Like the sweet ache of a love fading away, Calcutta is decaying, crumbling, rotting. The Mynah birds feast on this decay and more and more it’s becoming their city. The elegance of old Calcutta is being replaced by soulless concrete canyons. In many ways Calcutta is on the decline, but the melancholic remnants of past glory only make the place more beautiful. In those crumbling citadels of old Calcutta you will find artists and eccentrics. Do your business in Delhi, Bangalore, or Mumbai and come back to Calcutta to dream while the world falls down around you.
At night, as I’m drifting off to sleep I hear the neighbourhood night watchman strolling the streets blowing his whistle to let you know that he’s there and you’re safe. I awaken to the sound of the key walla jingling his keys as he strides down quiet lanes in search of customers.
She was the cool side of the pillow in the heat of Calcutta. We walked Calcutta’s whimsy: into a weathered Zamindar’s palace filed to the brim with aged European marbles (Medusa and David in sets of two – presumably ready post-flood to repopulate aristocratic abodes), past the Mansions of Chitpur Road, through oil smeared lanes of metal-hammering machinists, finally ending up in the ramshackle book stalls of College Street.
Many a revolution has been plotted in the coffee cooperative off of College Street. Waiters in white Punjabis shuffle past peeling paint, dancing to the tune of creaking ceiling fans. The dreamers of Calcutta have always been revolutionaries. This revolutionary spirit has redrawn the map – during the Vietnam War the Americans discovered one day that the front door of their consulate was now on freshly re-named Ho Chi Minh Street. They tried to outmanoeuvre the West Bengal communist government by relocating the entrance to the back of the building (thereby changing their street address). Their construction permit was denied and so, even today, you will find the American eagle grimacing on Ho Chi Minh Sarani.
The Maidan, the great green heart of Calcutta, beats with the life of the city where Ho Chi Minh meets Chowringhee Street. Passing through any of Calcutta’s innumerable parks you are likely to see young Indian couples making out. Rolling up stately Chowringhee Street looking into the gardens around the Victoria Memorial is like gazing into the closet at a teenage party. Why all this public embracing? Is it because Indians love the great outdoors, or are they just especially romantic? Nope. They’re just trying to escape away from the watchful eyes of their extended families. Ok, maybe that’s a bit romantic.
Calcutta is the city dissembled, then thrown back together again with artful neglect. The result is often confounding but always soulful. Calcutta has the sense of place that you find in any great city – whichever street you’re on, you never feel like you are anyplace other than Calcutta.
I have spent many hours rumbling over those bumpy streets. Sometimes in an old bus it feels like riding the waves in an overturned boat, the wooden ribs of the ceiling surrogate for the hull of a schooner. The city in transit is a blur of commerce – specialised markets are everywhere (from the saris of Rash Behari Avenue to the condoms of “rubber street”). When I’m not in the bus you will find me zooming in taxi cabs past Hindu shrines as my driver chews pan (a mild narcotic). The rickety Austin Ambassador taxis are adorned with a plastic figurine of the Hindu goddess Durga glued to the dash and strings of shrivelled chillies and lemons hanging from the rear-view mirror for luck.
If you look closely enough in that smudged mirror you might just spot the concave people of Calcutta. They are tucked into the hollows, clustered under bridges, scampering on the pavement trying to claim some space to eat their dal and rice. Calcutta historically responded to the urge to subdue reality by mansioning up from top to bottom. This was the only way to reserve the rights of denial and refusal. But these very same mansions are now gloriously deteriorating and dilapidating. The maharajas and colonialists have moved out and the poor have squeezed themselves inside. Is this the harbinger of the death instinct or just the end of empire and the rise of true democracy? The right to be poor, after all, is still fundamentally a right to be, a right to exist
Once a year, poor farmers, from the dusty villages of West Bengal, pour into Calcutta for a week of revelry and a month of employment. All over the city elaborate Pandals are erected on bamboo frames. The Pandals are temporary buildings that are an unlikely hybrid of religious shrine and fair attraction. The carnival engulfs the Pandals and spills into the streets with dancing, cacophonous drumming, and stalls selling salty and sweet indulgence. The dioramas that are the centrepiece of each Pandal are crafted by the artisans of Kamartuli, showing the eight-armed goddess Durga spearing a demon in human form while surrounded by Ganesh and the rest of her celestial family. In the end, the idols are brought to the Ghats on the Hooghly River and immersed; as we know nothing last forever, and so the entire diorama dissolves.
One day soon, I’ll leave and Calcutta will continue its dissolution without me. Yellow plaster will peel away to reveal ochre brick and evergreen-painted wooden shutters – a structural strip tease. Yet, for now, I’m still immersed in the sublimated soul of Calcutta – old world charm and sweet desire vaporised by the heat of the modern age. Now I’m dreaming the dreams of a weary romantic, ready to roll on. I pledge my fidelity, promising I will only dream of her…at least until the moment I fall in love again. And even then, I will remember these days, so dirty and alive.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Friday, November 14, 2008
Cast Adrift in Kampuchea
I spent the last month doing research in Cambodia, an aquatic land in Southeast Asia. Water surrounds and inundates in Cambodia - from the seacoast of the Gulf of Thailand to the expansive inland sea known as Tonle Sap, to the sky itself, awash with monsoon rains. The monsoon swells the Tonle Sap to five times its normal size. Traversing the lush green of the rice patties you pass traditional Khmer wooden houses elevated on stilts. It is the world’s richest fishing ground and peasants cast their nets in the hope of grabbing fish as they swim cross country. This week is the Water Festival – the most important festival on the Khmer calendar – celebrating the natural phenomenon of the Tonle Sap River reversing its flow to pour into the sea. The Apsaras, nymphs of the clouds above and the water below, are the protectors of Cambodia. After years of war one has to wonder if the nymphs have been on vacation (perhaps visiting the world’s largest paperclip in Kipling, Saskatchewan)? Like a placid sea, the Buddhist Khmer wear a mask of tranquility that belies sometimes turbid depths.
The Lonely Song of Sihanoukville
Lying face down on the beach in Sihanoukville (ahh the tough life of a PhD student) my peace is disturbed by the licentious sound of “Hey Mista….want a massage?” I mutter “no thanks” into the sand, and she knowingly replies “Ahh…you heartbroken!” It wasn’t in the slightest bit true, but I understand why she would find my refusal odd (not to mention my pasty back). Something strange happens in Sihanoukville. You see middle aged white men with young Cambodian girls (“hostesses” as they are called). I have never seen women so commoditised as they are in Cambodia and Thailand. In Tahiti, the fantasy of nubile Polynesian women was definitely marketed but the difference is the women themselves weren’t on offer (rather than lounging naked they were dressed with the buttoned up zeal that is the global gift of Christian missionaries). At dinner one night I was an unwitting witness to the playing out of the great greasy game. A middle-aged British man with slicked back hair and fading tattoos on his arms sat down next to me followed by a twenty-four year old Cambodian woman wearing a slinky black dress, red shoes, and too much makeup. My close proximity left me with no choice but to be immersed in their conversation. After lots of awkward small talk he asked her with plaintive earnestness, “why do you like me?” It seemed to me, to be an absolutely ridiculous question, but she humoured him, pausing for a long time before offering “because you are nice?” Later on he asked her if her mother knew what she did for a living. She said that she didn’t but he insisted “she probably knows, she just isn’t saying anything.” I wasn’t really sure what to make of all this. There is something unpleasant and exploitative about the whole business. But I think it would be absurdly paternalistic to assume that the women are all unwittingly victimised. On this particular night, what I saw was an almost chivalrous, but desperately lonely, man paying for the privilege of companionship. These sorts of scenes played out many times around me in Cambodia, but I was never so privy to this secret knowledge as I was that night.
Hours later, I sat completely alone in the dark on the beach and watched flashes of lightning illuminate fishing boats drifting across the Pacific horizon. As I closed my eyes the only sound I could hear was the constancy of the wind whispering in the casuarina trees.
Angkor Wat
Few civilisations rival the Angkor in terms of architectural industriousness. The Angkor built innumerable monumental temples, cities, and reservoirs. A “hydraulic” civilisation its efforts were centred on irrigation and spiritual transcendence. Today the legacy of the Angkor civilisation is still visible in the many impressive temples spread throughout Cambodia. None however, are more famous, or more impressive than those in the Angkor Wat area. Angkor Wat is a singularly impressive feat of material culture. In Angkor Wat you can explore the largest religious building in the world, climb massive pyramidal temples, and clamber through sprawling ruins swallowed by the dense jungle. Climbing through one such ruin I was met in the dark by a police officer who flashed his badge at me. I had heard stories about the rampant corruption in Cambodia and so I braced for the worst. He wanted to sell me a “souvenir” police badge. Bizarre.
Playing out my Indiana Jones fantasies only made me more conscious of the potential of close encounters of the slithery kind. In Ta Prohm I saw no snakes but I did see a pretty large snakeskin. Snakes are ubiquitous in Khmer iconography and likewise Angkor Wat is itself a source of great national pride for the battered Khmer, a motif of the possible (it’s even on the Cambodian flag).
The Fire at the Ends of the Revolutionary Earth
After forcibly dragging myself out of the temples and off the beach, I went to the northern fringe of Cambodia in search of the last gasps of the cruel Khmer rouge revolution. The town I stayed in (Anlong Veng) was the stronghold of the Khmer Rouge up until only a few years ago. It’s a dusty town with not much going for it. My hotel room was dark and somewhat dirty. The lights weren’t working at all so I went to get the desk clerk. He smiled and returned with me to my room explaining that the power was turned off during the days. As he was opening the curtains I heard a “hisssssssssss” and in an instant the clerk was frantically staggering backwards. “Snake!!!” Sure enough there was a small green viper climbing the window frame. He was pretty shaken up and I’m a bit afraid of snakes as well so it was not a happy moment. After this I kept an eye out and poked and shook everything out before I got too close. During my two days in Anlong Veng I saw snakes all over the place including a large snake attacking chickens under a house during an interview and a snake in a restaurant causing panic and mass evacuation.
Nonetheless, I shelved my ophidophobia and set out the next day I set out in search of Khmer Rouge. I had no idea what I was doing I just knew I was in a place full of Khmer Rouge stuff and I was going to find some of it. I ran into a couple of Germans (the only other foreigners to be seen). They asked me politely what I was doing wandering around the town – I told them I was looking for Pringles and Khmer Rouge. This sounded like a joke but I was completely earnest (and hungry). The culinary options were pretty limited in Anlong Veng. On the way there our bus stopped at a roadside market that, from a Canadian perspective, was like a horror movie come to life. Peeled and headless live frogs hopped along, an old woman spooned syrup over baskets of fried tarantulas, crickets and sparrows were roasted on skewers, live fish were smacked with mallets as they were sold to customers. Cambodians will eat anything. This is probably to their credit. They definitely aren’t half-assed omnivores like North Americans and Europeans.
I finally found a motorbike and driver who know some Khmer Rouge spots so off we went. First stop was Ta Mok’s house. Ta Mok (aka brother number five but let’s call him bastard number five for the sake of clarity) was a tough nut, with one leg and a mean disposition fuelled by fanatical ideological belief. I explored his house and compound. Not much was left but the walls were covered with murals of Angkor temples and strategic maps of Cambodia (used for planning military campaigns in the civil war). To gain entrance I paid the crusty guard a couple of dollars. He was a veteran Khmer Rouge soldier and he looked the part with olive green fatigues and a wooden foot.
After we left Mok’s house we ascended into the Cardamom Mountains along the Thai border. It took us about an hour and a half of pretty rough going before we reached Pol Pot’s hideout in the jungle. At times the road was so rough I had to get off the motorcycle so we could ford a patch of water. The lush countryside lining the muddy road was deceptively beautiful but in reality it was a giant minefield. Skull and crossbones signs warned the intrepid not to stray too far from the path. There are about one or two million landmines in this area of Cambodia alone. It is one of the mostly heavily mined areas in the world; one of the reasons that you see so many amputees of a certain age begging on the streets of the capital.
Pol Pot’s house is in ruins. Local villagers have picked it over pretty well, even using the construction materials to build their own residences. What remains is a basically the tile floor and a concrete room that used to be a cell. Who the hell has a cell in their house? Pol Pot, that’s who. There are several substantial concrete bunkers were he stashed his loot and was prepared to hide out if the bombs ever fell. These bunkers are now home to many large, venomous snakes. This has only reinforced the contemptible Pot’s reputation among local people as a man with powerful magic.
Several kilometres away is Pot’s grave and cremation site. All that remains is an earthy mound lined with beer bottles and incense sticks. Locals visit the grave to pray in hopes that Pol Pot will grant them good fortune. Pol Pot was removed from power in 1997 for ordering the brutal execution of a top Khmer Rouge official and his entire family. A year later he died a mysterious death (lack of oxygen, as several local people explained to me). I watched the Post-Mortem footage of Pol Pot. He lay in state for a couple of days with a huge block of ice sitting on his chest. When the time came, his followers laid him out on a mattress strewn with purple blossoms and the pile of tires underneath was ignited. With that, this dangerous man who could never distinguish utopia from dystopia went up in smoke. With this ignoble and anti-climatic end Pol Pot had escaped earthly justice, but, at long last, Cambodians were back on solid ground.
Him and I
Other than motorbiking around the hills I also tried to interview as many former Khmer Rouge as possible. I was able to interview a Khmer Rouge prison photographer in Siem Reap. This was the man who took the famous photographs of thousands Khmer Rouge victims as they arrived in Tuol Sleng. Google “Tuol Sleng” and you will see these photographs. Their eyes are sometimes terrified, sometimes defeated, often confused, and sometimes defiant. This man was brutality’s paparazzo and now he has turned his infamy into a business proposition – selling photographs to journalists and others. His infant grandson was all giggles as he peeked upside down at me from between my legs.
Returning to Phnom Penh my work was focussed on finding more Khmer Rouge to interview. I was especially interested in former prison guards and I was lucky enough to find one. After hours of rumbling along dusty roads I interviewed Him Huy in his house – a typical rural Cambodian residence elevated on stilts with roosters and buffalo lying beneath. Huy looked like he should be wearing a hat that said “I’d rather be fishing” as he answered my many questions about why he did what he did. He sat cross-legged on the bamboo floor, his typical Khmer checked scarf doubling as a sarong. He told me that he had no choice. That he feared for his own life. It was unsurprising and might have been more persuasive if I hadn’t seen his signature on a document authorising the “smashing” of seven pregnant women. Yet, sitting in front of me, Him remained, like the rest of us, at once pitiable and powerful. He wanted one hundred dollars for the interview but I declined.
The next day I interviewed Vann Nath. Nath was one of only a handful of survivors of Tuol Sleng. A soft-spoken and eloquent man, Vann Nath was kept alive so that he could produce portraits of Pol Pot. The interview was surrealistic. We sat on the balcony of the Mando burger underneath an ashen sky and Nath spoke tentatively of the unspeakable. I asked him what he thought of perpetrators who denied their responsibility by saying they were just following orders. His face puckered up like I had just fed him a sour fruit, and indeed I had. He spelled out his disdain and moral outrage with each aspirated syllable. Leaning back in his plastic chair, his breathing quickened as lightning bolts lashed horizontally across the dark horizon.
The Verdict
Aside from the sometimes grim nature of my work, Cambodia was a great place to hang out for a month. The food is wonderful – a more delicate version of Thai food. I took a short Khmer cooking course to learn some of the tricks of the trade (now I just have to find fermented fish paste and banana leaves in Saskatchewan and I’m set). I also discovered that Khmer people love singing Karaoke and that they also love getting married. Combine the two and you’re really getting somewhere. Cambodians also have a passion for posting warning signs everywhere. In a country full of landmines I guess there’s a good reason for that. My hotel was full of such signs including admonitions not to bring explosives or cats into the elevator and also not to “throw your belongings out the window.” Was their last guest Axl Rose? I guess we’ll never know. But the best thing about Cambodia is, without a doubt, the fact that you can wear your pyjamas all day long. No, I’m not exaggerating, all the goddamn day. How can you beat that?
The Lonely Song of Sihanoukville
Lying face down on the beach in Sihanoukville (ahh the tough life of a PhD student) my peace is disturbed by the licentious sound of “Hey Mista….want a massage?” I mutter “no thanks” into the sand, and she knowingly replies “Ahh…you heartbroken!” It wasn’t in the slightest bit true, but I understand why she would find my refusal odd (not to mention my pasty back). Something strange happens in Sihanoukville. You see middle aged white men with young Cambodian girls (“hostesses” as they are called). I have never seen women so commoditised as they are in Cambodia and Thailand. In Tahiti, the fantasy of nubile Polynesian women was definitely marketed but the difference is the women themselves weren’t on offer (rather than lounging naked they were dressed with the buttoned up zeal that is the global gift of Christian missionaries). At dinner one night I was an unwitting witness to the playing out of the great greasy game. A middle-aged British man with slicked back hair and fading tattoos on his arms sat down next to me followed by a twenty-four year old Cambodian woman wearing a slinky black dress, red shoes, and too much makeup. My close proximity left me with no choice but to be immersed in their conversation. After lots of awkward small talk he asked her with plaintive earnestness, “why do you like me?” It seemed to me, to be an absolutely ridiculous question, but she humoured him, pausing for a long time before offering “because you are nice?” Later on he asked her if her mother knew what she did for a living. She said that she didn’t but he insisted “she probably knows, she just isn’t saying anything.” I wasn’t really sure what to make of all this. There is something unpleasant and exploitative about the whole business. But I think it would be absurdly paternalistic to assume that the women are all unwittingly victimised. On this particular night, what I saw was an almost chivalrous, but desperately lonely, man paying for the privilege of companionship. These sorts of scenes played out many times around me in Cambodia, but I was never so privy to this secret knowledge as I was that night.
Hours later, I sat completely alone in the dark on the beach and watched flashes of lightning illuminate fishing boats drifting across the Pacific horizon. As I closed my eyes the only sound I could hear was the constancy of the wind whispering in the casuarina trees.
Angkor Wat
Few civilisations rival the Angkor in terms of architectural industriousness. The Angkor built innumerable monumental temples, cities, and reservoirs. A “hydraulic” civilisation its efforts were centred on irrigation and spiritual transcendence. Today the legacy of the Angkor civilisation is still visible in the many impressive temples spread throughout Cambodia. None however, are more famous, or more impressive than those in the Angkor Wat area. Angkor Wat is a singularly impressive feat of material culture. In Angkor Wat you can explore the largest religious building in the world, climb massive pyramidal temples, and clamber through sprawling ruins swallowed by the dense jungle. Climbing through one such ruin I was met in the dark by a police officer who flashed his badge at me. I had heard stories about the rampant corruption in Cambodia and so I braced for the worst. He wanted to sell me a “souvenir” police badge. Bizarre.
Playing out my Indiana Jones fantasies only made me more conscious of the potential of close encounters of the slithery kind. In Ta Prohm I saw no snakes but I did see a pretty large snakeskin. Snakes are ubiquitous in Khmer iconography and likewise Angkor Wat is itself a source of great national pride for the battered Khmer, a motif of the possible (it’s even on the Cambodian flag).
The Fire at the Ends of the Revolutionary Earth
After forcibly dragging myself out of the temples and off the beach, I went to the northern fringe of Cambodia in search of the last gasps of the cruel Khmer rouge revolution. The town I stayed in (Anlong Veng) was the stronghold of the Khmer Rouge up until only a few years ago. It’s a dusty town with not much going for it. My hotel room was dark and somewhat dirty. The lights weren’t working at all so I went to get the desk clerk. He smiled and returned with me to my room explaining that the power was turned off during the days. As he was opening the curtains I heard a “hisssssssssss” and in an instant the clerk was frantically staggering backwards. “Snake!!!” Sure enough there was a small green viper climbing the window frame. He was pretty shaken up and I’m a bit afraid of snakes as well so it was not a happy moment. After this I kept an eye out and poked and shook everything out before I got too close. During my two days in Anlong Veng I saw snakes all over the place including a large snake attacking chickens under a house during an interview and a snake in a restaurant causing panic and mass evacuation.
Nonetheless, I shelved my ophidophobia and set out the next day I set out in search of Khmer Rouge. I had no idea what I was doing I just knew I was in a place full of Khmer Rouge stuff and I was going to find some of it. I ran into a couple of Germans (the only other foreigners to be seen). They asked me politely what I was doing wandering around the town – I told them I was looking for Pringles and Khmer Rouge. This sounded like a joke but I was completely earnest (and hungry). The culinary options were pretty limited in Anlong Veng. On the way there our bus stopped at a roadside market that, from a Canadian perspective, was like a horror movie come to life. Peeled and headless live frogs hopped along, an old woman spooned syrup over baskets of fried tarantulas, crickets and sparrows were roasted on skewers, live fish were smacked with mallets as they were sold to customers. Cambodians will eat anything. This is probably to their credit. They definitely aren’t half-assed omnivores like North Americans and Europeans.
I finally found a motorbike and driver who know some Khmer Rouge spots so off we went. First stop was Ta Mok’s house. Ta Mok (aka brother number five but let’s call him bastard number five for the sake of clarity) was a tough nut, with one leg and a mean disposition fuelled by fanatical ideological belief. I explored his house and compound. Not much was left but the walls were covered with murals of Angkor temples and strategic maps of Cambodia (used for planning military campaigns in the civil war). To gain entrance I paid the crusty guard a couple of dollars. He was a veteran Khmer Rouge soldier and he looked the part with olive green fatigues and a wooden foot.
After we left Mok’s house we ascended into the Cardamom Mountains along the Thai border. It took us about an hour and a half of pretty rough going before we reached Pol Pot’s hideout in the jungle. At times the road was so rough I had to get off the motorcycle so we could ford a patch of water. The lush countryside lining the muddy road was deceptively beautiful but in reality it was a giant minefield. Skull and crossbones signs warned the intrepid not to stray too far from the path. There are about one or two million landmines in this area of Cambodia alone. It is one of the mostly heavily mined areas in the world; one of the reasons that you see so many amputees of a certain age begging on the streets of the capital.
Pol Pot’s house is in ruins. Local villagers have picked it over pretty well, even using the construction materials to build their own residences. What remains is a basically the tile floor and a concrete room that used to be a cell. Who the hell has a cell in their house? Pol Pot, that’s who. There are several substantial concrete bunkers were he stashed his loot and was prepared to hide out if the bombs ever fell. These bunkers are now home to many large, venomous snakes. This has only reinforced the contemptible Pot’s reputation among local people as a man with powerful magic.
Several kilometres away is Pot’s grave and cremation site. All that remains is an earthy mound lined with beer bottles and incense sticks. Locals visit the grave to pray in hopes that Pol Pot will grant them good fortune. Pol Pot was removed from power in 1997 for ordering the brutal execution of a top Khmer Rouge official and his entire family. A year later he died a mysterious death (lack of oxygen, as several local people explained to me). I watched the Post-Mortem footage of Pol Pot. He lay in state for a couple of days with a huge block of ice sitting on his chest. When the time came, his followers laid him out on a mattress strewn with purple blossoms and the pile of tires underneath was ignited. With that, this dangerous man who could never distinguish utopia from dystopia went up in smoke. With this ignoble and anti-climatic end Pol Pot had escaped earthly justice, but, at long last, Cambodians were back on solid ground.
Him and I
Other than motorbiking around the hills I also tried to interview as many former Khmer Rouge as possible. I was able to interview a Khmer Rouge prison photographer in Siem Reap. This was the man who took the famous photographs of thousands Khmer Rouge victims as they arrived in Tuol Sleng. Google “Tuol Sleng” and you will see these photographs. Their eyes are sometimes terrified, sometimes defeated, often confused, and sometimes defiant. This man was brutality’s paparazzo and now he has turned his infamy into a business proposition – selling photographs to journalists and others. His infant grandson was all giggles as he peeked upside down at me from between my legs.
Returning to Phnom Penh my work was focussed on finding more Khmer Rouge to interview. I was especially interested in former prison guards and I was lucky enough to find one. After hours of rumbling along dusty roads I interviewed Him Huy in his house – a typical rural Cambodian residence elevated on stilts with roosters and buffalo lying beneath. Huy looked like he should be wearing a hat that said “I’d rather be fishing” as he answered my many questions about why he did what he did. He sat cross-legged on the bamboo floor, his typical Khmer checked scarf doubling as a sarong. He told me that he had no choice. That he feared for his own life. It was unsurprising and might have been more persuasive if I hadn’t seen his signature on a document authorising the “smashing” of seven pregnant women. Yet, sitting in front of me, Him remained, like the rest of us, at once pitiable and powerful. He wanted one hundred dollars for the interview but I declined.
The next day I interviewed Vann Nath. Nath was one of only a handful of survivors of Tuol Sleng. A soft-spoken and eloquent man, Vann Nath was kept alive so that he could produce portraits of Pol Pot. The interview was surrealistic. We sat on the balcony of the Mando burger underneath an ashen sky and Nath spoke tentatively of the unspeakable. I asked him what he thought of perpetrators who denied their responsibility by saying they were just following orders. His face puckered up like I had just fed him a sour fruit, and indeed I had. He spelled out his disdain and moral outrage with each aspirated syllable. Leaning back in his plastic chair, his breathing quickened as lightning bolts lashed horizontally across the dark horizon.
The Verdict
Aside from the sometimes grim nature of my work, Cambodia was a great place to hang out for a month. The food is wonderful – a more delicate version of Thai food. I took a short Khmer cooking course to learn some of the tricks of the trade (now I just have to find fermented fish paste and banana leaves in Saskatchewan and I’m set). I also discovered that Khmer people love singing Karaoke and that they also love getting married. Combine the two and you’re really getting somewhere. Cambodians also have a passion for posting warning signs everywhere. In a country full of landmines I guess there’s a good reason for that. My hotel was full of such signs including admonitions not to bring explosives or cats into the elevator and also not to “throw your belongings out the window.” Was their last guest Axl Rose? I guess we’ll never know. But the best thing about Cambodia is, without a doubt, the fact that you can wear your pyjamas all day long. No, I’m not exaggerating, all the goddamn day. How can you beat that?
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Picking Fruit from the Poison Tree
I wonder if Pol Pot felt satiated as he watched Cambodia devour itself? His appetite for blood was certainly boundless - once he acquired that brackish taste he couldn’t get enough. The Khmer Rouge anthem was already a dreadful omen: a national hymn awash in bloody fixation...
I am now in Cambodia for a month doing research on the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979. Probably about a million and a half people were killed during this period but it’s hard to say. I guess at some point people just stop counting. A few days ago I visited Tuol Sleng – a notorious Khmer Rouge prison facility where 21 000 people were tortured and then sent to their death. They died alone, in the dark, in the nearby Choeung Ek killing field – a single blow to the back of the neck if they were lucky. Can there be a more profound aloneness then being cast apart from all of humankind? Can there be a more woeful death than the death of hope itself?
Tuol Sleng is a Khmer word that can be roughly translated as “poison-tree hill”. It was an abyss of cruelty, penitence without the promise of redemption. Guards wandered the filthy corridors between the tightly-packed cells; beasts in the form of men. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that they were men in the form of beasts, their humanity sublimated. They toiled with tools born of sadistic inventiveness, their spirits consumed by breathtakingly rootless spite.
Their headmaster was a former teacher known as Duch. He seemed the embodiment of the totalitarian espirit des corps: slavishly devoted to slavish devotion. Of course he was a mathematician: a formula for every human problem; formalism and legalism as the only true forms of perfection and beauty. The utopian ideal could be realised! This was nothing less than the consummation of every anal-retentive impulse. Squeeze a little harder Herr Eichmann and soon you’ll be shitting solid gold bricks - enough wealth to sustain the Reich for a thousand glorious years!
I tried to interview Duch but he’s off-limits (he is currently, finally, on trial at an international tribunal). Duch found Jesus sometime in the 80’s (I wonder if Jesus ever bothered to find him). Within days, I should be interviewing a former senior guard at Tuol Sleng - Him Huy. This should be fascinating and I’m not quite sure what to expect.
Today I’m heading to the far north of the country, into the mountains along the Thai border in search of Khmer Rouge cadres who might be willing to talk to me. Pol Pot lived and died in those mountains and his restless spirit still stalks the people there.
Kjell
Ps. Next time I will write more about the positive (contemporary) things in this beautiful country.
I am now in Cambodia for a month doing research on the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979. Probably about a million and a half people were killed during this period but it’s hard to say. I guess at some point people just stop counting. A few days ago I visited Tuol Sleng – a notorious Khmer Rouge prison facility where 21 000 people were tortured and then sent to their death. They died alone, in the dark, in the nearby Choeung Ek killing field – a single blow to the back of the neck if they were lucky. Can there be a more profound aloneness then being cast apart from all of humankind? Can there be a more woeful death than the death of hope itself?
Tuol Sleng is a Khmer word that can be roughly translated as “poison-tree hill”. It was an abyss of cruelty, penitence without the promise of redemption. Guards wandered the filthy corridors between the tightly-packed cells; beasts in the form of men. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that they were men in the form of beasts, their humanity sublimated. They toiled with tools born of sadistic inventiveness, their spirits consumed by breathtakingly rootless spite.
Their headmaster was a former teacher known as Duch. He seemed the embodiment of the totalitarian espirit des corps: slavishly devoted to slavish devotion. Of course he was a mathematician: a formula for every human problem; formalism and legalism as the only true forms of perfection and beauty. The utopian ideal could be realised! This was nothing less than the consummation of every anal-retentive impulse. Squeeze a little harder Herr Eichmann and soon you’ll be shitting solid gold bricks - enough wealth to sustain the Reich for a thousand glorious years!
I tried to interview Duch but he’s off-limits (he is currently, finally, on trial at an international tribunal). Duch found Jesus sometime in the 80’s (I wonder if Jesus ever bothered to find him). Within days, I should be interviewing a former senior guard at Tuol Sleng - Him Huy. This should be fascinating and I’m not quite sure what to expect.
Today I’m heading to the far north of the country, into the mountains along the Thai border in search of Khmer Rouge cadres who might be willing to talk to me. Pol Pot lived and died in those mountains and his restless spirit still stalks the people there.
Kjell
Ps. Next time I will write more about the positive (contemporary) things in this beautiful country.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Kjell Likes Short Shorts
The battle for Bangladesh has begun. What started as a country with a secular constitution in 1971 is now under siege from Islamic fundamentalists. I recently visited Bangladesh to do research on the mass killing of 1.5 million people in the Independence struggle of 1971 and found myself unwittingly in the company of communist rabble-rousers, and whisky-swilling opposition politicians.
Bangladesh seems a country of sour provenance – the grind of desperate poverty periodically interrupted by cataclysmic disaster. It is a small country packed with a hundred fifty million people. These are largely the same people as in Calcutta (Bengalis) but these ones drink even less. In fact, Bangladesh is in a state of national prohibition. On Eid (the most important Islamic holiday of the year) I sat in the office of a prominent Awami League poobah and sipped aged scotch (which he slid into his desk every time someone came into the room).
Fundamentalism is no doubt the ideology that fun forgot[1] and all of this can be really traced back to 1971 when East Pakistan (Bangladesh) decided to leave behind the neo-colonial domination of West Pakistan (Pakistan). The West Pakistanis didn’t much like this idea and a massive killing of Bengalis in East Pakistan begun. All told about one and a half million people were murdered, largely in the name of fundamentalist Islam – a worldview originating in the Middle East that fetishises a fantastical version of medieval Islam where women are chattel and the rule of law is vengeful divinity. In search of identity, West Pakistanis increasingly gravitated towards Islamic fundamentalism while the Bengalis in East Pakistan were the same mellow Bengalis they had always been. When Bangladesh struggled to separate from Pakistan the fundamentalists sided with the West Pakistanis in the slaughter. It was literally a slaughter as scores of (mostly Muslim) Bengalis had their throats slit in a perverse twist on Halal butchery. I met one such man at a killing site sinisterly known as the “butcher’s den”. His tormentors held him over a cess pool and tried to cut his throat but the blade was miraculously dull (from over-use) and he was able to escape.
The Bengalis won that battle but it seems they are losing the war. Those very same fanatics that brought innocents to their knees are now running the country, radicalising the madrasas, and pushing for Wahabi-style sharia law. The perpetrators of the 1971 genocide were never prosecuted and the result is that now Bangladesh is no longer in the vanguard of secular Islam (like Turkey).
Dhaka itself is a vast city – a developing world metropolis filled with garment factories (a polite word for sweat-shops). The rural poor make the journey to the big city to scrape together a few Thakas to survive. You can find reborn rural villages in the heart of Dhaka with houses built on stilts, a dirty reservoir acting as stand-in for the mighty, mystical Ganges and the Bay of Bengal. Dhaka is noticeably poorer than Calcutta and even main thoroughfares are filled with bicycle rickshaws with their brilliantly decorated canopies and sinewy drivers. Every time we stopped at a traffic light the rickshaw was surrounded by beggars in myriad forms: men with deformed legs scampering crab-like across the pavement, women holding their babies with imploring eyes, well-rehearsed children tugging at your pangs of guilt. I never know whether I should give money to beggars. I have been warned by several people not to give money to children as sometimes you are feeding a drug habit (glue-sniffing) or worse perpetuating a begging bondage system where children are sent out to beg by ‘pimps’ and are held as virtual slaves by these pimps in service of profit. I take it on a case by case basis but I’m not really sure what the right thing to do is.
I don’t want to paint an overly negative picture of Bangladesh. Bangladeshis themselves are boundlessly friendly and generous. They are the inheritors of a richly cosmopolitan and humanist cultural tradition. This is a country that definitely has something useful to offer to the world if it is allowed to stay worldly. It must not be hijacked by those who render divinity divisive.
[1] I thought regrowing my beard might have won them over but no such luck. I guess my short shorts threw them off. I borrowed them from Axl Rose.
Bangladesh seems a country of sour provenance – the grind of desperate poverty periodically interrupted by cataclysmic disaster. It is a small country packed with a hundred fifty million people. These are largely the same people as in Calcutta (Bengalis) but these ones drink even less. In fact, Bangladesh is in a state of national prohibition. On Eid (the most important Islamic holiday of the year) I sat in the office of a prominent Awami League poobah and sipped aged scotch (which he slid into his desk every time someone came into the room).
Fundamentalism is no doubt the ideology that fun forgot[1] and all of this can be really traced back to 1971 when East Pakistan (Bangladesh) decided to leave behind the neo-colonial domination of West Pakistan (Pakistan). The West Pakistanis didn’t much like this idea and a massive killing of Bengalis in East Pakistan begun. All told about one and a half million people were murdered, largely in the name of fundamentalist Islam – a worldview originating in the Middle East that fetishises a fantastical version of medieval Islam where women are chattel and the rule of law is vengeful divinity. In search of identity, West Pakistanis increasingly gravitated towards Islamic fundamentalism while the Bengalis in East Pakistan were the same mellow Bengalis they had always been. When Bangladesh struggled to separate from Pakistan the fundamentalists sided with the West Pakistanis in the slaughter. It was literally a slaughter as scores of (mostly Muslim) Bengalis had their throats slit in a perverse twist on Halal butchery. I met one such man at a killing site sinisterly known as the “butcher’s den”. His tormentors held him over a cess pool and tried to cut his throat but the blade was miraculously dull (from over-use) and he was able to escape.
The Bengalis won that battle but it seems they are losing the war. Those very same fanatics that brought innocents to their knees are now running the country, radicalising the madrasas, and pushing for Wahabi-style sharia law. The perpetrators of the 1971 genocide were never prosecuted and the result is that now Bangladesh is no longer in the vanguard of secular Islam (like Turkey).
Dhaka itself is a vast city – a developing world metropolis filled with garment factories (a polite word for sweat-shops). The rural poor make the journey to the big city to scrape together a few Thakas to survive. You can find reborn rural villages in the heart of Dhaka with houses built on stilts, a dirty reservoir acting as stand-in for the mighty, mystical Ganges and the Bay of Bengal. Dhaka is noticeably poorer than Calcutta and even main thoroughfares are filled with bicycle rickshaws with their brilliantly decorated canopies and sinewy drivers. Every time we stopped at a traffic light the rickshaw was surrounded by beggars in myriad forms: men with deformed legs scampering crab-like across the pavement, women holding their babies with imploring eyes, well-rehearsed children tugging at your pangs of guilt. I never know whether I should give money to beggars. I have been warned by several people not to give money to children as sometimes you are feeding a drug habit (glue-sniffing) or worse perpetuating a begging bondage system where children are sent out to beg by ‘pimps’ and are held as virtual slaves by these pimps in service of profit. I take it on a case by case basis but I’m not really sure what the right thing to do is.
I don’t want to paint an overly negative picture of Bangladesh. Bangladeshis themselves are boundlessly friendly and generous. They are the inheritors of a richly cosmopolitan and humanist cultural tradition. This is a country that definitely has something useful to offer to the world if it is allowed to stay worldly. It must not be hijacked by those who render divinity divisive.
[1] I thought regrowing my beard might have won them over but no such luck. I guess my short shorts threw them off. I borrowed them from Axl Rose.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Himalaya
On this, the day of devotion to the god of all machines great and small, combustion propels us up Himalayan slopes; forever ascending in our iron box, we roll through villages clinging tenaciously to the mountainside. I’m with Ramona and Ginny – two friends visiting from The Netherlands – traveling from Darjeeling into Sikkim.
Darjeeling is the land of the Ghorkas (Ghurkas). The Ghorkas are, of course, famous Indo-Nepali soldiers fighting in the service of the British Empire. Ghorka identity is now firmly anchored to this martial myth and Ghorkas are one of the only groups in India who have the constitutional right to carry concealed weapons (in this case the wickedly curved dagger known as the Khukiri). I visited a “Ghorka accessory” shop in Darjeeling decorated with a poster proclaiming “A Ghorka and his Khukiri: A Fatal Combination”. Darjeeling, a former British hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas is most famous for its tea, grown in verdant green terraced gardens on the hillsides. Now there is a Ghorka nationalist movement seeking statehood for “Ghorkaland”. Darjeeling is a world apart from the rest of India – the people speak Nepalese, wear fez hats, eat momos (Tibetan dumplings), and have the sun-wizened look of other Himalayan peoples. It’s a stunningly beautiful town, wrapped in the four directions by soaring mountains. When the liquid-pearl clouds clear, Kanchenjunga rises before you – the celestial mass of the third highest mountain on earth.
On the drive from Darjeeling to Sikkim we traverse roaring mountain rivers and mossy green forests alive with acrobatic monkeys. Our driver stops at a roadside stand to buy bunches of radishes, the most striking shade of violet – the twilight edge of an incandescent sunset. Later, we drift through a village and are immersed into a burst of colour and commotion as children celebrating the Vishwakarma Puja surround our jeep laughing, passing out sweet snacks, and smearing purple rice paste onto our foreheads.
Sikkim is a Himalayan kingdom that was independent until it acceded to India in 1975. It retains much of its old character and the landscape is dotted with Buddhist monasteries and Stupas.
Since I am in a Buddhist homeland, and because I’m trying to escape thesis world if only for a few blissful moments, I will afford my wandering mind a wide pasture and allegorically illustrate three of the central tenets of Buddhism - impermanence, duality, and mindfulness. I make no claim on eloquence or clarity but my Mefloquine mind needs to breathe deeply every once and a while…
Impermanence:
Beginning with the ubiquitous end, let us take a moment, or a minute, to consider the tragically short lives of mayflies and snails. Allow me to introduce Ephemeroptera (“short-lived wing”). On one sunny day, not unlike any other sunny day, the Mayfly nymph emerges from her abyssal cradle under the smooth stones of an icy stream. She takes flight for the first time on delicate, luminescent, spun glass wings, lofting into the azure sky higher and higher. The warm spring air carries her into a sweeping spiral of her companions; the beating of their wings reverberates in her chest. What indescribable liberation! Finally there is a great joining and then it is over. The ephemeral mayfly emerges and falls into deathly slumber in a single day. Does the mayfly’s life proceed with the same rhythm as ours as it only glimpses one sunset, one spin of the earth on its axis? Assuming that the sum of the mayfly’s life is equal, we live in parallel worlds of time and experience. To the mayfly every moment is at once the most joyous and the most melancholy ever.
On that same spring evening, the rain tumbles to the earth, washing away the carapace carcass of the mayfly. The cool rain cleanses the smooth concrete pavement. Sensing an opportunity unlike any other a snail emerges from underneath a mossy stone wall and slips across the path, her flesh drinking in the life-giving water. She glides along in contentment, feelers twitching in the night air. And suddenly it’s over, her beautiful spiral shell reduced to fragments, trodden by an artless foot…
It was a sickening feeling. I was remorseful at having destroyed such modest, yet magnificent, ambition. But nothing lasts forever. Even the destroyer will one day be destroyed.
Duality:
India is full. There’s no more room. Don’t even think of coming here, please. I’m crammed into a jeep with eleven other people. Beside me is a jovial and fleshy Buddhist monk - we break up the monotony by trying to coax a smile out of the baby in front of us. There are people on top of me, people behind me and also in front of me. I have a feeling there might also be somebody underneath me – poor bastard. As my landlady appraised: “you have height…you’re tall…no, super-tall!” I shift as I think I feel a hand on my ass. It’s not often I get a hand on my ass (certainly not for a lack of trying) but sometimes in India I feel as though my arse might as well have a hand magnet on it. There’s just no room so physical contact happens. Our limbs are entwined, tangled. This jeep stinks. I’m trying to hold my breath. Get me out of this jeep! I’m tired; I’m hot - just as tired and hot as all the other bodies around me. In fact, they are probably thinking similar things (with the exception of the guy below who is thinking: “get this giant blonde nerd off of me”).
Is it possible to forget myself in this crowded jeep, to extinguish my egoism and just merge seamlessly into the steel blue sea? No problem. But first, I need to get that hand off my ass!
Mindfulness:
Stars sparkle in the midnight velvet sky
Morphine spiders crawl under paper skin
The streets of Kolkata feel vacant as a dream, yet still they shudder
Rivulets of water dance in the glow of a kerosene lamp
Underneath the smouldering orange moon,
Maya seeks redemption in Nita’s wearied arms
Stolen from sanctuary so many restless nights ago
Used roughly by strangers with their foul breath and fouler temperament
Used until her body was numb, her mind was numb, her soul was numb.
Only brown sugar softened the hard edge
An opiate to make them go away,
To slip into the grey
In this moment, on this concrete curb, the brown sugar was fading
And that old ache was creeping back,
A pain so real
A stone would cry out
Her body twitching,
Like Arjuna after the battle
she fell to her knees,
heartsick
She can feel Nita’s soft lips brushing against her ear as she points to the sky and whispers,
“maybe we’re just the lucky ones.”
Through the red haze of her pain she finds that moon
and senses opportunity,
a returning…
As I’m drifting along, lost in my own thoughts, I glance to my right and there is Ramona - a friend from my days in the Netherlands. I spent a month in Jamaica where we (along with our friend Marcel) spent days laying on the beach and nights listening to the sounds of “The Cool Ruler” and other reggae stars (everybody in Jamaica thinks they’re a reggae star – my personal favourite was the appropriately named Brushy One String). We ate escovitchied fish, rundown chicken and Johnny cakes, and chased it with dragon stout. That is Ramona as I know her. How odd that we now find ourselves together in the Himalayas.
Driving through the Himalayas, through Sikkim, it’s hard not to notice the bizarrely whimsical road signs. Ramona called it “fortune cookie wisdom” and that pretty much sums it up. A few examples:
- The rule of the road, quite the paradox: left is always right
- If married, divorce speed
- Sinking zone: a trouble spot since 1975.
- Go with the bend my friend.
We were stuck in one such “trouble spot” for three hours as a landslide had to be cleared by an army bulldozer. Because of its privileged (cursed) geographical position, wedged between Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan, Sikkim is full of military bases.
The heights of the Himalayas are defined by the sky. Clouds flow around you and the ever-present icy wind animates and, with time, tatters the Buddhist prayer flags. Stupas - monuments to the dead - are surrounded by expanses of fluttering white flags covered in swirling Tibetan script. The chants of Tibetan monks are an elemental rumble tumbling like waterfalls down the cold mountains. The people themselves belong to the landscape – they are often extremely short like alpine trees growing on the edge of possibility. Places like Sikkim and Tibet themselves exist on the edge of possibility; their very remoteness imbues them with their power as carriers of the spiritual imagination.
I’m now back in Calcutta witnessing the City of Joy in its most joyous moment: the Durga Puja. I don’t know what all of you are doing but I’m going out into the sound and the lights to have some fun!
Darjeeling is the land of the Ghorkas (Ghurkas). The Ghorkas are, of course, famous Indo-Nepali soldiers fighting in the service of the British Empire. Ghorka identity is now firmly anchored to this martial myth and Ghorkas are one of the only groups in India who have the constitutional right to carry concealed weapons (in this case the wickedly curved dagger known as the Khukiri). I visited a “Ghorka accessory” shop in Darjeeling decorated with a poster proclaiming “A Ghorka and his Khukiri: A Fatal Combination”. Darjeeling, a former British hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas is most famous for its tea, grown in verdant green terraced gardens on the hillsides. Now there is a Ghorka nationalist movement seeking statehood for “Ghorkaland”. Darjeeling is a world apart from the rest of India – the people speak Nepalese, wear fez hats, eat momos (Tibetan dumplings), and have the sun-wizened look of other Himalayan peoples. It’s a stunningly beautiful town, wrapped in the four directions by soaring mountains. When the liquid-pearl clouds clear, Kanchenjunga rises before you – the celestial mass of the third highest mountain on earth.
On the drive from Darjeeling to Sikkim we traverse roaring mountain rivers and mossy green forests alive with acrobatic monkeys. Our driver stops at a roadside stand to buy bunches of radishes, the most striking shade of violet – the twilight edge of an incandescent sunset. Later, we drift through a village and are immersed into a burst of colour and commotion as children celebrating the Vishwakarma Puja surround our jeep laughing, passing out sweet snacks, and smearing purple rice paste onto our foreheads.
Sikkim is a Himalayan kingdom that was independent until it acceded to India in 1975. It retains much of its old character and the landscape is dotted with Buddhist monasteries and Stupas.
Since I am in a Buddhist homeland, and because I’m trying to escape thesis world if only for a few blissful moments, I will afford my wandering mind a wide pasture and allegorically illustrate three of the central tenets of Buddhism - impermanence, duality, and mindfulness. I make no claim on eloquence or clarity but my Mefloquine mind needs to breathe deeply every once and a while…
Impermanence:
Beginning with the ubiquitous end, let us take a moment, or a minute, to consider the tragically short lives of mayflies and snails. Allow me to introduce Ephemeroptera (“short-lived wing”). On one sunny day, not unlike any other sunny day, the Mayfly nymph emerges from her abyssal cradle under the smooth stones of an icy stream. She takes flight for the first time on delicate, luminescent, spun glass wings, lofting into the azure sky higher and higher. The warm spring air carries her into a sweeping spiral of her companions; the beating of their wings reverberates in her chest. What indescribable liberation! Finally there is a great joining and then it is over. The ephemeral mayfly emerges and falls into deathly slumber in a single day. Does the mayfly’s life proceed with the same rhythm as ours as it only glimpses one sunset, one spin of the earth on its axis? Assuming that the sum of the mayfly’s life is equal, we live in parallel worlds of time and experience. To the mayfly every moment is at once the most joyous and the most melancholy ever.
On that same spring evening, the rain tumbles to the earth, washing away the carapace carcass of the mayfly. The cool rain cleanses the smooth concrete pavement. Sensing an opportunity unlike any other a snail emerges from underneath a mossy stone wall and slips across the path, her flesh drinking in the life-giving water. She glides along in contentment, feelers twitching in the night air. And suddenly it’s over, her beautiful spiral shell reduced to fragments, trodden by an artless foot…
It was a sickening feeling. I was remorseful at having destroyed such modest, yet magnificent, ambition. But nothing lasts forever. Even the destroyer will one day be destroyed.
Duality:
India is full. There’s no more room. Don’t even think of coming here, please. I’m crammed into a jeep with eleven other people. Beside me is a jovial and fleshy Buddhist monk - we break up the monotony by trying to coax a smile out of the baby in front of us. There are people on top of me, people behind me and also in front of me. I have a feeling there might also be somebody underneath me – poor bastard. As my landlady appraised: “you have height…you’re tall…no, super-tall!” I shift as I think I feel a hand on my ass. It’s not often I get a hand on my ass (certainly not for a lack of trying) but sometimes in India I feel as though my arse might as well have a hand magnet on it. There’s just no room so physical contact happens. Our limbs are entwined, tangled. This jeep stinks. I’m trying to hold my breath. Get me out of this jeep! I’m tired; I’m hot - just as tired and hot as all the other bodies around me. In fact, they are probably thinking similar things (with the exception of the guy below who is thinking: “get this giant blonde nerd off of me”).
Is it possible to forget myself in this crowded jeep, to extinguish my egoism and just merge seamlessly into the steel blue sea? No problem. But first, I need to get that hand off my ass!
Mindfulness:
Stars sparkle in the midnight velvet sky
Morphine spiders crawl under paper skin
The streets of Kolkata feel vacant as a dream, yet still they shudder
Rivulets of water dance in the glow of a kerosene lamp
Underneath the smouldering orange moon,
Maya seeks redemption in Nita’s wearied arms
Stolen from sanctuary so many restless nights ago
Used roughly by strangers with their foul breath and fouler temperament
Used until her body was numb, her mind was numb, her soul was numb.
Only brown sugar softened the hard edge
An opiate to make them go away,
To slip into the grey
In this moment, on this concrete curb, the brown sugar was fading
And that old ache was creeping back,
A pain so real
A stone would cry out
Her body twitching,
Like Arjuna after the battle
she fell to her knees,
heartsick
She can feel Nita’s soft lips brushing against her ear as she points to the sky and whispers,
“maybe we’re just the lucky ones.”
Through the red haze of her pain she finds that moon
and senses opportunity,
a returning…
As I’m drifting along, lost in my own thoughts, I glance to my right and there is Ramona - a friend from my days in the Netherlands. I spent a month in Jamaica where we (along with our friend Marcel) spent days laying on the beach and nights listening to the sounds of “The Cool Ruler” and other reggae stars (everybody in Jamaica thinks they’re a reggae star – my personal favourite was the appropriately named Brushy One String). We ate escovitchied fish, rundown chicken and Johnny cakes, and chased it with dragon stout. That is Ramona as I know her. How odd that we now find ourselves together in the Himalayas.
Driving through the Himalayas, through Sikkim, it’s hard not to notice the bizarrely whimsical road signs. Ramona called it “fortune cookie wisdom” and that pretty much sums it up. A few examples:
- The rule of the road, quite the paradox: left is always right
- If married, divorce speed
- Sinking zone: a trouble spot since 1975.
- Go with the bend my friend.
We were stuck in one such “trouble spot” for three hours as a landslide had to be cleared by an army bulldozer. Because of its privileged (cursed) geographical position, wedged between Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan, Sikkim is full of military bases.
The heights of the Himalayas are defined by the sky. Clouds flow around you and the ever-present icy wind animates and, with time, tatters the Buddhist prayer flags. Stupas - monuments to the dead - are surrounded by expanses of fluttering white flags covered in swirling Tibetan script. The chants of Tibetan monks are an elemental rumble tumbling like waterfalls down the cold mountains. The people themselves belong to the landscape – they are often extremely short like alpine trees growing on the edge of possibility. Places like Sikkim and Tibet themselves exist on the edge of possibility; their very remoteness imbues them with their power as carriers of the spiritual imagination.
I’m now back in Calcutta witnessing the City of Joy in its most joyous moment: the Durga Puja. I don’t know what all of you are doing but I’m going out into the sound and the lights to have some fun!
Monday, October 6, 2008
The Hardening of the Heart
Faced with the ordinary, human disappointments of life there have been moments where I have resolved to immunise myself by forging my heart into a harder instrument. But, I ask myself, does the hardening of the heart serve a constructive purpose? The hard hearts have strength but it is brittle and hollow – self-defence born of the denial of self-awareness. In the age of rationalism and technological mastery is humanity best served by feeling less? It is easy to profane the humane. Yet, if we disconnect ourselves from our own suffering are we not also disconnecting ourselves from the suffering of others?
I have wondered about the human cost of the kind of work that I do: when you become habituated to the suffering of others are you losing some of what it means to be human? Is that ever a reasonable price to pay?
In the everyday of Calcutta I sometimes lift my legs and step right over human suffering as I’m going about my important business of looking for books or shopping for cheap sandals. Empathy is wonderful, just so long as it doesn’t throw me off balance. Recently I stopped on the street over an old, grey-haired woman who was begging in the darkness with her child in her arms. I stooped over and emptied the change out of my pocket into her outstretched, wrinkled, russet hand. She glanced down at the small change (a few rupees) and briefly looked up at me, her face showing naked, desperate disappointment. It was not the look of an imposter, but an honest look of destroyed hope born from the wasting disease of poverty. It made me feel terribly ashamed. How could I put such a look on anybody’s face? I passed her again a few minutes later and this time slipped a ten rupee note into her hand (about 25 cents). I didn’t stop to look at her face. I couldn’t bear to see that look again. When does cool indifference become cruel indifference? I don’t know.
I have wondered about the human cost of the kind of work that I do: when you become habituated to the suffering of others are you losing some of what it means to be human? Is that ever a reasonable price to pay?
In the everyday of Calcutta I sometimes lift my legs and step right over human suffering as I’m going about my important business of looking for books or shopping for cheap sandals. Empathy is wonderful, just so long as it doesn’t throw me off balance. Recently I stopped on the street over an old, grey-haired woman who was begging in the darkness with her child in her arms. I stooped over and emptied the change out of my pocket into her outstretched, wrinkled, russet hand. She glanced down at the small change (a few rupees) and briefly looked up at me, her face showing naked, desperate disappointment. It was not the look of an imposter, but an honest look of destroyed hope born from the wasting disease of poverty. It made me feel terribly ashamed. How could I put such a look on anybody’s face? I passed her again a few minutes later and this time slipped a ten rupee note into her hand (about 25 cents). I didn’t stop to look at her face. I couldn’t bear to see that look again. When does cool indifference become cruel indifference? I don’t know.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
A Note on the Origin of Bananas
I'm lying here on my bed typing. Dusk is bleeding the colour from the cityscape but it isn't becoming any more subdued. With dusk comes rush hour and its cacophony of honking horns. The Mynah birds compete, squawking a bit louder in unison with the cars. Fruit bats are emerging from their arboreal slumber and swooping overhead. I'm feeling slightly wistful, as I often am, missing people and places, wondering about other people, and worrying a bit about an old Indian man.
Probir, my next door neighbour, is an urbane, lively, and wiry old Bengali. Once he took my (ex) roommate to the university district and regaled us with stories about youthful flirtations and mischief. At the coffee cooperative, with its waiters in their white coats, red sashes, and ruffled white hats, he told a little white lie that we were on our way to the airport so could we please get our brew a little quicker? Another day he shuffled into my apartment and asked me: "do you know where these bananas came from?" He was holding up a great bunch of ripening bananas arrayed around a curved emerald stem. “Let me tell you a story...” This guy loved telling stories almost as much as he loved apologising for telling too many stories! “I have an old friend named Suman. He was a very skilled man, working for years building the frames of cars by hand. One day he lost his business and so he was forced to become a key-maker, sitting on the street making keys. He became very poor but remained a proud man. I could never dream of giving him money so I decided to help him in other ways. His son was in grade five but had never had a proper pair of running shoes! The shoes that he was using were no good for sports and against the school regulations but the teachers knew the family was poor and so they said nothing. I decided to buy him a pair of shoes but I told the family I made them myself. I got a piece of paper and carefully traced my way around the boy’s feet. When I was done I showed them to the boy and said ‘now I've got everything I need to make your shoes!’ ‘but the paper is ripped on the corner,’ the boy said and so I began to trace again. When I finally presented the family with the shoes they were so overjoyed I was embarrassed. They could not pay me, but in return they gave me these bananas from their tree!” His face was illuminated by mirthful pride. I never did get a chance to try those bananas but surely their origin alone rendered them a little more delicious than the average banana.
A couple of days after our (slow-motion) tour of College street Probir had a stroke and fell into a coma. I hope that with time this old story-teller will re-awake. Until then...
Probir, my next door neighbour, is an urbane, lively, and wiry old Bengali. Once he took my (ex) roommate to the university district and regaled us with stories about youthful flirtations and mischief. At the coffee cooperative, with its waiters in their white coats, red sashes, and ruffled white hats, he told a little white lie that we were on our way to the airport so could we please get our brew a little quicker? Another day he shuffled into my apartment and asked me: "do you know where these bananas came from?" He was holding up a great bunch of ripening bananas arrayed around a curved emerald stem. “Let me tell you a story...” This guy loved telling stories almost as much as he loved apologising for telling too many stories! “I have an old friend named Suman. He was a very skilled man, working for years building the frames of cars by hand. One day he lost his business and so he was forced to become a key-maker, sitting on the street making keys. He became very poor but remained a proud man. I could never dream of giving him money so I decided to help him in other ways. His son was in grade five but had never had a proper pair of running shoes! The shoes that he was using were no good for sports and against the school regulations but the teachers knew the family was poor and so they said nothing. I decided to buy him a pair of shoes but I told the family I made them myself. I got a piece of paper and carefully traced my way around the boy’s feet. When I was done I showed them to the boy and said ‘now I've got everything I need to make your shoes!’ ‘but the paper is ripped on the corner,’ the boy said and so I began to trace again. When I finally presented the family with the shoes they were so overjoyed I was embarrassed. They could not pay me, but in return they gave me these bananas from their tree!” His face was illuminated by mirthful pride. I never did get a chance to try those bananas but surely their origin alone rendered them a little more delicious than the average banana.
A couple of days after our (slow-motion) tour of College street Probir had a stroke and fell into a coma. I hope that with time this old story-teller will re-awake. Until then...
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