At the Delhi Airport, ready to board a flight home via the Mother Country. Sitting here, surrounded by fellow travelers, I am reminded of my ever growing disdain of backpacking, soul-searchers in India. Not because I begrudge them their “journey” but because too often they expect everything and everyone to bend to their every whim while they traipse through this land of apparent spiritual plenty.

Dear raggedy neo-hippie, swathed in Fabindia khadi, berating the Coffee Day guy for not making your chai fast enough, complaining that the these stupid people at the airport are “totally killing” your good karma high,

Get over yourself.

Kisses,

your fellow travelers and the universe at large

And on that tolerant, peaceful note, I sign off, consigning this blog to hiatus until my return to the land of curry and mithai (if the god(desses) allow).

It is with a heavy heart that I write this last post from Calcutta, leaving behind the land of my fore-mothers to head back to the flash and glamour of Delhi. I shall miss you, Cal. I will miss your 113% humidity, your unending traffic jams, your air the color of kajol-lined eyes. I will miss the kathi rolls, the guavas for Rs. 2 each, the hilsa fish (chockfull of tiny sharp bones), the deep-fried everything. Most of all, I will miss my fellow Bongs. Those brilliant, funny, exceedingly talented peoples of Bengal. Is it any wonder, given the clear genetic advantage we possess, that we might frown upon diluting its power through miscegenation?

“Modern science” and “genetics” tell us that in-breeding is “bad.” Those “experts” claim that continued intermarriage and procreation with close relatives increases the likelihood of otherwise recessive genetic disorders and birth defects. They might even say that the practice of marrying only in a particular strand of a particular last name of a particular caste of a particular religion of a particular geographic region actually results in the continued marriage between cousins. They would be right, of course, but what is the harm? If those cousins happen to be especially tall, fair, homely, sober and adjustable—with well-matched horoscopes, what’s the problem in keeping all that good stuff in the family? Seems like good marriage politics to me. Just because Bengal has the highest occurrence of albinism in the world, a genetic disorder which otherwise has a .007% statistical likelihood of manifesting itself, doesn’t mean that the Bengali genes have started resembling the pulpy, truncated, and deformed mash of their West Virginia counterparts. We are, after all, a culturally and intellectually progressive people. We do not frown upon marrying outside the People because we are prejudiced, chauvinistic and moderately incestuous. Bengalis would welcome marriage with outsiders if they could simply prove, with a degree of genetic and astrological certainty, that the union would result in children as obedient, bookish, and hirsute as those produced through the proper channels. But until we see some properly documented and referenced proof (please include statistical tables in appendix), we’ll just keep doing it the way we have for the last seven millennia, ok? I mean, what’s a little more hemophilia within the family?

This is, in essence, an ode to my own Bengali parents and all that they did not do. Having observed Bengali parenting at great length and in prodigious detail these last weeks, I thank my own parents for straying from the fold in their parenting techniques.

You see, the Bengali umbilical cord is long and sturdy enough to stretch over a lifetime of codependent, poorly-socialized behavior. It starts young—with the oft-unending relationship with the teat. Bengali children are known to breast feed longer than any other peoples upon this earth. Long lunch breaks are instituted in primary schools so that children may run home for mammary-affection. I, personally, am of the school of thought which says that once a child is able to articulate, in full sentences no less, their desire to breastfeed, it has long since been time to wean. But maybe I am harsh in my judgment…. Take for example a young child we shall call S. Any resemblance this description may bear to that of my cousin’s child is, I’m sure, purely coincidental. S is a remarkably adorable child, a little over 2 ½ years old and just brimming with the liveliness and mischievousness which so marks the Bengali young. He is, at his young age, able to recite a variety of nursery rhymes and produces, upon demand and spontaneously, quips which are at once adorable and heart-rendering. It also means that he is able to articulate his desire to breast feed in a number of highly verbal and witty ways. His charm is added to by his sweet appearance, possessing as he does the large eyes, apple cheeks and pouty lips that too often, in Bengali men, disappear beneath poorly groomed, manky facial hair after puberty. But for now, little S is a child of uncommon beauty and charm. What makes his face particularly beguiling is his smile. It is not a smile of bright little white pebble baby teeth, but rather a rakish vampirical grin as his two front teeth have not come in properly and are flanked by rather prominent canines. Why, you might ask does a toddle of his age not have front teeth? The answer you would receive is that the continued breast-feeding is impeding the growth of his teeth. Now, some you with softer, more maternal hearts may be saying, what’s the harm in letting a child have such a small comfort? Well, here’s one possible answer:

The state of little S’s teeth is not the only issue at hand. Bengali parenting is much more than just being lax in the desire to wean. Rather, it is simply another example of the ways in which lives are ruled by the iron umbilical cord. Children are encouraged to rely upon their parents for as long as humanly possible. This results in meals structured around chasing, beguiling, pleading and haranguing children into eating. Others are enlisted in the cause: as one parent mashes flood into a pulpy submission and forms child-sized balls, another adult chases the child, while yet another recalls their talent for Extreme Bengali Guilt, and yet another stands on deck, to take over when one or several of the attending adults collapses in exhaustion. The feeding of a Bengali child can often take hours and shifts are recommended to prevent Feeder Burnout

Me, acting as cajoler/distracter, as S is hand-fed by his grandmother. The process took a mere 3 hours.

This would, on some high-maintenance planet far out in the galaxy, be almost sweet if it did not continue for as long as the child lived with the parents. And given that most Bengalis do not move out of their parents’ homes until they are married, this means decades. Children are cajoled and hand fed by mothers well into the twilight of their years. The intimacy wrought of such behavior also means that parents feel quite comfortable in inquiring into and feeling a dominion over all aspects of their child’s life. Whether the child has slept properly, digested their food, cleared up that awkward rash, gone to the bathroom, blown their nose, impregnated their wife, or wet the bed are all questions well in the realm of Parental Knowledge. Refusing to answer such questions is unheard of and, when very rarely attempted, is usually met by a smack across the back of the head and the pronouncement that you are aushobho, uncivilized. For it is the mark of Bengali civilization to be so inextricably bound by the force of the umbilical cord as to have practically no autonomy at all. But then again, if you are hand fed for your whole life, whatever in the world would you do with autonomy?

On my way to the airport on Friday– heading to Dhaka for the weekend– I saw a side of Cal that I’ve never seen before—the quiet side. Granted, it was 5 am but it was the first time that I’ve seen the streets of the city empty but for a few taxis and a couple early-risers up and about on their one-speed Chinese bicycles. Traffic cops apparently use then to commute, making use dual use of those goofy looking white helmets they have to wear.

The empty streets of Cal are particularly stark because so much living is done on the streets—people bathe, have haircuts and shaves, and buy everything from produce to DVDs to towels to luggage on the sidewalks, or footpaths, of Calcutta. In a city where space is such a rare commodity, privacy is expected, let alone taken for granted. Walking around the lake near the guesthouse on a rainy day, I had to hurdle canoodling couples every few inches. Though it may be that young Calcutta’s collective libido is especially firey in the monsoon (something about the rain, I suppose), another explanation for the profusion of PDA is the lack of private space for those displays of affection that might otherwise not be public. Things we might normally relegate to the confines of our own homes, those Things We Do Behind Closed Doors—sleeping, eating, fighting with families, punishing children, nosepicking, picking of other body parts, actually any bodily function at all—is only private for those wealthy enough to afford space and doors behind which to have a private life. This is also perhaps why Indians are so nosey—I mean, inquisitive. Without an ingrained notion of privacy which governs your own actions and behaviors, how can you possibly comprehend when, how and why you might trod on the personal space of others?

It’s very likely that being in India is making me dumb, actively sapping what little functioning brain matter I had. In Delhi, I chalked it up to the heat, the dizzying masses, and general cacophony—death by over-stimulation. But here in Cal, I think there is a different culprit. The city itself. You see, Calcutta—ahem, Kolkata—is a city deeply confused. In the midst of a serious identity crisis. First there was the changing of its name from the Anglicized Calcutta to the more authentically Bengali Kolkata, much to the chagrin of non-Bengalis who are loathe to struggle with the odd syllable emphasis and aspirated t.

But it gets worse. In this frenzy to (finally) shake off the mantle of colonial oppression, Kolkata has decided to rename all of her streets, washing away the remnants of the Raj’s Anglophilic names like Lindsay, Auckland, Camac and Canning. Instead, the roads have been rechristened (or whatever is the comparable Hindu ceremony) after illustrious Bengalis: Meghnad Saha, Sarojini Naidu, Leela Roy, Mother Theresa, Shakespeare, Ho-Chi Min… you get the idea. Sometimes the change is logical such as Theatre Street is now Shakespeare Sarani. But the logical is short lived. For one, in the zest to pay homage to all the brilliant, talented prominent Bengalis, streets have been divided so that portions of each are renamed after different people. At any given point, what used to be CIT Road might be Manik Bandhopadhayay, William Carrey Sarani or Sheik Mujibar Rahman Sarani. Depending on who you speak to, the address of a given place may be three to seventeen different things. Indeed, most people ignore the new names all together and often the old ones too in favor of some sort of directional Kolkata shorthand to which I am not yet privy.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all about decolonizing our streets as we decolonize our minds but I have yet to understand governing principles of the name-change. Want to get rid the lingering names of colonizers? Right on. Want to honor the beloved sons and daughters of Bengal? Amen, sister. Want to show Britain that its hold on you is fading, a mere sixty years after the nasty break up? Been there, burned the t shirt. But why strip streets that already bear the names of Bengalis in favor of new ones? I mean, who did Harish Chatterjee posthumously piss off such that his namesake road gets two new names? And the shame of being the apparently-not-famous-enough-anymore-Bengali who loses their street name to Charlie Chaplin? That’s a low blow, Cal. Real low. Who decides who is important enough to not only have a road named after them but important enough to strip some other person of that honor and then get a road named for them? Was there some 25 million person town-hall meeting, where there was a straw poll? Was there some sort of write-in contest? Did Karl Marx win some secret popularity contest by such a margin as to warrant being feted twice? What, Karl Marx Sarani wasn’t enough so he had to get Marx Engles Bithi too? Seems unfair to me. I mean, what about all the Bengalis left behind? The ones not cool enough to get a street name. Seems highly un-Marxist to give old Karl two streets when Ravi Shankar gets nothing. Methinks there’s a little favoritism at work here. And that would be utterly un-Bengali. We are, after all, an intensely just and fair-minded peoples.

Okay, enough mope and sap. I’m back. I’ve been told that my last post was “beautiful” and it made someone “cry” so there will be no more of that. (Bad for my image, you see)

Ask any traveler what they notice first about India and it will not be the sweet smell of cow dung burning in the morning, though that might come a close second. It will, inevitably, be the that Indians are a race of starers. Wide, unblinking, camp-stare-off-winning caliber starers. Add the more than occasional slacking of the jaw and you have what we call the Calcutta Gawk. It’s a whole-body phenomenon, everything goes limpid with the mouth, except for the eyes which get even wider. The anthropologist alurk inside me says that it may be an adaptive mechanism intended to make use of the extra-large eyes of the Indic peoples. Or perhaps the evolution happened the other way around and those protuberant features developed out of the extensive use and muscular stimulation which is needed for such full-contact staring. Whichever way it developed, Indians are now the chosen race of starers. From the very elderly to the infantile, at least a dozen people will pop their pupils in your direction in a given second (have to account for population density and what have you).

Mostly, I am protected from staring in Calcutta by the fortress in which I live. The RMIC guesthouse is a pentagonal fortress which consists a city block and within it houses a college, library, guesthouse and multiple offices. It is an impenetrable bastion of order and civility, hiding pristinely manicured gardens, white-uniformed bearers, and the stray foreigner cowering from the potent Calcutta Gawk.

View of the monsooned garden from my balcony at the guesthouse

Inside, no one stares. So when you step out of one of the 5 gates which protect you from the wall, guards standing in salute of your departure, and you get a full-frontal Stare, it’s not unheard of or shameful to run back into the compound grounds, whimpering and clutching your face. But should you be committed to living amongst those in the outside world, you have to be armed with an essential tool: The Counter Glare. It’s not as formidable or piercing as the Gawk but, aimed accurately, can send a gaggle of little old ladies scurrying out of your path. The Glare requires a determined set in your shoulders, sunglasses are helpful but not necessary, a clenched jaw and an neon-lit attitude of “Whatcha looking at, punk?” (Be forewarned, the Glare is least effective on those who evolutionarily gifted in India, the older that women get, the less the Glare touches them. In fact, it is possible the Glare just makes them go into HyperGawk mode, instant death to most foreigners. The tourist drags of Cal are strewn with the mangled bodies of Dutch tourists who dared take on the power of the Mashi– which means mother’s sister but is used as general term for women of a certain age…ahem, maturity– Stare.)

I’ve always thought that the Stare, when directed at me, was one which bemoaned the color of my skin and questioned where I was from. But as of late I have begun to wonder if there isn’t a different thought process and Spidy sense that governs it. You see, I’ve been– silly as it might seem– dressing for the heat, which means I wear baggy cotton pants and flowing cotton kurtas. Now, I thought I was dressing in the height of Indian handloom chic but I now suspect that it is only adding to the inevitable conclusion drawn by the Calcutta Gawk. The Gawkers can’t tell if I’m a man or a woman. The confusion is understandable, given that the average adolescent male Bengali is about 5′4 and weighs roughly 115 pounds (soaking wet). Add to that my lack of discernible markers of Bengali womanhood (the ample hips and boobs gene is clearly recessive here), my hair, the way that I walk, and that I do not scream and swoon hysterically all that often, the confusion begins to gather steam. So I see only one solution. I should start passing as a man. Think of the ease it would afford me in moving through the city. I could spit, stare, readjust my manly parts and hold hands with male friends in public! (All of you detail oriented folks who would point out my lack of both manly parts and male friends in Cal need not bring it up) But this might also mean the loss of the Calcutta Gawkers and, though I may scamper back into the guesthouse 3 mornings out of 7 in face of it, I have a deep-seeded respect for it and an anthropological interest in studying it further. So, the gender confusion continues. For another day at least.

Today, I offer no sarcastic witticisms. India has pummeled me good. I’ve just had the kind of bad day that India seems so particularly adept in providing. This is the land of inefficiency in all avenues of life, corruption from the lowliest of urchins to the finest of politicians and everyone in between, smog enough to evoke the most reticent LA nostalgia, filth that is so all-pervasive as to coat every surface all the time, violence aimed at the body, the psyche and the spirit, that ages-old and much revered misogyny and just masses of bodies. There are bodies on the sidewalk, bereft of any real sign of life but hand outstretched in the hopes of the smallest alm, while people step over them not once looking down. There are women are harassed, abused, assaulted and demeaned by men on their way to worship the great Mother Goddess at temple. There are children are maimed and dismembered by their parents to maximize begging profit. There are girls sold off like chattel, with little thought of what the futures hold for them. And there is poverty beyond anything I can describe to the Western imagination, in slums of millions leaning up against high-rises that house some of the world’s wealthiest individuals. There are people who have it all and will not spare a glance, let alone a rupee or a second thought, to those who have almost nothing at all.

India is the very worst of humanity.

This is the litany that rolls through my mind as I sit in traffic for hours in the back of an Ambassador cab. And then I arrive at a tailor who recognizes me five years after the last time I was there. Who calls me didi, sister, and asks after my family. There is the toddler who climbs onto my lap as I sit at a cafÈ, so assured in the safety and prospect of affection from strangers. There is the man who, seeing my abjection after another pointless argument with the Bureaucracy, doesn’t hesitate to come and ask if he can help. There is gaggle of school girls who approach me in a shop to inquire as to who my favorite Bollywood hero is and giggle gap-toothed at me. There are the bearers at the guesthouse who cluck about my eating, forcing extra dessert on me and leaving snacks outside my door. There is the daughter of my father’s childhood friend who, having never met me, talks to me on the phone like I’m an old friend. There is the ease of touching, the willingness to smile and the instant familiarity borne of strangers calling me sister, in a land where I know so few people.

India is the very best of humanity.

In honor of my pals left behind in Delhi, I give you a sample of the questions I posed to T & P on a daily basis. We like to call it Dumb Questions from the NRI. It usually goes something like this:

T: blah..blah..important nuanced analysis of Indian socio-politics..blah—

Me: Um, PS. I paid rs. 45 for a chai today, was I ripped off?

T: What does that have to do with what we were talking about? You can’t just throw PS in there and change the subject. That’s not how it’s used.

P: Sure it is, that’s how I use it. It’s a women’s college thing, you wouldn’t understand. This one time at Bryn Mawr….

Me: No, really. Do you think people can tell I’m not from here? I haggled and everything. I got him down from Rs. 90 for the chai. Did I get the Indian price?

T: No no, of course not. You got the best possible price. Besides, what good would it do for me to tell you that you had been ripped off?

Me: So when I paid Rs. 8 for a banana? And the Rs. 100 I paid for the umbrella? Wait… I made a list of all the things I bought.

P & T:  Stupid NRI.

I have no one here in Cal to pose stupid NRI questions too, which wouldn’t be so hard as long as I felt I was passing as a real Bengali. But yesterday, buying some DVDs of questionable origin and authenticity on the street, I was accosted by my urchin vendor to tell him where I was actually from. When I asked him why he thought I was foreign, he said in his heavily Bihari-accented, grammatically incorrect Bengali that the  Bengali that he spoke perfectly came out of my mouth all funny. India is the land of my deflated ego. Just when I thought I was slick and impressing everyone with my mad Bengali skills, poof. The Bihari pre-pubescent pirated-DVD vendor informs me otherwise. So I did the only thing left to do: pulled my list out of my pocket and asked him, “I paid Rs. 150 for this shirt, did I get ripped off?”

I write with a heavy heart today as I do so in Kolkata rather than Delhi. I usually love Cal– the cafes, the bookstores, the potential for mischief-making, but this time it’s just not the same. It is actually, if you can believe it, hotter than Delhi here and the air is thick with the smog of Hindustan Ambassadors clogging the roads. The Ambassador car is quintessentially Calcuttian; the illegitimate Cold War love child of a Rolls Royce and a Soviet tank, it is the symbol of Cal’s dogged hold upon the vestiges of its colonial past. It harks back to the heyday of the Raj here where Russell and Park Streets were filled with bright white people of the same (or equally Anglo) names.

Being here is like being in a different time, if not a different place from Delhi. Despite being a part of India’s violent surge into Western notions of modernity, Cal remains distinctly unmodernized most visibly in the wrought iron balconies, colonial architecture, cycle-rickshaws and deep all-pervading nostalgia for the Good Old Days. Now, keep in mind, those Good Old Days are the days of also the Days of Colonial Oppression and Days of Widow Burning and Child Marriage but let’s not be too judgmental, those were apparently also the days of great opulence, influence and delightful high teas. And Cal has not yet recovered or come to terms with their loss. But I can’t pretend that Cal isn’t really just a manifestation of that mini-Colonialist that so many of you have noticed in me before. Few things in the world are as nice as a tea with proper fairy cakes at Flury’s on Park Street. And you can only find it in Cal.

Now, for a land that is so famed for its starving masses– whether those of Sally Struther’s fame, “For just pennies a day, you can ensure Ram doesn’t go hungry again,” or the more personal variety that haunted so many of us picky eaters when we were children “Eat! Eat! There are starving children in India. Poor little Babu, and Pappu and… “– India has proved the land of gastronomical plenty so far. I’ve been eating, quite literally, like a Moghul king in Delhi. My Delhi pals have ensured that every delightful delicacy in the city finds its way into my stomach– kebabs in every imaginable form, ice cream sundaes delivered in the middle of the night, chaat (from a mall stall because of T’s fear that my delicate American constitution might not withstand the unwashed hands, tap water, food sitting out in the heat all day long and heavy fly patronage of chaat on the streets), parathas, biryanis, and my new favorite thing in the world: the kathi roll. My innate Bengali chauvinism demands that I point out that they were in fact invented here in Cal but they have been perfected in Delhi at Nizam’s where mutton, chicken or paneer kebabs are wrapped in a egg-fried paratha with picked onions.

Words cannot describe the perfection of two of my favorite things, kebabs and parathas, mating to create the perfect super-food. But I will say that eating such ghee-fried, meat-laden deliciousness as I have makes real the source of the ubiquitous bhuri, potbelly, of all the Indian Uncle-and-Auntiejis out there. And why the once ferocious Moghuls were so easily ousted: it’s hard to rouse yourself out of a kathi roll food coma, even to save yourself and your kingdom from hordes of invaders. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Despite this being the one place left in the world where the dollar isn’t tanking like Exxon Valdez and the site of manufacture of most things which need nimble, lowly-paid brown fingers, India is not exactly shopper’s paradise. Walking through a market in India is sensory overload– more stores crammed into narrow alleyways than you can imagine, disembodied hands reaching out to grab, tug and nudge you and the cacophonous cries of “Madam, Madam, here please!” “Madam, you look, see, number 1 quality!” “Sister! I showing you goodly authentic Indian!” Now as tempting as it is to see what a goodly authentic Indian might look like, you can’t actually respond to such siren songs. The minute you glance over, showing the tiniest sign of consumer weakness, you are funtoosh, done for. You’ll be dragged in, showered with overpriced, shoddily made goods marked with such familiar names as Guci and Parda. They’ll bring in a stool for you to sit on, children to pick through your hair and chai to placate you into consumer complacency. You’ll walk about two hours later without any clue of how you managed to spend all your rupees on a pile a heavily sequined and sparkled polyester scarves.

Not to fear, dear reader, there is another way. In this land of infinite hospitality, your shopping experience may be eased by the ever-helpful presence of what I call the urchin guide. Now the trick is to first distinguish the urchin guide from all other manner of urchin– pickpocket, leper, beggar, nosepicker, etc–as they will be of no use to you in this endeavor. The urchin guide often simply materializes at your side, perhaps silently guiding you through the Frogger game that is road-crossing in Delhi. Once you’ve managed to cross without being flattened by bus, truck, auto, car, motorcycle, or bull-cart, the urchin guide will strike up a conversation usually along the lines of how he is learning English and loves to practice it with foreigners because he is “muchly hoping for becoming government tourist agent for helping foreigner to see and love beautiful and glorious motherland of India.” He will then tell you that whatever shopping center you are heading towards is terrible, you will have much hassling there and will direct you, while entertaining you with stories of his real home, most beautiful place in India ______, to the nearest “government” shopping emporium where you will be fleeced within an inch of your credit-loving life. The urchin guide, you may by now have picked up, gets a commission and earns his living befriending confused looking tourists looking to hand over many rupees in exchange for hideous and overpriced souvenirs of their time in this great land.

Now, I want to be clear that I’m not trashing on the urchin guide. In the consumer ecosystem of Delhi, he is a keystone predator, playing a crucial role in keeping the flows of goods and currency moving as they should (one out of your pocket, the other in). They are also usually almost blindingly charming, displaying the extraordinary knack of so many Indians of being able, by simply calling you sister or friend, to immediately endear themselves to you. It’s hard to hate on a small brown child who happens to be stunningly beautiful (there are rarely ugly urchin guides roaming about and small Indians tend to adorable anyways) and sweetly calls you sister. I’m a tough woman but I’ve been felled by less. Sure I buy things that I end up regretting and pawning off as gifts to those less versed in the quality of Indian handicrafts but I do so with the knowledge that I too am playing the necessary role of easily caught and macerated gazelle in the jaws of the great Indian tourism industry.