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.

Normal

It's the strangest thing, thousands of miles away from 'home', the same distance from 'normal', in a place that is slowly becoming my most familiar reality to see old feelings and queasy pains rear their ugly heads again, seemingly having burrowed their way from new york to Kolkata, brushing aside their cloaks of dirt and detritus to re-reveal themselves in full glory. In less muddy terms, I feel like I had subconsciously made a rather strange assumption in the first few weeks upon landing here, spontaneously formed in the humid smog that led from the tarmac to the winding city streets. Considering the constant inundation of so many new difficulties and mentalities, every day becoming a process of assimilation and amalgamation, navigating a rough terrain wholly different from home, I had somehow thought that I would be spared from those feelings and that contributed the more average peaks and valleys of life back in Amerika. However, after a couple of the strangest weeks in quite some time, I'm realizing that (perhaps intrinsically tied to the fact that walking down the street is less of a bother than it used to be, that here really is becoming home to one degree or another) these kinds of feelings and ouches are a bit more universal than I may have imagined. If I want this to become my home, my reality, my everyday, than I need to be ok with embracing everything about such a reestablishment. If I want there to be a teleology rather than just a stasis interrupted but nothing besides car horns and packs of street dogs, I'm gonna have to accept the path as it bends and might become torqued and painful in the process. These past couple weeks saw one relationship never permitted to get going despite a rather strong impetus from the opposite member, and another... something... come to a close after a slow souring once I had stopped fooling myself it was something other than what it was.

Foucault, Terracotta, Dumb Fuck, Sociology, Cappuccinos, Street-tea, Facial Hair, Funny Pronunciation, Baggage, Post-coital cookies, Waking up to mist rising from pukurs, Stretchy smiles. Etc.

Done. Finished. It's time for a new start, but not because I've packed up and moved somewhere new, the kind of freshness tied to temporarily and its antecedents. Rather, it's because this is how things go in life. Wayward. But it's kind of comforting to feel these familiar feelings come rushing back clouded in cigarette smoke and a new saltiness in the air. Though through this haziness has also emerged an amazingly close new friendship, and a rather well-cultured shoulder to lean on. Home. Sweet. Home.

Bombs over Bombay

(Note this was written some time ago, during the terrorist attacks... excuse the nonexistant backdate)

I woke up this morning to hear (only after being called from the US) that a spate of bombings and hostage situations have descended on Mumbai, that a Mujahedeen group has decided to pull a series of attacks more alike to the recent bombings in Islamabad - bombing popular western/tourist/expensive institutions with precise large blasts - rather than the less targeted sprinkling of attacks which have occurred in other cities, taking place in crowded markets and main roads but disseminated throughout the area with a just as violent but definitely less focused targets. There are a number of strange aspects of the story so far, particularly in the reactions from the Amerikan media, the Indian media, Kolkata itself as one of the four metros, and... myself. Firstly, while this entire year has seen a tremendous and concerning up tick in the rate of bombings, this is the first story to make the top of the New York Times website, to ascend beyond style columns about dog sweaters and bok choy. Thusly, everyone in the Amerika is reading this event as a single catastrophe that signals a great terrorist takeover of India. This is simply not true. The Indian media has had a much more accurate reading, in my opinion. This event was frightening and meaningful in its degree and exact nature, targets, etc, but more concerning is how it exemplified the lack of training of the police force and the complete failure of their response. While events have been taking place continuously this year, and the lack of proper police action was slowly revealed, it took a drawn out hostage situation to reveal how misguided their efforts and strategy really were.

However, sitting on the opposite end of the country in a state with such an amazingly different socio-political situation, I feel bizarrely unaffected by these events. While everyone reads up on the news in the paper, and 'chi chi's in disgust over both the actions of the terrorists and the poor reactions of the police, people here seem fairly confident Kolkata won't be hit by an attack anytime soon. Yes, the bombs have been going off seemingly everywhere, and Kolkata as one of the metros is a perfect target, but for a variety of reasons and theories Kolkata is not seen as a target by the general public and (they hope) the terrorists themselves. Firstly, Kolkata is just so far east it feels rather aloof and separated from the more entwined Bombay/Delhi Metropolitan swath, and thusly farther away from their politics and issues, and those affixed to them as urban symbols of the larger India. Secondly, a theory held by one of my teachers is that too many Muslim militant groups and jihadists have large Indian centers and communities living in Kolkata, relatively unbothered by the police. If they were to attack so close to their own soil, a police raid is much more likely to occur and also to be be successful. It pays to keep your own lawn rather well-kept and unpocked by bombs I suppose. My most favored theory is that the political scene here is simply too distracted by its own super-local concerns that the greater national dynamic of Hindu/Muslim relations is drowned out to the point of being mute. While much of the rest of the country is being spurred on by the Hindu fundamentalism of the BJP political party as a rising alternative to the secularism of the Congress party, the BJP/Congress presence in West Bengal is almost insignificant. Rather, an intense competition between the 30 years incumbent CPI(M) Communist party and the (literally) grass-roots Trinimul party over highly local and almost entirely areligious issues primarily dealing with the increase of local industry, the decrease of farmland, and (occasionally) scheduled tribe status, dominates the political scene. Safety through a particular kind of chaos and destabilization. Neat!