The Last Refuge of the Rickshaw

Hey everybody. Apologies for the flowery prose and cryptic references of my last post, but what can I say – I even romanticise my own romanticism. At least I didn’t write in my postscript that “time was our co-conspirator and the elements were our accomplices” - marrying my terrible humour with lawyer-speak seemed a bit too cruel and unusual. All that aside here are some of my early impressions of life in Calcutta…

Calcutta is dirty, overcrowded, toxic, and intoxicating. It’s a huge city of around fifteen million people. It’s also considered to be the seat of Bengali civilization and probably the most culturally vibrant city in India. Calcutta is a city of sharp contrasts - expansive leafy green parks, monumental Victorian colonial buildings (Calcutta used to be capital of the British Raj), soaring religious sites, but also vast, dire slums where people live burrowed into heaps of garbage and noisy, polluted streets choked with swerving traffic. Ancient traditions coexist with glass and steel office towers and shopping malls. These contrasts extend to living Calcutta, to the people: Sikhs in turbans; countless teenagers in blue jeans and t-shirts; women in brightly coloured saris with henna tattoos on their feet; men in tailored suits; beggars - wretched bundles of flesh wrapped in soiled bundles of cloth, twitching on the pavement; a mystic clad in a loincloth with nearly black skin, frazzled hair, and bloodshot eyes picking his way through the sea of humanity, leaning on a warped stick.

I knew what Calcutta was going to be like, but all the knowledge in the world can’t prepare you for corporal experience. Although I haven’t had many moments of complete comfort since my arrival, I thrive on the unfamiliarity of this place. Maybe this is why I love travelling: to add some exoticism to my otherwise dull character, a pinch of cumin to my white bread. In Calcutta exoticism permeates the very air that you breathe – it’s dense and bursting with the visceral stench of life. Dead dogs rot in the street, incense burns in Hindu shrines, people smell, street vendors fry sizzling batches of puri, and the choking smog of thousands of cars, buses, and motorbikes makes your eyes water. It’s incredibly humid here – going outside, the air wraps around you like a coat. I trained for this steamy heat by half hour stints in the sauna at the Salthill Leisureland. It was very misleading - where are all the Polish body builders and that pine scent? Something has gone badly wrong.

There is a certain level of grunginess in Calcutta and either you get used to it or you go nuts. Like it or not, you’re right in the middle of it. Just before I left Ireland I was chatting with a guy who was telling me “I’d love to see Calcutta – from the inside of a space suit that is.” The man was joking, but he had a fair point. There is no space suit so your only refuge is blissful indifference to the sensory assault that is India. Yet life is not war and India doesn’t have to be an assault - this city can be challenging but it’s also eternally surprising and thrilling.

I’m staying in Jodhpur Park in South Calcutta near Salt Lake.[1] From Salthill to Salt Lake – the dominant element for this period of my life appears to be salt – the sweat of my brow or the tears seasoning my breakfast? Must be sweat – in Calcutta I sweat even when I’m sitting still.
Only steps from here there’s another lake – it’s a marshy, emerald lagoon fringed on one side by a vibrant slum and on the other by crumbling Hindu statues of crowned gods on horseback. People bathe there but they are made of stronger stuff than I (as my mother has surely told each and every one of you – I don’t have my cholera vaccine).

Nonetheless, I’m performing horrible experiments on my gastro-intestinal tract. My sister (the ‘gastro-intestinal guardian’) would not approve. She has had three different types of parasites (all ostensibly picked up when a Lemur shit on her baguette in Madagascar). Still I’m endeavouring to be as cautious as is possible while living immersed. I have a built-in water filter on my tap that plays an unreasonably happy little tune when it has successfully obliterated all living organisms within range. The Jains would not approve.

Today’s forecast: partly nauseated with diarrheic periods. Actually so far I’m not doing too badly. Don’t worry…I’ll be sure to keep all of you posted. In this age of internet exhibitionism I might even create a blog about my colon. I could call it Inside Kjelly’s Belly: A Moving Story (the subtitle lends some undeniable class and panache).

Frequent blackouts add a strange rhythm to my life here (using the phrase “strange rhythm” after that last paragraph seems entirely uncalled for). Anyway, when the fans go off it’s time to go out – otherwise my apartment becomes unbearably steamy (this is exactly the scenario I find myself in as I type this email on my laptop – sitting cross legged in my boxers, looking like a pale and feverish Gandhi). Inside the blackout the glow of the street lights also dies away and more than once I’ve found myself groping around in pitch black trying to find my way home. I have a history of stumbling around in the dark – a drunken crawl through a spidery cave in Fiji with Lance and Ralifo; a quick, worrisome 3am march through the dense forests of New Caledonia with no light; driving through the anarchical tenements of Kingston Jamaica during a blackout – the tranquility of the night is easily transformed to disorientation in unfamiliar lands.

I live a relatively solitary existence (as much as possible in a city of fifteen million people), with only the fauna in this apartment for company. This means that I’m starting to go a little crazy. One day, at my funeral, this might be described as “a rich inner life” but for now we may suppress the post-mortem sycophantic urge and just call it plain old crazy. I can’t get rid of the cockroaches, ants, and lizards so I’ve decided to engage them (ostensibly with the hopes of some kind of communication breakthrough on the order of coco the chimp). After the lizard shits one too many times on my wall I begin to taunt him: “oh you think you’re sooooo cool because you can walk upside down! Are you doing a PhD as well? What’s that? I see that Gene Simmons tongue of yours moving but not much sound is coming out. Ahh….wait, I hear you now. You are doing a PhD? In marine phycology? Oh damn, my mistake!” (actual transcript)

Leaving the apartment I’m inevitably confronted with the sub-continent’s well-earned reputation for weighty bureaucracy. Virtually every task here requires photo id, copies of your passport and visa, and a passport-sized photograph. All these requirements imposed on a man who feels carrying a wallet, or more than two keys at once, (or wearing socks) is overly burdensome. Very problematic! My dad is fond of telling the story of how it required six people to make him an ice cream cone in Sri Lanka and I’ve experienced similar things here (a four stage process involving tickets and security checks in order to buy a Samosa in a shop).

Yet, Indians must be the most enterprising, ingenious people on the planet. Every possible economic niche is filled. Just walking the street nearby my apartment I pass an old man in rumpled brown clothes doing a steady business repairing shoes, another copying keys by hand (using a file and a cigarette lighter), and an electronics repair “shop” consisting of old tools carefully laid out on a dirty blanket.

The soundtrack to my Calcutta life, walking these tumultuous streets, is the constant din of honking horns from the three wheeled “autos” and bicycle rickshaws. Whatever comes next is bound to seem oddly serene.

Calcutta is the last refuge of the rickshaw – the only place in India where foot rickshaws are still common. There is talk of banning them, for they are a brutal occupation. I have seen the rickshaw pullers resting under bridges in dingy Dickensian squalor. There they lie languidly, limbs dangling, looking like they aren’t long for this world. They probably aren’t - they pass through this life in swift turbulence. By moonlight, as the rain rinses the soot off the pavement, the pullers sleep sheltered beneath their conveyances. What do they dream of? I don’t know, but I suspect their happiest dreams are of sleep itself. For when they awake they must navigate through a maelstrom of traffic, with lanes more negotiated than demarcated. Perhaps dreams themselves are the last refuge of the rickshaw.

[1] I’m staying temporarily with Becky Bavinger, an American who was kind enough to offer me a place to crash. Becky is the country director of Made by Survivors – an NGO that offers economic opportunities to survivors of human trafficking.