Time has passed

It's been a while.

I am coming up on month ten of the subcontinental residency. My apartment lease ends in 40 days. I will be back in the Amerika in just under 2 months. Everything exists only as countdowns and running timers, moving backwards and forwards from the present. Whenever I am asked what country I am from (and this happens constantly, everywhere, incessantly, without restraint) the next question is undoubtedly how long I have been here, how long I will stay. An assumed (albeit correct) temporariness...

In the last few months I have been to Thailand, Cambodia, Israel, and Turkey, short breaks from the stifling shuffle and terracotta teas of Kolkata. It's oddly strange to realize one's reference point has been relocated, for boarding passes to mention destinations and hometown returns devoid of any mention of JFK or Newark. This is also a point of strong suspicion for airline personnel working along any Israeli routes – I was stopped and questioned a record number of times. Though I admit that my bag filled with jars of tahina on the return trip would look a bit funny through the monitor of the x-ray machine, and the unkempt facial hair and gumpcha-as-scarf didn't help.

The last month or so has reinstated the summer heat back into our lives, the midday sun making the outside world incredibly uninviting, and of course adding a new dimension and acridity to smells wafting out of street gutters and garbage piles, and also from the armpits of those less drawn towards personal hygiene, perhaps due to economic circumstance but often just as point of personal preference or rather... ambivalence.

Speaking of garbage piles, one of my favorite sights here involves a particularly wonderful yet common occurrence that take place in and around the pile at the corner from my building. Oftentimes, when returning late at night I spot a poetically archetypal cow (black and white spots, lacking the particular angularity of the more brown and bullish creature more often seen here) munching on some household debris, a street dog or two happily shoveling down several-day old rice stained sickly yellow with the remnants of a past daal, and a near-albino cat timidly nibbling away on its own favored fragments, often nestled at the cows feet. It just seems the strangest dinner party one might imagine, as if a number of foreign dignitaries got together without translators, decided to remove their trousers and stand knee deep in whatever it was they were eating, and occasionally stare suspiciously at any passerbys. In the dark of night, on a deserted street corner reeking of piss, with their coiffures gone akimbo.