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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.

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