Week One

Largely, the thought running through my head this past week has been that of confusion and nihilism. At the end of the day, despite my academic and career-oriented plans that easily incorporate my study abroad into their wordy webs, on an innate level I have absolutely no idea why I am here and its eating at me, weighing down on me like the humidity here and the omnipresent sheen of perspiration and clinging dust it leaves. I'm definitely feeling confined by this feeling of questioning, pacing in my bedroom, staring at my hopelessly trying ceiling fan, watching the pack of wary dogs that stake out the sidewalk below my verandah. I'm hoping this will change, but as of right now I don't feel connected to this place, no real expediency or necessity to my living here or my rather time-consuming language learning. While I question the validity or seriousness of this train of though, I've been considering forfeiting my fellowship for the year, cutting my stay here down to 10 weeks from a much more frightening and ominous number I'm estimating at around 42 weeks. It's only been a week so I'm going to reevaluate my sentiments in another week or two, but I just can't see myself being here that long, especially considering at the end of the summer our cadre cuts itself down to 3 from a relatively crowded 7.

I'm pretty lonely here, isolated from New York and Philadelphia by a 9 and a half hour time difference, several thousand miles and at least one ocean depending on which way you're counting. I walk down the street and am largely ignored but always a trail of stares lies in my wake, often coming early enough to be obvious and glaring, adding an intensity to compliment the sun, its presence hidden by smog and endless towers of verandahs but still indicated by the thick drippy heat. There really are essentially no foreigners here, even east and central Asians are only an occasional abnormality. In the last week I've seen only seven or eight obvious foreigners, a batch of white girls in blue and purple saris descending into the subway in the central part of the city, another errant guy standing on a platform, a couple in the foreign registry office, and an elderly and seemingly disillusioned man walking a major street called Rash Bihari in a frightened expedient shuffle, clutching his red messenger bag to his chest like an only child, a delicate thing to be cradled and shield from the cacophony and dirt of the street. I am so white here, for lack of a better word, still stumbling both in my footing and sense of direction, and also my language, stuttering like a toddler in sentences heavy with pronouns, pauses, and interjected English.

Enough with such kvetching and lonely mutterings...

Kolkata as a city has been a huge surprise, a city far different than what I expected, nowhere near as idealistically ruralist as Chandigarh, as bent on hyper-urbanization as Delhi, as picturesque as Jaipur and its surrounding hills despite its layer of filth and tourist-driven greed. I was expecting a city of sediments, history laid out in horizontal slabs built up to form the canyons than run through it as streets, carrying its ballooning population like a slowly bubbly silty stream, pre-colonial historical buildings crowned by the implants of the British Raj and finally splattered and shot through by modern construction and mushrooming towers. While this kind of sedimentary growth exists at the core of this city, what is more visible and apparent is a different kind of layering, sticky films adhering to all surfaces, roads, walls, cubby holes, and rooftops, growing not only upwards but also inwards, suffocating the streets in a barrage of hawkers, their stalls sporting piles of aluminum dishware or mounds of handkerchiefs, greasy sweets or piles of mangos indicated at a distance by an ensuing cloud of flies. The smaller streets cease to be these pulsating arteries of movement I imagined and become more like seams that mark off the end of one building and its outpour and the beginning of the next, its traffic squeezing along this impossibly narrow space, forcing its edges away momentarily, only to have this footprint of space immediately consumed and reabsorbed into the blurry edges of buildings and city-blocks. On a bad day the soot that hangs in the air adds to this claustrophobia, the thick clouds sitting in the sky seemingly meeting the exhaust trails of gaudily painted trucks and tiny auto-rickshaws, forming a single gray-white mass that also has come to set up residency in the city, competing for a more psychological kind of space in this crowded metropolis.

I intend to take pictures once I have a Ziploc baggy to protect my camera from the constant humidity and threat of a sudden downpour, though I will promise you that each picture taken will be only a tiny piece of this city, an object depicted by a constrained focus because this city has a kind of visual density too cacophonous to accurately capture, to portray in a way that is decipherable and meaningful.

If anyone feels the desire to say hello do email me,
or if you're feeling particularly nice, if you send me a real paper email I'd return the favor and you'd get a nice foreign stamp,

Benjamin Weinryb Grohsgal
C/O AIIS
12/2 Swinhoe Street
Kolkata 700019 India