Calcutta and Bangladesh

Richard W. Frank

Calcutta and a border scuffle in Bangladesh

"To travel properly you have to ignore external inconveniences and surrender yourself entirely to the experience. You must blend into your surroundings and accept what comes. In this way you become part of the land and that is where the reward comes." -Freya Stark

My oxygen-starved brain took a second to register the three Nepali porters running through the snow at me yelling "Dangerous! Dangerous!" Then I saw what they were pointing at. The mid-morning light highlighted a river of snow pluming off the cliff above me at an amazing speed. Avalanche. D'oh! I was in danger of literally becoming part of the land. Fuelled by every ounce of adrenaline my body possessed I transformed into Carl Lewis-fastest man in da world. After five seconds of flying I rather ingloriously fell face first into a cushion of fresh snow as a cloud of snow dusted me. Smiling the Nepalis helped me out from under my millstone of a pack then continued running down the narrow valley. The Annapurna Sanctuary had turned into a game of Pitfall and motivated by self-preservation I continued wet to the skin to Machapuchare Base Camp. Why the heck did I leave the warm embrace of Mandrem Beach?

Six weeks earlier three backpackers could be seen one sweltering afternoon stepping off a train into the most maligned city on earth: Calcutta. As early as the 1770s the first governor of Bengal Robert Clive called it "the most vile place in the universe." Nearly one hundred years later one of his successors, Sir George Trevelyan wrote "Find if you can a more uninviting spot than Calcutta...the place is so bad by nature that human efforts could do little to make it worse, but that little has been done faithfully and assiduously." I could hardly wait.

On the taxi ride to our hotel in Sutter St. we saw a small body of a child swathed in white carried on a wooden bed by four Bengalis down the highway as cars whipped by. Welcome to Calcutta. Crossing the Howrah bridge the full sprawl stretched before us. How monochromatically grey it all seemed. On the 35 hour train journey from Madras I had read Frederic Thomas' "Calcutta-The Human Face of Poverty" and at some time in the past I had seen that Patrick Swayze movie, so I thought I was ready for the depravity and the poverty.

"...it's not hippies on a spiritual mission who come here anymore, just morons on a poverty-tourism adventure holiday...your kind of travel is all about low horizons dressed up as open-mindedness. You have no interest in India, and no sensitivity for the problems this country is trying to face up to."

-William Sutcliffe, Are You Experienced, p74.

After I dropped my bag in the dormitory, I set out to loose myself in Calcutta's narrow streets and see the reality for myself. The next week saw me spend many an hour walking trying to avoid the cows and taxis, but what I found surprised me. The pollution was indeed a physical force making me stop periodically and sit down because the fumes made me sway like a dingy lost at sea. The streets which were swept daily were still coated with a pervasive grey ooze which squelched into my Tevas until my toes were an unrecognizable blob. Charming. Calcutta is the one of the last places on earth to still widely use rickshaws pulled by sickly men in bare feet. Even Dhaka has largely replaced them with bicycle-pulled. These men with a life expectancy down in the forties provide an economical way for locals to negotiate Calcutta's narrow alleys. I never did see a tourist take one out of some misplaced sense of guilt I suppose.

"In India we are keen on defecation. As part of a general concern with purification, which is tied up with recognizing the body as the temple of the soul. Phlegm and feces have no place in a temple. The man who strains towards Nirvana must be sure to void his bowels regularly." -Gita Meta, Karma Kola, p82.

But the dirt, rickshaws, and excrement represented the surface of Calcutta. It has always been a city of migrants since the time the British turned this small town into the capital of their burgeoning Empire. These men come from the countryside to make money with the full intention to return to their families. It is a town where few have a stake in its future. Calcutta has the highest ratio of men to women of any city in the world (and Anchorage has the most women...I was headed the wrong way). And yet for all the negatives the city has a vitality and an active culture and artistic scene of which most cities would be proud. People may sleep on the sidewalks but there is no sense of lassitude or despair. The street dwellers have formed a powerful union to let them stay where they are. The living is cheap and it is easier to save. In the morning men wash themselves and gossip by the local pump. Families cook breakfast and chat oblivious to the activity and bustle inches away. Businessmen emerge from under grimy plastic tarps in impossible white starches shirts. Everyone seems to have a purpose and a job whether cleaning up trash or selling "Pickpocket" underwear or posters of kittens. Despite the weather which Mark Twain found humid "enough to make the brass doorknob mushy," rickshaw wallahs trot down alleys carrying school children, boys play cricket in the rain on a Chowringee green, and the park near the impassive Victoria Monument to the empire is host to Asia's largest book fair (if only my bag was big enough to carry that copy of the OED with me). The museums are large and impressive (if the stuffed animals look a little dusty and missing an eye or two) and Rabnath Tagore called Calcutta home as well as many other writers and artists.

"I shall always be glad to have seen it-for the same reason Papa gave for being glad to have seen Lisbon-namely, that it will be unnecessary for me ever to see it again." Winston Churchill

It was my last day in Calcutta and there was no putting off seeing Mother Theresa's mission. I had spent several evenings with women from my hostel who had spent weeks volunteering at the houses for the dying, single mothers, and orphans. The volunteers seemed to be entirely women of a certain age, single, earnest, humorless, and generous by nature. I wondered (maybe a little cynically) what they got out of giving. It did seem a noble way to giving something back after receiving so much (sometimes too much) from India. I felt awkward surrounded by selflessness (or the negation of the self) and this feeling increased when I finally was surrounded by blue and white cowled nuns. A young and attractive Bengali nun kindly showed me through the many rooms adorned with crosses, bible quotes, and adoring photos of the Mother. As a solo nonbeliever I felt like I was trespassing. This was one time when I felt like being a part of a large and anonymous tour group. Just follow the flag and take photos. It was with a sense of relief when the tour of suffering and generosity was finished. Being naturally parsimonious with beggars over the last two months I tried a meek atonement by making a donation. I really just wanted to throw her the money and be gone, but it took 30 minute of filling out forms before I was allowed to hand over my meager cash and flee with a tax deduction clutched in my damp hand.

My mission to Bangladesh did not go according to plan. The embassy in Calcutta told me that I was not allowed to travel overland via the nearby border but would have to sponsor the national airlines by flying. D'oh! With stubbornness and a few dead presidents I hoped to circumvent this "requirement" and hopped the ludicrously overcrowded commuter train determined to beg, buy or steal my way in. After a jarring 30 min rickshaw ride I faced my first hurdle-the glacial Indian bureaucracy. For the next three hours I learned the difficulties of shuttle diplomacy bouncing between India and Bangladesh in an insidious test of patience and stubbornness. Who would break first? The Indians would not stamp my passport without a visa and the 'deshies would not give me a visa without this. Anthony Burgess be damned. I prided myself on restraining from profanity and making faces at the bored border guards but came dangerously close to both. Then unexpectedly the Bangladesh official I had dubbed Tweedle Dumber took me to the border one last time and told the guards not to let me back....And so my three hour tour to scenic Bangladesh came to an end. Loudly questioning the marital status of their parents I went back to Calcutta and went to seek refuge in the arms of the Himalaya.

Back to World Trip #2

Back to the South

The toy train ride to Darjeeling (fun for about the first thirty minutes) from Siliguri takes eight hours giving ample time to admire the view and revel in the aroma from the surrounding tea plantations. I was not able to enjoy the mountains for long, as I started my long expected "Indian health horror story." My stay in Darjeeling and Sikkim was tainted with the symptoms of Guardia but did not get it treated until Katmandu. I wasn't really able to eat and the stomach cramps and nausea were exacerbated by some amazingly tortuous jeep rides on mountain roads. All pleasure may be similar but each suffering is unique.

In a moment of lucidity I made a point to visit Tensing Norgay's grave at HMI. Sir Edmund Hillary and Norgay were the first people to stand on the highest place on earth in 1953. After meeting Sir Ed under such different circumstances at Pole, it was amazing to visit this simple white marble grave in the shadow of Kanchenjunga, at 8598m the third highest mountain in the world.

In Sikkim I felt sorry for myself, took long walks in the hills, and spent the afternoons in Gangtok on the roof of my hotel watching as Nature used her more impressive Crayons on Kanchenjunga and wispy clouds as novice monks practiced blowing their 2m long horns and trumpets into the sunset. Felt as if I was in a bad Brad Pitt movie.

Visiting Rumtek monastery is like being back in Tibet. The home of the Ngmapa sect has optimistically placed a banner across the dirt road welcoming the Karmapa. Internet printouts of his flight from Tsurpu gompa paper the entrance. It is unlikely however that India will endanger Chinese relations by letting him move this close to Tibet in such a sensitive region. Poor guys, they looked so hopeful repainting the place.

To get into Sikkim on a 15 day permit one has to (again) brave Indian bureaucracy for several hours. The valleys to Tibet and Bhutan are lined with checkpoints and bases to prevent a repetition of India's humiliating defeat in 1962 when Zho Enlai could have taken Calcutta without breaking a sweat. It is just hard to find these people threatening as long as they don't try to offer you a rickshaw. Maybe it was the fact that everyone sounded like the Simpson's Apu (please do not be touching the Slushie machine). Traveling up to Tsongo Lake at the Bhutanese border we passed numerous examples of Indian "camouflage"-buildings splashed with patches of red brown and orange that contrasted garishly with the surrounding snow. They try, they really do.

My stomach was now in a permanent state of revolt. I felt I was walking on deck in a stiff storm being stabbed by dull daggers. Though I was as yet not sure exactly which amongst myriad diseases was the culprit, reading the Health section of the Lonely Planet is enough to make the most stoic a hypochondriac. Dysentery, Japanese encephalitis, parasites, amoebas, rickets, there were far too many creepy crawlies that could make me feel like an Apollo rocket every time I used the toilet. And we have liftoff!!

The only break I had was re-discovering Star-TV and ESPN. How can I begin to describe how two Canadian girls and I almost lost bladder control watching the Muppet Show for the first time in around 15 years. Memories of the Swedish chef "Bork da bork," Gonzo with his disturbing chicken fetish, Fozzy's stand-up, and good ol' grumpy Stadler and Waldorf helped me laugh my way during my purgatory of 30 hours of buses and jeeps to Katmandu. I loaded myself with pharmaceuticals, gritted my teeth, and sang to myself "It's time to get things started, it's time to light the lights..."

Bob Seger sure had it right. Katmandu was like nirvana after the colorful chaos of India. Coffee, huevos rancheros, antibiotics, hot showers, a call home, and trying to decide if I could really afford the Hilton (just for one night?).

Two days later I found myself with a relatively sound body perched on the roof of a dilapidated bus careening towards the Himalaya in the company of two confused pigs, 30 chickens, and three Nepali boys in baseball caps watching for low wires and soaking in a pervasive sense of freedom from knowing this was the last bloody bus for three weeks. Heehee!

To Annapurna