’s age, and she really meant to say ‘tall’.) Second Place: "There are no pirates here in Thailand. We catch them all." (Said to me by one of my students, a Colonel in the Marine Police, roughly equivalent to the US Coast Guard.)

8. BEST SMOKE: Krong Thip, by a long shot. Smooth, tasty, and not lackluster like most other filtered cigs, they’ll run you about a buck a pack. Read it and weep, fellow nicotine-addicted New Yorkers.

9. COOLEST FORM OF TRANSPORT: Longtail boats. Forget the tuk-tuk, these homemade, low-slung wooden craft are powered by modified motorcycle or car engines strapped to their sterns, and are steered by angling the long rudder that sticks out the back (this is the original engine’s drive-shaft -- only extended, with a propeller welded to the end), thereby giving them their name: Longtail. The smaller ones can do about 20 or 25 mph, and the ones with the car engines can probably get up to around forty or so. But because you’re so close to the surface of the water, you feel like you’re flying.

10. BEST ANIMAL: Without a doubt, the Gecko. Every room has one. They’re cute and bright green, they can walk across the ceiling, and they eat the mosquitoes. Mine is named King, after the King of Thailand, whom he somewhat resembles -- except for the glasses, of course.

Colonel Bundit, Pirate Catcher

One of my private students is a policeman. But he is no private; he is a Colonel in the Marine Police. As far as I can figure out, his rank is roughly equivalent to that of an admiral in the Coast Guard. His name is Bundit Tungkasernee, and he is a professional Pirate Catcher. Though, he will not admit to that.

We have a text book at our disposal for our two hour lessons but we rarely open it; his English is already very good. Instead, I grill him about his job, and he tells me what he has been up to since I last saw him. He talks, pausing only to ask me for a word he doesn’t know, which I then endeavor to supply. When I provide him with a word or phrase he thinks useful or interesting, he jots it down in a small, black notebook. In this way he expands his work-related English vocabulary, and I learn a lot about the Marine Police.

One of the first things I learned was that there are no pirates in Thailand; he told me this on the first day. That was strange, I replied, as I was sure I had read several articles on piracy in the Bangkok Post. These had usually been short news pieces -- sidebars really -- and true enough, they were usually about pirate attacks in other countries. But often enough the incidents took place in Thailand. "No," he replied firmly. "In Indonesia, Malaysia, yes, there are many pirates. But in Thailand, we have no pirates."

Strange, I thought, that he be so insistent. And yet, I was certain I had read of pirate attacks in Thai waters. I started doing a little research into the subject and found the following on the Heritage Foundation website:

"On March 17, 1999, 20 pirates boarded the cargo ship Marine Master off the west coast of Thailand. The pirates wore army uniforms and masks, and carried automatic weapons. The 16 members of the crew were kidnapped and then set adrift." Just as I had thought: Thailand, pirates.

A far cry from their cutlass-swinging forebears, these latter-day pirates were very real, very modern, and very dangerous. Sabers and flintlocks had been replaced by machine guns and grenade launchers; captured schooners had given way to speedboats and fishing trawlers; but the profession of piracy was very much alive and well in South East Asia. In fact, if anything, incidents appeared to be on the rise. According to the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Center website reported attacks against commercial ships had tripled during the 1990’s, increasing by 40 percent in 2000 alone. And in the last five years the problem has only grown worse.

Captain Pottengal Mukundan, Director of the IMB reports: "Following the tsunami of 26 December, there have been at least three violent attacks in these waters. The first attack occurred on 28 February, when a tug towing a barge carrying coal for Lumut Power Station was attacked off the port of Penang. A gang of pirates abducted the captain and chief officer and held them for ransom."

"In the second incident, on 12 March, a fully laden oil tanker en route from Samarinda to Belawan in Indonesia was attacked by 35 armed pirates. The captain and chief engineer were kidnapped and are still missing."

"And at approximately 1830 hours on 14 March, the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre received a report that the Idaten, a Japanese tug, had been attacked roughly 70 miles South West of Penang while towing Kuroshio, a construction barge, from Batam, Indonesia to Myanmar. Armed pirates arrived in three fishing boats, abducted one Filipino and two Japanese crew members and transferred them to one of the fishing boats. The whereabouts of the abductees is still unknown."

The problem is not only growing in S E Asia, it is growing worldwide. The pirate’s realm has expanded to include not only South East Asia and the Indian Subcontinent, but the African coasts and the Red Sea, South and Central American waters, and the Caribbean.

I wanted to know more. I wanted first-hand accounts. Here I had an expert at my fingertips: Colonel Bundit.

I will grill this man about pirates until he cries for mercy, I thought, then flip him over and grill him again. But it was not to be so easy. The Colonel wouldn’t give me jack. He would of course admit to catching the occasional drug smuggler. He had to; his department was responsible for one of the biggest heroin busts in Thai history only last month. It was all over the newspapers. But pirates? In Thailand. No, sir. This he would not concede. "There are no pirates in Thailand," he told me. "We catch them all."

Now, Colonel Bundit is a cultured and educated man. He appreciates music and literature, and plays golf on the weekends. He is proud of his country and has made it a personal goal to visit every Thai town of note before he dies. He is not prone to rudeness. So by his curt and sullen answers, I was given to know that this was not a subject he wanted to talk about, at least not on his dime.

It was as if I was inquiring into the frequency of his herpes flare-ups, or whether he masturbates with his left or right hand. I was the one who was being rude, by bringing up a subject he found embarrassing and uncomfortable to discuss. By implying there may be incidents of piracy in Thailand, I was not only questioning his effectiveness as Chief Pirate Catcher but in the process dragging his country’s good name through the mud.

Imagine my frustration. Here I had an expert on modern piracy at my disposal that invariably went mute on the subject. Whenever I brought it up, he would grow vague and distant, and the humor drained from our conversation like cold bathwater. But his obstinacy on the issue only piqued my curiosity.

I became obsessed with pirates. What a fantastic idea for a book, I thought. Who were these people? What was their story? Was there any truth to the commonly held belief that many of them were descendants of the notorious Sea Gypsies who had plagued these waters since well before the time of the first European incursions into the hemisphere? It was fascinating to think that an entire race of oceangoing bandits had survived -- and not only survived, but actually prospered -- through the 1900’s and into the 21^st century.

I was hooked. But if my expert source wouldn’t provide any answers (and the internet surrendered only tantalizing tidbits of information), how was I going to find out more about these ferocious sea villains? I wanted to see them in the flesh, maybe even speak to them. I wanted to hear their stories, in person.

These were not musty, fictional characters. They were living, breathing, and very dangerous criminals: smugglers, extortionists, killers. How could I get the dirt without getting myself murdered in the process? I didn’t know yet, but the questions kept buzzing about my head like flies. I was headed for Calcutta in three days time to start a new job. Calcutta was one of the three great ports on the Indian Ocean. And the Indian Ocean was a hotbed of modern piracy. I didn’t know yet which way the wind would blow. But the story -- I had a feeling -- was just beginning.

Thai Pop

The pop music in Thailand is bad. Trust me, it’s even worse than in America, if you can believe that. BAD. Bad with a capital B, and a capital A, and a capital D.

You might rightfully suggest that I’m not really qualified to make sweeping generalizations on Thai Pop music, as I have only lived here three months. But you would just be a spoilsport, and who cares what you think anyway?

Let’s just say that in those 3 months, I haven’t heard more than one song, ahem, of note. What was the song? It was an old standard called "Welcome To Thailand", which rather gently, but still quite effectively takes the piss out of all of us palefaced farangs. But this is the only Thai pop song I’ve been exposed to thus far which even hints at social commentary. Generally speaking, Thai pop songs seem to come in one of three basic styles: The Folky, The Bubblegum, and The Tearjerker.

The Folky stuff is the least offensive to these particular ears. In fact, actually I quite like some of it. Thai people call it Country, but although it often features an acoustic guitar, it ain’t no Achy Breaky Heart. The melodies are clearly Asian, and audibly more influenced by Chinese than Indian musical traditions (Thailand has absorbed much that is Indian over the centuries). It’s usually sad, plaintive stuff that sometimes unexpectedly puts one in mind of Hank Williams – not because of any melodic similarity, but because of the frank plainness of the songs.

Sometimes Thai Country music can be bouncy, even dancy – especially the music from out East in Isan province. But it rarely gets rowdy. Thais are almost never rowdy, even when completely loaded. And they like to get loaded as much as the next guy (unless, of course, the next guy happens to be me). Beer and whiskey are the nighttime beverages of choice here for men, while ladies imbibe a noxious concoction known as Spy, which tastes like Night Train laced with carbon monoxide gas. I harbor a private theory that Spy was created by the Thai government to curb intoxication in women, as it produces almost instant nausea, and results in a hangover akin to a baby elephant tap dancing on your head. But I digress.

I merely meant to convey that wild, out-of-control music is met here with blank stares of incomprehension. The propensity to go berserk just doesn’t seem to reside within the national character. Mick Jagger, Tom Waits, or Iggy Pop would be greeted in Thailand with a combination of perplexity and pity.

Thais like their music beautiful -- beautiful, or cute. Thai Bubblegum falls into this second category. It’s basically disco, but with a faster, bum-titty, bum-titty beat. Occasionally Thai Bubblegum songs will reveal a fleeting foreign Techno influence. These songs will be faster, snappier -- and even cuter, if that’s at all possible -- their beat curtailed to a far fleeter bum-tit, bum-tit, bum-tit. Imagine Madonna’s early work if it had been composed by Barney the purple dinosaur, or think Menudo on speed. Thai Bubblegum songs will invariably feature one of the 3 currently most trendy English words: "sexy," "naughty," and "cheeky" -- and sometimes all all of them, if you’re lucky.

Thai Bubblegum songs are about sex, for people too young to engage in coital union just yet -- which in Thailand is just about anyone under the age of 30 who bears the embarrassing stigma of being still unmarried. Despite its reputation as the sex capitol of the world, Thailand is actually quite conservative. Teenage girls may parade about in skin-tight jeans, proudly sporting an "I’m A Playboy Centerfold" T-shirt, but don’t be fooled, they have no idea what the English slogans they are endorsing actually mean. There is little premarital sex here. Women usually live with their parents until a suitable mate can be located. But, sorry, we were talking about music.

The third and most ubiquitous type of Thai Pop song is The Tearjerker. Like its American cousin, the Power Ballad, this trash is a scourge upon your eardrums as well as your patience. Unfortunately little can be done to avoid it; it blasts from every bar, every karaoke joint, every shop and tuk-tuk and taxi. The Tearjerker appears to be manufactured under a strict set of government guidelines which are religiously adhered to: It has to be performed in a mind-numbingly dull middle tempo; musically, it can only be gratingly predictable; and it should always feature the lyrical equivalent of soap opera dialogue.

I learned this last fact in the course of my unflinching research into the subject. Me: "This song is awful! What the hell are they whining about?" Thai Person: "She has gone very far away and he is very sad." Or, alternatively, Me: "This song is complete shit! What in God’s name are they shrieking about?" Thai Person: "He has gone very far away, and she is very sad."

Variations on this theme include: He Has Gone Very Far Away And He Wrote Me To Tell Me He Is Now Banging His Secretary, The Bastard – AND: She Left Our Farm And Moved To Bangkok To Work At The Motorcycle Parts Factory So I Have Been Engaging In Sexual Congress With The Water Buffalo. Alright, so I made the last few up. But you get the idea.

While I can’t claim to actually understand the lyrics, these songs always sound strikingly like some miserable Thai waiter yowling the contents of a menu: "Why don’t you tryyyyy my Phad Thaiiiiiiii? I think you shoooould, it’s really gooooood!" Musically, The Tearjerker is much like the unpleasant musical wallpaper to be found anywhere in the world; it’s everywhere you go, and difficult to block out. Every Thai secretly loves this dreck, as you will soon discover if you ever go to a karaoke bar with one. I suppose there are plenty of people in America with a taste for audio excrement such as Kenny G and Guns ’n’ Roses, but I pity these rubes and do not count myself among them.

Krap – Crap – Bad English – Hip Hop - Bushwick

Krap. It was a word you heard on average about every 15 seconds in Thailand. In its longer form, kop khun krap, it meant thank you. The shorter krap meant please. It popped up at the end of nearly every sentence uttered by anyone with any manners here. People even said it when answering the phone, as a hello.

Cell phone etiquette hadn’t really caught on yet in Thailand, so people still tended to yell into them, as if the fact that the thing had no wire coming out of it meant you had to shout harder to be heard on the other end. Their phone would ring (a deafening Casio-tone blast of the latest pop song) and they’d grab it and scream, "Krap?"

"Yes!" he always wanted to shout back,. "Krap!!"

Back in the States they spelled crap with a C, and crap was what had driven him away from America in the first place: the crap on the TV, the crap that came in though the mail slot and out of the radio, the infotainment crap that passed for news. The billboards bombarded you with crap. People sold you crap online and down the phone. Countless catalogs and magazines were devoted to the stuff. People were simply mad about it. The sky over every exit on every freeway across America glowed with signs boasting the miraculous choice of crap on offer there. The fast food chains sold crap in all its varied and irresistible flavors. Every supermarket, mall, convenience store and discount chain was chock-a-block with it. And the armies of the obese, grown dull and thick on a steady diet of all this crap, spewed yet more crap into the air from their ridiculous, bloated SUV’s.

And just when you thought you had taken all the crap you could possibly stand, that’s when you were mistaken. Because late into the night, think tanks were hard at work envisioning new crap, better crap: The Crap of the Future! Though still in the conceptual stages, this theoretical new crap would be developed by designers, tested on focus groups, revised and refined by engineers, marketed by PR firms, and finally unveiled -- shiny, seductive and soon obsolete -- to a public ever hungry for ever more crap.

Yes, in America crap was king. Our schools were crap. Our health care system was crap. The President was full of it. In America, crap flowed seamlessly from manufacturer to distributor to consumer, passed quickly from tongue to anus, drained swiftly from toilet to sewer to river to sea. And the oceans were filling up with it. So much crap had been produced, in fact, that the sea level was actually rising. Soon all America would be awash with it, swimming in it, drowning in our own crap. Krap. He always half-thought of it as a misspelling of "crap," the way American businesses, in their pathetic attempts to be cute, would deliberately misspell their names: Kiddy Korner or Toys R Us or All U Can Eat Bar-B-Q. For some unknown reason the worst offenders of all seemed to be beauty salons. Every town in America had at least one. And all the names were despicable, running the gamut from dopey spelling to dopier puns: Klassy Kuts, A Cut Above, Hairs to You, and his own personal favorite, The Curl Up and Dye. He imagined women named Debbi and Krystal congratulating themselves on their Wildean wit.

More pathetic still was the linguistic butchery perpetrated on the language by hip hop acts with dumb-ass names like Fabolous and Masta Killa, Kurupt and 50 Cent. But this bugged him for a different reason. The "gangtas" did it as a fuck you to the system, which was fine. The problem was, it accomplished just the opposite. The product of a lousy public school system and worse neighborhoods, the rappers were flaunting their ignorance. "Look at me," they were saying. "I can’t spell fo’ shit, but look how many gold chains I got." Well, good for you, clown, but what about all your cousins back in the ‘hood for whom becoming a Hip Hop Impresario will probably never be a viable career option? Instead of using their big mouths to change -- or even challenge -- the system that had cheated them, they reveled in their ignorance, wore it as a badge of honor. It was all bitches and ho’s and fancy clothes. It was depressing. America was a country in which for most kids the only two roads out of the ghetto were to deal drugs or join the army.

The thing that bugged him more than the general acceptance of this shitty state of affairs was that these working class zeroes were getting rich while propagating the idea that staying uneducated was a really smart thing to do. Lucky for them, their fans were too ignorant to realize that they were being lied to. Maybe it didn’t really matter how you spelled the word Nigger; but not knowing how to spell it was a good way to make sure you stayed one. By glamorizing ignorance hip hop "artists" were ultimately only serving the interests of the government and the rich by perpetuating the cycle that kept poor people stupid, and kept niggas down. Just like the niggas back in Bushwick.

There were no two ways about it, living in Bushwick sucked, bigtime. Some people would have said that it was because he was white and privileged and middle class and he just didn’t belong there. They might have been right. But if one accepted this logic, it would have meant that anyone who happened to have been born poor was somehow genetically better suited to living in a shithole, and the evidence didn’t seem to bear this out. Nobody he had ever met in Bushwick seemed particularly smitten with the place. In fact, he got the distinct impression that they would rather have been anywhere else, would have left at the drop of a hat, given half a chance. This didn’t mean that they hadn’t in some way adapted to their environment; they had, but that didn’t make it any easier a place to survive.

In Bushwick, the first thing that struck you was the noise, the sheer volume of the sound that pervaded the place. The noise was the main thing that ground you down: the maddening, grating, ever present, soul-crushing roar of cars and busses, the clatter and shriek of the elevated trains, the speakers in front of the 99 Cent stores blasting hip hop, the trucks with their growling engines, their blaring horns and tortured brakes, the jeeps endlessly roaming the streets with bass bins bombing, the jets on the path to La Guardia rumbling across the sky with the false promise of somewhere else to go, somewhere else to be (please, God, anywhere but here!).

But for these people there was nowhere to go, no way out, and no escape from the noise. They could only try to ignore it, outstrip it, or blot it out. No one ever spoke in Bushwick -- they would never have been heard above the din. Instead, they screamed on the streets, they barked in the bodegas, they shouted on the subway, they bellowed into cellphones, they hollered in the hallways of the hospitals and the jails and the schools.

In Bushwick the schools were jails and the jails schools. He had seen the inside of both and they worked hand in hand. The schools were overcrowded, hot, violent holding cells for prisoners in training. The schools taught you that there was no hope without crime. The jails were training centers for young criminals: it was here that the kids made their real connections, where they networked, where they learned a viable trade. The only problem was this: the schools spit you out and the jails wouldn’t let you go.

It was all crap and he wanted no part of it anymore.

Ko Samui, Thailand

The place is a dump; don’t bother coming. Ko Samui, I mean. Sure, it’s beautiful. The brochures bill it as Tropical Heaven. Just goes to show you -- any place that’s got brochures about it is probably going to suck, big time. Ko Samui is more like a low-rent dumping ground for cash-strapped gringos, yours truly included. Not even a topless Scandinavian model-type to make life interesting. Just Limeys and Eurotrash of the meanest stripe. A pair of oh-so-French vegan dykes complaining about all the stray dogs everywhere. (Maybe if you just ate a few…?) A brace of louts slumped over their Singhas in front of the football. A gaggle of chicks from Slough or Bognor Regis haggling over the price of a plate of fried rice with a waiter that could really give a fuck. And, as always, there are the requisite dull Americans, loud in every way and so flaccidly huge you feel they’re hogging the very air.

Not that I don’t haggle, myself, mind you. I haggle to my heart’s content, thank you very much. I bargain like a rug trader on a mission from God. I bicker and argue like a man possessed over amounts that really must tally to a couple of pennies. But I’ve got good reason to be a chiseler. Reason is I’m broke. You don’t want to wind up homeless and broke in South East Asia. On Saturday night while the drink is flowing they are laughing right along with you; Monday morning they’re giggling in embarrassment as the feral mongrels lick clean your bones. Can’t say I blame them. Nothing can make you lose face in this country quite as fast as being devoured by a pack of mangy dogs.

Anyway, I’m out of here. Let the Robs and the Julies have it to themselves. I don’t want it. Don’t want the perfect white sand, picked clean of trash by a bent-backed crone just before the dawn. Don’t want the deluxe concrete air-con bungalow with complimentary cockroach on the pillow. Don’t want the friendly smiles, big and false beneath hateful eyes. Let them have it, the dirty old Aussies and Krauts and Brits who prop up the bar from sunrise until sundown, one hand on a beer, the other on their Thai girlfriend’s ass, their foul carcasses sun-baked and bloated like things that wash up on the shore after a disaster at sea.

The Thais make a joke of it all, bless them. The joke is, after all, on us. They’re laughing all the way to the bank. We farangs must seem like a ridiculous race of gigantic clowns, blundering about in our whiteface, filthy of mind and filthy with cash. It’s a sign of the good nature inherent in most Thais that they don’t simply beat us, remove our fat wallets from our oversized foreign posteriors and send us on our merry way. Thanks, I was just leaving anyway.

The Ants Attack!

Sometimes a day at the beach isn’t a day at the beach. Alright, I didn’t cut my leg open on coral. I wasn’t stung by a jellyfish or devoured by sharks. Neither was I sucked into a dangerous riptide or suffer sunstroke. I just lost my watch. Not the end of the world. The weird thing is, I can’t figure out how the hell it happened.

I’m sure I threw the watch in my bag before going for a swim. I was only in the water for about an hour and kept one eye on my bag the whole time. Nobody went near it. I lay on the beach and read for awhile, head resting on the bag, the palm leaves casting gentle shadows like Venetian blinds across my pasty New York skin. Then, after the sun, huge and blood red, had made its glorious exit from the sky, I gathered my things and went to put on my watch. It wasn’t there. I checked all the pockets, even the ones in which I knew for certain I hadn’t put the watch. No watch. I emptied the entire contents of the bag onto my blanket. I scoured the beach, retracing my steps. Nothing. The watch had vanished into thin air.

Later that night as I lay in bed awaiting sleep, it kept bugging me. What had happened to the goddamned watch? It couldn’t have just vaporized. Maybe a very patient and skillful thief had lain in wait behind the bushes and had darted out to snag the watch just as my head was turned. It didn’t seem likely. Why had he not swiped my wallet and passport as well? Maybe a bird had flown off with it. Aren’t there supposed to be birds in the tropics that decorate their nests with bright, shiny things to impress the ladies? Maybe some thieving monkey had grabbed it. There were monkeys in the forest; I’d heard them, but never seen them, and certainly had never seen them working on their tans or doing the backstroke. A kleptomaniac crab, perhaps? A flying fish with a clock fixation?  I gave up. It was only a 20 dollar watch and I could get another.

I was standing in line at the gates of unconsciousness when somebody shoved a sharpened screwdriver up through the mattress and into my spine. What the hell? Adrenaline kicked in. I tried to roll clear, but he stabbed me again, this time right in the crotch. It was the bastard who took my watch and now he meant to take my life! I leapt for the light switch so I could at least see the face of my assailant. My bed was crawling with red ants. An expedition had been mounted, my bag serving as base camp. They must have snuck in while I was searching the beach. The bulk of the troops could be seen marching out of the bag, single file up the bedpost, but the forward reconnaissance forces had already penetrated my T shirt and jockeys and were in the process of pitching camp. Tent pegs were being driven simultaneously into my armpits, belly, back and genitalia. Tearing my clothes off, I sprinted toward the shower. The water was freezing, but I didn’t care as I blasted the little creeps to a watery grave. With their bites still stinging and beginning to swell all over my body, I watched with glee as great clumps of ants, clinging together in their desperation -- and probably emitting tiny insect screams of terror beyond the range of human hearing – were swept along in the inescapable current, swirling clockwise, ever closer to the whirlpool and unavoidable oblivion.

In the morning, I looked like the victim of some medieval disease, covered in strange bumps, like buboes. After my shower, before passing out the night before, I had managed to clear the ants from the mattress with an ancient roll of cellophane tape. But I had been too terrified to get back into bed, afraid that some renegade ants were still on the prowl, unaware the war was over and that humanity had triumphed. So I slept in the chair, aided in this enterprise by the dregs of a bottle of bad whiskey. I did not rest easy. I dreamt of ants: thousands, millions of them, standing on the backs of their insect brothers, forming the undulating shape of a man. And the man was wearing my watch.