Movement, in reverse

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On Saturday I awoke in Darjeeling at a very dark (un-celebratory) hour. Hindu incantations blared from a neighboring speaker to mark the Nepali New Year. I went down to the main square to watch lines of uniformed school children and women dressed in traditional Nepali clothing and bright pink blush sit through introductions of important people and speeches that seemed exceptionally boring.

Jeep

I had my last egg thenthuk and dragged my luggage down the hill to begin the reverse of the journey I had made two weeks before. By jeep we drove out of Darjeeling, past gompas that I hadn't managed to visit (further evidence of my failing tourist spirit) and through never-ending tea plantations. Women in Nepali wrap skirts with multi-colored umbrellas over their heads walked single file down the road, returning from delivering the morning's pickings. Their empty baskets were slung from their foreheads and bounced on their backs as the wound down the roads.

Bus

I shed layers of clothing as we drove from the mountains of Darjeeling to the planes of Siliguri, where I waited for my deluxe bus to Calcutta. It was certainly an upgrade from the 300 rupee bus I'd taken there, but an overnight bus will never be comfortable. Especially when the man next to you keeps falling asleep on your shoulder and, from 4 AM to 7 AM, appoints himself as your personal tour guide and companion despite your desperate attempts to read your book.

By the time the bus got down in Calcutta I had been beseiged by more socially awkward single males than I knew what to do with. As one followed me to my taxi, asking over and over again if we could meet during the day I realized this was when it was not so fun to be the single foreign woman who makes friends so easily. (And later when he showed up at my hotel after apparently following me through the streets I was confirmed in this feeling. I had never been more thankful for the over-employment of India. At least the six or seven men sitting around doing nothing in the lobby of my hotel could keep this weirdo away from me).

Lay-over

I checked myself into a small cell-like single in the middle of backpacker's Sudder Street. It smelled like a bathroom, but it was cheap and temporary so it would do. It was 8 AM on the Sunday that marked Bengali New Year. Nothing was open except an ISD, where I plopped myself into a booth with a fan and talked to my parents and sister for over an hour. During the course of my conversations and for no apparent reason whatsoever the owner of the phone booth first brought me a banana and then a glass of chai, simply smiling and nodding as he handed them to me. Clearly this man, like the hotel manager in Yuksom, had been sent to remind me that genuine kindness does not only inhabit the mountains. It has seeped into the planes to welcome me back and make my journey back to Banaras that much easier.

Because of the heat, my fatigue, and my limited time in Calcutta I again abandoned any efforts to properly explore the city (I still haven't even been to that silly Victorian Memorial). Instead I sat in a Barrista on Park Street and drank iced coffee while I read in a magazine about trans fats in India--the health menace that lurks un-regulated in street stalls and attacks people in the form of samosas and milk sweets.

Three hours later I emerged from an internet cafe hungry. Having clearly learned nothing from my morning's reading I headed straight for Roll House, a Park Street institution selling the hot kathi rolls that Calcutta is famous for. It is nothing more than a hole in the wall with just enough room for a two person kathi roll team. I had no idea what I was ordering, but since the bharthan on which the rolls were made happened to be on one side of the four foot wide front counter, I got to watch the whole thing unfold.

It started with a paratha (round flat bread made with oil, flour and water) that was browned in oil in the center of the bharthan. I had ordered an egg paneer roll so more oil was added to the concave part of the bharthan and an egg was broken to fry in the oil and weld itself onto the paratha. Again oil was added for good measure (are you sensing a theme here?) and once the paratha-egg disk was greasy enough it was scooped from the bharthan straight onto the marble counter, where paneer-sabzi (cheese-veg) mix was spooned into the middle and chili sauce and pepper were tossed on before it was rolled up in wax paper that instantly became transparent and spotted with grease. So if I die soon, we're all clear on why.

Part of the guilt of ruining my own health was assuaged by a more wholesome feature of the experience. When I was ordering an old hunched woman in a cotton sari had shuffled over and gestured toward the bharthan. So I ordered her an egg-paneer roll and the roll-walla made hers ahead of the other orders in line (whether to make sure she got fed quickly or to get her out of the line is unclear).

She joined her hands--with the hot kathi roll in grease paper poking out from between them--in thanks and shuffled on down the sidewalk. When I finally got my roll and walked back toward Sudder Street I saw her squatting against the wall, munching happily on her roll. She joined her hands again and smiled appreciatively and I joined mine in response (this time with my own kathi roll sticking out between hands in namaste).

Train

Jeep and bus complete, from Calcutta it was off to Banaras by train. I arrived at the massive Howrah station an hour and a half early, so I made my way to the waiting room. There was an outdoor balcony that extended over the station's front entrance, where chaat sellers were lined up by the dozens and sparrows inhabited the trees, making me wonder when I'd first walked up whether the train station was attached to a bird market. On the balcony families had spread out sheets to sleep, eat and wait for their trains; there was a perfect view of the river coupled by the breeze that blew off of it. The Howrah bridge (steely clunky and cagey) was lit gorgeously with violet lights in the dusk. Unbelievable amounts of human and vehicular traffice lent the whole scene a feeling of buzzing.

I made friends with a recent twelfth standard graduate who had just written his entrance exam into the Hotel Management School of Banaras Hindu University. We talked about Banaras, call centers, foreigners in India, and the state of traffic safety in the country. His English was as excellent as he was polite, and although he weighed about half as much as me he insisted on carrying my million pound bag all the way to my berth, even though he was going in the opposite direction.

In the train I met a Calcuttan who was working in Banaras. By morning he apparently felt pretty comfortable with me and started airing all his questions and concerns about American culture. "In all the corporate countries like America there doesn't seem to be much emotion. The people don't have that much emotion, that much bond with others. Isn't it?" We covered a range of topics over which Rajeeb had clearly given some previous thought: What happens to children when their mothers work? Why don't people take care of their parents in their old age? How could anyone possibly re-marry after the death of their spouse? I did my best to explain the emotional profile of Americans and our views on independence and self-gratification, but he didn't seem convinced.

Things got really messy when he decided to read my journal. He had two complaints. One, he felt that I was misrepresenting Calcutta, to which I responded that I was not representing Calcutta at all and in fact had made it perfectly clear from the beginning that mine was not even an attempt at a thorough account of the city. Two, he felt I complained too much about "the people." He was referring specifically to what I had written about the men on the bus. "Again I disagree with you," he said. I was glad that his English was good enough for me to reply frankly. "It's not a matter of disagreeing with me. This is not an opinion. It's an experience. It happened. And because you will never be a foreign woman travelling alone in India you will never be able to tell me that my experiences are wrong."

In the end we agreed that the difficulty was in expressing such a great range of experiences: while I cannot deny that I sometimes attract more attention than I'd like and yes it is a fact that I've been physically harrassed more times than I can count in this country, it is also true that on this trip in particular I have met plenty of men who just wanted to have a conversation or be of help in some way. Like this man, Rajeeb, who I think had wrongly taken my writings as a condemnation of all men in India.

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