ohbenjamin.tumblr.com

I am now living in Bangladesh and posting quite frequently at http://ohbenjamin.tumblr.com.

moving

if anyone still reads this,

as you can tell this blog has gone to sleep.

because i am no longer in india.

for the time being.

i have been in new york/philadelphia for the summertime.

however, i am moving and starting a properly coinciding blog.

starting september 2009:

benjamininhawaii.blogspot.com

e-hotdog

the kid next to me in the internet cafe is eating hotdogs, one by one.
he is on his fourth now.
it smells bad.
he is a fatty, and i hate him.

kalitola

Sitting in the SAATHII office in Kalitola, the windows wide open in hopes of some kind of ventilation, one can hear all the goings on of the streets and alleys outside. This part of the city is more a village than any urban area, still drowsily shuttering itself from noon to twilight, bike rickshaws plying its streets with their steady song of horns and hollars, slithering chains and mechanisms.  A man goes buy with an ice cream cart and shouts repeatedly "I HAVE GOOD ICE CREAM" (in Bengali) and I giggle happily, almost perturbed by how high-pitched a giggle this actually produced.

Walking home from New Alipore

At a certain hour at night all public transportation formal and informal has given way to a sleeping city save for the taxis that continue to lumber across the nearly barren streets, the heavy gleaming carcasses of the anachronistic ambassadors heaving their bellies across the ruddy asphalt. They are a bit like the young born into a funny noble reincarnation. A new model seems to better belong 70 years ago if only its seats weren't still sheathed in plastic wrap proudly announcing a protracted youth, emblazoned with the words 'gulab' or 'shanto' and the appropriate Indian symbolic imagery of roses or docile elephants.  

Construction workers and occasional crazies set up their ephemeral camps beneath bridges and embankments, their tents either wholly imagined or feigned with a few scraps of newspaper and corrugate, a gampcha draped transparently overhead from a dead tree branch now resigned to its cement encasement, long having quit its slow regurgitation of the bricks of its imprisonment. The radiance of an incandescent light bulb overhead suddenly rejuvenates the muddied colors in the cloth, red and green madras now infused by a yellow light that simultaneously shows the fabric's age and gauzy shoddiness. This is the a flag of a bearer who has foisted it aloft without much thought of imagery of semiotics, of a nation which sleeps beneath crumbling infrastructure perhaps of their own toil, the dirt of perhaps another state still deeply embedded in fingernails stained by dirt and bleached by days. Their dreams, if anyone makes conversation, are definitely not filled the jauntily dancing bears of Bengali, more likely the swift jabs of Hindi. Birds shaking the dust from their wings, shrieking.

Dogs trail behind for a block or a kilometer, sometimes noising hopefully with snouts singed by car exhaust or radiator grills, sometimes barking relentlessly, nipping on the cuffs of my pants. Eventually, reaching the delineation of their territories, the dogs freeze under the glow of the bulbs overhead. They ascribe to a whole set of borders scratched through the streets without thought of the barriers of religion and money that materialize themselves more readily and profusely in apartment buildings shuttered behind endless sets of gates and shanty villages congealing along these perimeters and dividing walls. The dogs stare half distracted, senseless anger rimmed in fluorescence. A pile of rice in the gutter, a prolonged honk in the distance, and the shuffle of lungis in the sticky sweetness of the night, propped knees being reorganized, the gentle nudge of a bedmate.

It's hard to stay motivated,

...to continue to apply for jobs when the only responses I get or silence or rejection steeped in the dismal outlook set by 'today's economy'.

...to do much of anything productive when it gets hot before breakfast and the stuffy stickiness remains long past dinnertime.

...to not feel isolated from anything and anyone having to do with your field, separated by a half-day's time difference, a major body of water or two, and a lack of internet past 6pm or so. ...to care about much of anything between 10am and 7pm, ie. daylight hours.

It's easy to complain,

...to eat various fried foods prepared by a shirtless man stooped over kerosene fryer on the sidewalk. ...to take naps and then eat bread mindlessly while still sweaty and confused over dreams involving past or contrived lovers.

...to sit on my veranda, pretending to not watch my neighbors across the street eat their dinners but actually playing a game consisting of guessing what concoction lies in each bowl, mustard oil pooling in a sickly vermilion on the surface.

...to give up on identifying what breeds of mosquitoes and other bugs might be biting me at night, leaving me with a sundry grab-bag of welts and lumps of all different sizes, colors, aggravations, and lifespans.

In sum, it's hard to apply for and find jobs, while it's easy to eat or do other food related activities.I suppose, despite being overseas, this all makes me your average Amerikan.

PATRIOTISM!

(unrelated: i miss grapefruit)

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.