Here’s another letter.
This one I wrote the first evening in my new digs on Sudder Street,
Sunday evening, 6 April. Surely
this overlaps some of what I wrote in the blog entry, but as I can’t log onto
the net just now to see what is redundant, I will enter it as is, though again
with the garbage and the personal stuff excised.
~~~~~
Dear ______,
I just got your email and resisted the urge to write back
immediately. Hopefully this will
be more thoughtful.
When I got back here, I reread the draft of the blog entry
you reacted to (finding a couple of typos too) and smiled. It is amazing how razzed you can get,
how out of control you can feel, and how certain Buddhist ideas come into play: it is how you react to your situation
that makes all the difference. I
read that now, now in my now-reasonably-priced, correct-part-of-town
guesthouse, and smile. What I
wrote was exactly how I felt. And
I was distrustful of everyone for about a day.
Yesterday I wandered as far as a street restaurant for a
late lunch. There I was engaged by
an overly inquisitive 42 year old railroad worker who asked about my wife and
kids and family, and then said how sorry he felt for me for not having any
children. Strange, in a country with
so, so many people. I then
returned to my room for the day, Lynda having suggested a day off, and I paid
for another too-much night.
It was only this morning that I wandered out, and beyond,
and found my way to Sudder Street, the right place to be here in Calcutta. I found a place for less than a third
of my hotel, w/o AC, but I am so much happier. (I wrote something of that for my next blog entry.) But the whole experience, looking back,
tells me that having no control was what I didn't do very well. So it is a lesson I hope to learn, to
perhaps look next time at the amount of control I do or do not have and ask,
“Is that the reason I am so stressed?
Is it necessary that I have control? What if I just accept that I don’t have control? Would I react to it differently? Could I surmount it without the passage
of time?
Anyway, to your questions. Yes, India is sometimes alarming. At rural train stops in the morning, some men jump off from
the sleeper class cars and run off for a quick shit. They look like pumpkins out there, squatting deeply like
Asians are wont to do. Across from
my hotel was a fountain of sorts where men and women bathed, never taking off
everything, being discrete. There
was a man sitting on the sidewalk bathing out of a bucket later in the day on
another street. There are two
outdoor urinals down the alley from my current place, but mostly men pee
wherever they are, trying for an alley and some running water. Young kids are dressed naked from the
waist down so they can just go wherever they are. And the amount of physical deformity if truly alarming,
everything from amputations to birth defects. I don't see so much of what looks like mental illness, but
surely it is there too.
But it is like snow in Vermont. After a while you stop paying such attention to it and go about
your business. You can no more
make all the people and the suffering go away than you can melt away last
night's storm. The beggars are
insistent, and the amount of living on the street is alarming. To give you an idea, on the street
where I lived two nights, on that one block there were probably 10-15 people
sleeping on the street in the middle of the day. Some of that is the noon break at work places. But most of it mirrors the sleeping
dogs, anywhere and everywhere.
There are just too many people.
I even read that India is slated to surpass China as the most populous
nation by 2038. And as everywhere,
the rich/educated are having fewer children, the majority poor are having more.
One other thing.
In Mumbai, squatter settlements, of which the Dharavi slums is the
biggest, are snidely called "huttlements." They are routinely destroyed by the city when they block the
sidewalk, and are rebuilt within days, sometimes hours. The politics are amazing, and not
getting better. I'm reading a book
on Mumbai called "Maximum City, Bombay Lost and Found." It's written by an Indian who moved to
the US when he was 14 and returned, as a writer, in 1999, 21 years later. He wanted his kids to have the
experience of going to school where all the kids looked like they do. And the major work of his time here (5
years, I think) was this book.
It's #5 on the best seller lists here, a bit detailed for my ability to
take in detail about the place, but very good.
By the way, Mumbai and Kolkata are COMPLETELY different. It is said that all the major cities
and regions in India are quite different from each other. The food here is more Chinese in
nature, less spicy than in Mumbai, with more variety on menus. (I'm adding to this after coming back
from dinner, and I have a new record:
13 Rs or 33¢ for dinner, a plate of wok fried noodles and vegetables on
the street. I ran into a Japanese
girl who raved about the place!
Speaking of variety, this street stand had probably 50 ways to have
noodles or rice; the girl helped
me with the menu! By the way, I
have an embarrassing habit of mixing up the Chinese and the Japanese; I’ll bet they hate that!
That's if from here, for now. Keep reading the blog, and stay in touch.
Jay
