O Calcutta!

Kolkata pajamas!
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By Dan

Well, Calcutta (now known as Kolkata) is our final stop in India, and in some ways it feels like we have been in training for Calcutta during our five weeks in India. Calcutta is the big time, the major leagues, the finals. This place is big, crowded, loud, crazy, desperately poor in some places, and colorful beyond belief. I’d never been to Calcutta before, but had always thought that Calcutta was indeed somehow in a league of its own: “the black hole of Calcutta”; O Calcutta!, the musical whose name said it all; a place so bad that working here got Mother Teresa a Nobel Prize and a nomination for sainthood. Speaking now from experience, I can confirm that it is indeed different.

Howrah Bridge
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I think we’re all about ready to be done with India, although we have loved our time here. It just wears on you a little. Christina and I were standing at the check-in counter in Guwahati, clearly working with the agent as we prepared to fly to Calcutta, when a guy charged up from behind us, shouldered himself in between us, and thrust his ticket at the agent. Christina and I looked at each other, then shouldered him back behind us, but it sort of epitomized the India experience. We’ve had some interesting discussions with the kids. It’s hard not to make gross generalizations when trying to explain why some countries or people do things one way, and others do things another. Our theory on India is that the struggle for survival is so real, that people haven’t had the luxury to step back and wait their turns, or consider the impact of littering on the environment and future generations, or think about treating workers more thoughtfully. It’s tough to explain, though. . . .

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Did I mention that Calcutta is intense? Yeah. It is. The streets are impossibly crowded, all through the day and all through the night. As you walk or drive around, you see people literally living their lives on the street: clusters of 15 guys in loin cloths lathering up around a public faucet; folks stretched out to sleep on the sidewalk; people hanging their laundry to dry on the median divider; guys getting shaves and haircuts on the side of the road; and more public urination and defecation than I have ever seen. But, at the same time that we’re being bowled over by the craziness, we also have rather sublime travel experiences. In the market across from our hotel, we got friendly with Mr. Shaw, who sits cross-legged for about 14 hours a day selling spices out of the ten square foot cubby hole that has been in his family for over 100 years. He was a charming man, who loved the kids, and kept offering free cups of tea or cold drinks, samples of his salted cashews, and sniffs of his various other wares. This from a man who might sell ten bucks worth of stuff, gross, on a good day. Grayson said to me as we walked away from one of our chats from Mr. Shaw, “Wow, Dad, India has some pretty awful stuff, but then some pretty awesome experiences, too. That was very cool.” I think he’s getting what travel is all about.

Room with a view!
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Our arrival in Calcutta was classic India. At Calcutta Airport (formerly called DumDum – how did they ever let that name go?) we paid the prepaid taxi fee of about $5 for the 25 km. ride into town, which ended up taking about 50 minutes. Part way along, while stuck in traffic, we watched a guy riding in the back of a truck get into it with a taxi driver – one vehicle had bumped the other, or something. They went to blows, the taxi driver causing a bloody nose, before onlookers broke them up. Two blocks the later, the truck had pulled across the road, forming a road block, so that the guy in the truck could get a second shot at the taxi driver. We managed to get past before witnessing any more mayhem. The taxi driver wouldn’t drive down the street to our hotel, claiming that he didn’t have the right medallion. In fact, he just didn’t want to spend 20 minutes going around the corner (it was a one way street), which I can understand, given that he was making five bucks. But, it meant that we traipsed two blocks down the road through the craziness, dragging our bags. Thank goodness for wheels. The kids looked like pros, dodging food carts, vendors, racing motorcycles, beggars, rickshaws, and the occasional cow. We were definitely glad to get in the front door of our hotel, after that adventurous arrival.

Victoria Memorial
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Day one of our Calcutta stay saw us hitting a few of the big tourist destinations. Well, I guess. . . .We took ten cents rides on the beautiful subway system, which was remarkably uncrowded (could it be priced beyond the means of most Calcuttans?) to the Victoria Memorial, a big fancy white marble monument that was built to honor Queen Victoria’s silver jubilee. Yes, it’s a lovely building. But, it took twenty years to build, and thus wasn’t finished until long after her death. And, somehow, a splashy monument to a queen who lived five thousand miles away, when there are folks starving, doesn’t seem quite right. You can’t help but notice the juxtapositions all over India. Just near the Victoria Memorial, we had walked past a block worth of families living on the street under plastic lean-tos, directly across the street from a Marks & Spencer department store advertising fancy purses and jewelry in the windows. Gives one pause.

Hand drawn rickshaws - we didn't partake!
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More things we can’t quite figure out about India: (1) Why is re-bar advertised everywhere? Are there really that many people who are in the business of buying re-bar, and who make their decisions based on billboards? Re-bar might be the second most heavily advertised item in India, after cell phones. Weird. (2) Why do so many guys dye their hair and/or mustache that very funky color of red? I guess if everyone’s hair is black, it is nice to mix things up a little, but wow, is that red an interesting shade, especially when the mustache and not the head is dyed. (3) Why do the newspapers have so many relationship advice columns, articles on dating dos and don’ts, and similar material, when everybody we talked to confirmed that virtually every marriage is still arranged by the families, rather than being a “love marriage”? Maybe with a population of over a billion, if 90% of the people are in arranged marriages, that leaves another 100 million or so who might date, which sells a lot of newspapers, but it sure seemed to us that the newspapers weren’t really reflecting reality.

Reasoning that the kids had about had their fill of wandering Indian streets, and on the recommendation of the wonderful people with whom we shared our train ride to Guwahati, we went out to Science City one day. On the way, though, we made a point of driving over the Howrah Bridge, which crosses the Hooghly River and is apparently the most heavily used bridge in the world (we believe it), and passing Howrah Train Station, which has something like two million people pass through it every day (again, we believe it). Science City was a sort of Exploratorium or Lawrence Hall of Science (Bay Area people will understand those references), and had some really fun and hands-on science displays. Grayson had been complaining recently that we have been neglecting his science education (in fact, it’s just been so subtle that he hasn’t realized that he has been learning!), so this was a perfect way to spend some time. The day was significantly hotter than the previous day, and somebody said to me that winter was over, and Calcutta would be hot, hotter, and hottest from now through the summer. So, I was a little bummed when I drew the short straw and got to hang out with Abby in the outdoor park area of Science City, while Christina and Grayson were indoors in the AC’d comfort. Before long, I managed to lure Abby back inside. Very sneaky of me, eh? Science City’s only drawback, which should come as no surprise to anybody who knows India or has been paying attention to our blog entries, was the toilet facilities. I managed to make like an Indian (“That’s what I love about the great outdoors!”), but Christina reported that the entire, multi-acre facility, which must have had several thousand visitors while we were there, was serviced by one lonely squatter. Science City definitely gets the thumbs up from us, though.

Another big hit with the kids was the Indian Museum. The collection was housed in a fun old building with a beautiful courtyard, and was very peaceful and relaxing after the chaotic hustle outside. There was everything from archaeology to natural history to ethnology, but we focused most of our attention on the natural history and other science stuff. Many of the animal specimens were very much the worse for wear (not surprising, since several had plaques indicating that they had been a gift of the Maharaja of Such and Such in 1922 or thereabouts), but it was a great way to run through many of the great animals that we had seen in our five weeks in India. Similarly, the geology room seemed like a collection that a British civil servant posted out to India circa 1886 had put together during his weekends off, and gifted to the Museum when he realized how much it was going to cost to ship it back to Mother England and the end of his stint. But, the kids love rocks, and there were some fun fossils. Another thumbs up.

Thus ends our time in India. Wow. Definitely one of the more memorable countries that we have visited, in so many ways. In doing the post-mortem, Christina and I are very pleased that we managed to put together an itinerary that featured a really good mix of activities: the comparatively relaxing time in the south, the beaches of Goa, Delhi for its monuments and scene, Agra for the Taj, train travel, tigers, Khajuraho’s temples and art, Varanasi for its intense spirituality, rhinos and the northeast, and crazy Calcutta. While the kids grimaced from time to time (well, actually, we all did), they both say that they’ll be back (probably more to look for tigers, though, than to savor Calcutta’s street scene or to get another few bites of dal and curry), and I am virtually certain that Christina and I will be, too.