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January 24th 2010

Published: January 24th 2010

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Drinkthewater

Babu Ghat

zoomed in on the bridge ... not Howrah bridge, the next one downstream from there

There’s a body lying in the Varanasi Junction train station. A human body. Of course, there are lots of bodies all over the place at train stations, but this one doesn’t have a person in it any more. At least, it was there was when I was there in the wee hours at the beginning of January 7, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s still there.

I took the train from Varanasi to Kolkata. It was scheduled to leave at 18:10. After a few hours word got around that it was very late, probably going to leave around midnight some time. I figured there wasn’t much point leaving, so I lay down on a quiet bit of platform, with my sleeping mat protecting me from the normal dirt of the platform, and tried to sleep, fairly unsuccessfully. There were constant announcements in English and Hindi about various other trains, but not mine. Finally at 23:30 there was one brief announcement saying that the train was going to depart at 02:00. At 02:50 there was an announcement that it would leave at 04:00. At 04:10 there was an announcement saying it would leave at 05:00 and at 05:50

downtown

some random street in Kolkata

there was an announcement saying it would leave at 06:00. It finally left at 06:30, more than twelve hours late. I assumed this meant that it’d arrive at about 20:00, as it was scheduled to take fourteen hours, but no, it eventually ended up arriving at 02:00, or about nineteen hours late.

Anyway, during the time waiting for the train, in Varanasi, I wandered down to the far end of the platform to stretch my legs and to find somewhere quiet to pee, not yet having got the hang of the Indian male thing of just peeing wherever you feel like. This was at about 23:00. On the other side of the platform there was a “restaurant”, a mass of Chinese tourists, and general liveliness. I walked to the end of the platform, found a fairly quiet place, and walked back on the other side. That’s when I saw the body. It was wrapped up, not in colourful cloths like the ones taken to the Ganges to be burned, but a brownish-grey blanket, probably the same as many people are sleeping in. It was wrapped from head to foot, so I couldn’t see if it was a body for

governor's house

a historical house, Iforget the history, now off-limits

sure. It was lying on a trolley thing which might even have come from a hospital, which once had four little wheels, but now has three, only two which look as if they might work. So the trolley was at a bit of a slope, and parked at an odd angle against the wall as if someone has just pushed it there without any thought.

“Cool,” I thought, “that looks like a body. Can’t be. Can it?” and walked on. Although it was fairly deserted, nowhere in India is really deserted so I didn’t want to pry.

But then as I lay on the ground getting a few minutes’ sleep in between the PA announcements and the occasional throngs racing to get on or off some other train on the same platform, I began to wonder how a body gets there. Certainly no-one could just leave a body lying out the back of the staff area where they park the motorbikes?

A few hours later I had to pee again, so on the way back I knew I’d regret if I didn’t find out for sure. I looked carefully ... it certainly looked like the shape of

showering

homeless people showeringn from water gushing out of a pipe in the streets

a body. It wasn’t moving at all and was wrapped fairly tightly, so it wasn’t someone sleeping. I wasn’t going to unwrap anything or poke it, but there seemed to be a bit of a gap where the feet were, as if he had just been rolled up in the blanket. I pulled out my pen and tried to move the loose bit of the shrowd to see if it really as a body.

It seemed to have several layers of wrapping, and so with only one pen as soon as I pulled one back another fell over it. But then I felt the pen hit something hard. I instinctively pulled back, but then moved the cloth again and saw, unmistakably, part of a black human foot. As I pulled back, the smell of a decomposing body hit me, not too strong but unmistakable, despite the cold (I’d say it was about 5 C). So he hadn’t just died the same day. I turned around and saw someone watching me from afar. I shrugged and he didn’t make eye contact and walked away. I dropped the pen in a pile of rubbish.

I don’t understand how this happens,

St John's Church

even in a city like Varanasi where the living come to die and the dead are brought in the hope of eternal life. I checked the Indian Rail webpage and it’s quite clear. A corpse may not be carried on a train unless it’s in an airtight coffin, checked in the luggage, and accompanied by a person. That seems fair. So how does one’s body end its life rotting in a cheap shroud on a broken old metal trolley in a dinghy corner of Platform 4 at Varanasi Junction train station, near where the staff park their motorbikes, and behind some office where railway employees needlessly push paper around and drink tea? Do the staff come in to work every day and say to each other in an embarrassed way “We really need to do something about that corpse out the back” and then all look at each other expecting someone else to do it? Or was it only there overnight until the next shift came on?

Anyway, I haven’t said much about Varanasi. It’s not just about conmen and dead bodies. But you can read about all the interesting stuff anywhere. Plus you can get the idea from

St John's Church

memorial to the Black Hole of Calcutta, moved many years ago fromt he actual site

the photos I put up in the last blog. I’m not sure if I mentioned in other blogs, but at night in any big train station in India the tracks become a kind of moving mass of rats, on a substrate of railway tracks, water, shit, piss, phlegm and rubbish. In Varanasi they had monkeys too, although they seemed to mainly stay on the platforms which didn’t have people on them. (I’m sure the train stations in Rajasthan would have been full of monkeys but I didn’t take many trains there.) When I booked the train I forgot that it’d probably be my last long-distance train journey in India for this trip. If I had, I might have lashed out and gone Second Air-Conditioned Class, rather than Sleeper Class.

I will add that before leaving Varanasi I visited the town of Sarnath. It’s only about 10 km from Varanasi, so it’s basically a suburb, but it’s the place where the Buddha supposedly preached his first sermon after enlightenment, ad also where emperor Ashoka meditated and made some edicts and did some other things. It’s got a lot of ruins and some nice temples, but I’ve see a lot of

St John's Church

burial site of the supposed "founder" (European) of Calcutta

ruins and temples in the last year. It has a big museum which apparently is nice but they don’t allow photos so I didn’t think it was worth the Rs 10 ($0.25) entrance fee. So I went from the holiest city for Hindus to one of the pilgrimage sites for Buddhists, and back again. There’s actually a surprising lot of Muslims around Varanasi, the women dressed up like tents in mourning, the men dressed like everyone else. There’s photos of it in my last blog.

So I made it to Kolkata. I ended up not doing much there, so I don’t have too much to say about Kolkata. It seems quite nice, certainly nicer (and cheaper!) than Mumbai, and somehow it felt less polluted and probably still more affluent than Delhi. I think it still has a bit of a bad reputation because of its association with things like the over-hyped “Black Hole Of Calcutta” and “Mother Teresa of Calcutta”, and the poverty that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s when it was flooded with people escaping the horrors of nearby Bangladesh (which until Partition, of course, had been part of the same country and the same state). Of

St John's Church

course Kolkata is famous for being the cultural and intellectual capital of India. An Indian gentleman at the train station in Varanasi made sure I knew this, as if I didn’t already, at about 4 a.m.

The Telegraph newspaper, which proudly labels itself as based in “Calcutta”, amidst very circumspect reports about the Indian bashings in Australia on one day reported that three of the largest high courts around the country were being pressured to change their names. From “Madras High Court” to “Chennai High Court”; from “Bombay High Court” to “Mumbai High Court”; and from “Calcutta High Court” to “Kolkata High Court”. The courts were resisting this as apparently using English, old names and expensive colonial buildings gives them an air of timelessness.

I walked around the city a lot. Parts of downtown Kolkata are quite fancy, full of nice restaurants, air-conditioned shops selling all sorts of modern consumables or clothes, and all that stuff. Of course there’s the typical Indian poverty, crowds and messiness too in other places. Like Mumbai it lacks autos in downtown, which is strange for India. There are some in the outer suburban areas, and of course there’s the big white Ambassador

St John's Church

taxis, which are quite cheap. There’s also a few old-style rickshaws, where poor men will run through the traffic pulling you on a big rickshaw. At night many of them curl up on a hessian sack, under a blanket or two, and sleep between the handles of their rented rickshaws. At least here most of them have sandals - I hear that in Dhaka they don’t even have that luxury.

One popular thing for tourists to do is volunteer for a day or longer at the Mother Theresa hospice, a small place which I think now also runs schools, orphanages, and suchlike. I half wanted to do this but left it too late and when I finally got there it was impossible to get in because of the throng. Back in the backpacker ghetto I ended up having lunch near a group of young Kiwis talking animatedly amongst themselves about how they felt a bit uncomfortable being amongst so many people who worshipped Mary, as opposed to themselves who only worshipped Jesus. Much better. Actually there’s an awful lot of churches in Kolkata, most of which seem to try to do something for the poor. These range from the

St John's Church

historical centuries-old Anglican or Wesleyan churches through to more hip churches with massive buildings and services in dozens of languages, such as the Baptists, Assemblies of God or Seventh Day Adventists, through to the old favourites such as the Roman Catholics or the Presbyterians. Kolkata is famous for (and, possibly, named after) a large temple to Kali, the goddess of death and darkness, or time & change and eternal energy, depending on whom you listen to. I wanted to visit that temple, where apparently they sacrifice goats, but I wasn’t allowed in with my camera and there was nowhere safe to leave it and since it was quite a distance away I never got around to going back.

So I didn’t see that much of Kolkata. I was kind of looking forward to leaving India and going back to SE Asia. My travel time is running out and I booked all my airfares for the rest of my time. I visited some of the tourist sites in Kolkata and walked around the streets, some of which you can see in the photos. I’m a bit behind in this blog - I left Kolkata on a flight to Bangkok on