A Long Journey into Bengal

We slept through most of the train ride, but it was still a very long, tiring trip. Kolkata has the reputation as the friendliest city in India and lived up to this as we were pointed in the direction of the prepaid taxi stands and were put in a taxi without much hassle. We stayed with a couchsurfer we'd met in Pushkar and once again it was a huge relief to land at a home rather than a hostel. Anubhav lives in the center of town and is a very busy lawyer, he had to leave that evening, with regrets. It suited us to stay inside by ourselves, eat an uninteresting but thankfully filling pizza, and watch movies on his laptop. Magda's belly had recovered somewhat, but mine was just beginning to really rebel. The next day we met with another friend of our friend Jen's and walked around the city as much as we could with my energy level scraping the road. I was tired and sick still and hadn't eaten properly for days. We ended the day with a relaxing night at a children's play, performed by incredible little actors and laced with none too subtle anti-American messages. The perfect venue for such views in a play put on by seven year olds. I mentioned my thoughts to our friend santosh afterwards and he giggled, saying that the playwrite was a communist and it would be troubling if he hadn't included a little anti-americanism.

The next day my stomach was worse and I rolled in misery in the back of santosh's car. He had planned to drive us all over town, to see absolutely everything. Well, planned for his driver to drive us all over town. His driver was a young Bengali who had recently fled the city to marry a Muslim girl. Both families were scandalized and everyone was searching for him, but he managed to arrive back in the city that day since Santosh had special guests that needed sightseeing. I observed the driver but he showed no signs that he was a wanted man, in anything he drove as if he didn't have a care in the world. It was hard to stomach his driving in fact. We cut the trip short.

That night Anubhav got tired of my sickness and decided to cure me. He and Magda went out to find food while I stayed at home, miserable. He brought back a series of colored pills and some red bean curd and rice. The combination of everything, he said, would cure me. If it didn't I was to see a doctor immediately. It made me nervous to indulge in Indian over-the-counter drugs, but I felt up for any cure after almost a week of feeling down. I took the pills and ate the curd. The curd was delicious. The pills, or the curd, had an immediate effect. From that point on I was essentially, spookily, cured. We woke up early and took an uneventful taxi ride to the airport. We watched our last views of India sliding by the window and felt, frankly, relieved. India is hard to travel in, harder when you finally surcome to Delhi belly, which I think everyone does, and as we went through a series of ridiculous and pointless checkpoints in the Kolkata airport we almost laughed with relief. We were headed to Thailand.