Sarah: Our journey to Kolkata gets off to a fairly inauspicious start on Saturday when we arrive at the Gaya train station for a 9:00 a.m. departure and are told that our train is delayed and now expected in at 11:30. This is a train that had started in New Delhi some 17 hours before, Gaya being just one of many stops on the long line to Kolkata. We all groan a little -- a couple days before, Patrick had met someone whose train ended up arriving at its destination 18 hours late, and we’ve been told that the Indian Railways policy is that late trains always defer to on-schedule trains for station stops, track changes, and so forth -- which basically means that once a train has started running late, it’s only going to get later.

So we settle in for what is to be a long wait in the upper class waiting room (everything in the train stations here is segregated into classes, with the upper class waiting room being the equivalent of the premier lounges in American airports, except with rickety plastic chairs, frequent power outages, and foul odors drifting from the squat toilets in the bathrooms).

Around 10:30, Hannah and I go downstairs to the enquiry window to check on our train again, and hear that it is now expected at noon. By 11:30, when Patrick asks, they’re saying it will arrive at 1:15, and by 12:30, the projected time is 1:45. The train is clearly getting later and later at some progressive rate, and it starts to seem like a Calculus word problem (because aren’t all math word problems about trains?), which I gigglingly transcribe (“If an Indian train is scheduled to arrive at Gaya Junction at 9:00 a.m....”) and Hannah dutifully graphs out in her journal. Our calculations suggest that the train’s arrival time is an exponential curve approaching 2:00 p.m. And 2:00 is just about when it pulls into the station, which Hannah and I, old Math Team buddies that we are, congratulate ourselves on, because we’re nerdy like that.

On board the train, we settle in for some lounging in our berths and study up in the guidebook to figure out a strategy for finding a guesthouse. If all had gone according to plan, we would’ve had an eight-hour train ride that got us into Kolkata by 5:00 p.m., which seemed like a fine and decent hour to go looking around for a place to stay. But now our train is running at least five hours late, and getting later by the hour, putting us on target for a middle-of-the-night arrival, which is never fun in a new city. Still, we pick out a first choice hotel and a couple back-ups that are just down the block and hope for the best.

It’s 11:00 p.m. when we finally arrive in Kolkata, and we grab a quick dinner in the train station food court, because we weren’t able to eat on the train -- another glitch in the system, apparently, since usually you can order meals on the trains; I guess because this one was originally scheduled to arrive before dinner time, there was no provision for dinner service. So, 11:30 or so, we get in a taxi and head for Sudder Street, the backpacker district, which should be packed with budget accommodation. After several wrong turns and stops to ask for directions (to what should be one of the more common taxi destinations in the city), our driver pulls up to the Hotel Diplomat, which is locked up and gated. A staff person is roused only to tell us that the hotel is full. We unload our stuff from the taxi anyway and proceed on foot around the corner to a couple other guesthouses that had been recommended in the guidebook.

The scene is the same. A locked gate, a sleepy-eyed man stumbling up to it to say the word “Full,” a continued trudge down the block. Four places have turned us away, and we’re starting to feel like Mary and Joseph on Christmas Eve, when an old man in a blue sarong hands us a business card and says, “Come, come.” Without much choice, we follow him further through the narrow street and down another block. The first place he takes us to is full. The second place has two rooms -- they’re 800 rupees, which is three or four times what we’d normally hope to spend, but we’re desperate enough to take a look. The first is small, windowless, but clean -- so we ask to see the second.

The young woman leads us up a tiny, ladder-like staircase, opening a trap door to allow our backpacks to fit through, and all of a sudden we’re presented with a doorway that we’d have to duck to fit through -- it’s got to be all of four and a half feet high -- but I’m starting to duck down, assuming the hallway will be taller on the other side -- only it’s not. Hannah, stooped over with her backpack on, obligingly follows the woman down the child-sized hallway as Patrick and I wait in the stairwell, where we can still stand up. “It’s just like that scene in Being John Malkovich,” I say. Meanwhile, Hannah too is assuming that once she makes it through the hall, the actual room will be full-size. But no, it’s got four and a half foot ceilings too. And no window. “But it’s very clean,” the woman says, and Hannah can’t help but chuckle a little bit as she stoops her way back to us. “Have you guys seen Being John Malkovich?” she asks. We thank the woman for her help, but say we’re going to keep looking.

We pass a family sleeping under blankets in the stairwell of the hotel on our way out, and that’s starting to look like a better and better option. Our blue-saronged friend tries to lead us down an even darker, narrower alleyway, to which we say thanks but no thanks, and when I knock at the next dark, gated guesthouse, the guy there tells us he has a room with three beds, only 300 rupees. We take a look, and despite the boarded up window, strong scent of mold, and large black stain running up the wall from a cluster of charred electrical wires, we decide it’s time to end our search and settle in for the night. The guy puts fresh sheets on the beds for us, and turns on the fan, and eventually we all fall asleep.... Only to be woken by him poking his head through the door the next morning at 8:00 a.m. (because apparently the bolt on the door doesn’t actually work) to ask for our passports. We’re like, “can’t this wait an hour or two?” but no, it can’t. So we get dressed and get our check-in forms filled out and head out to find breakfast and look for a new hotel, because staying in that one again is definitely not an option. It stinks like a damp basement and the pillows are lumpier than a bag full of socks and clearly, electrical fires are a not-uncommon occurrence.

But we do find another place, slightly better (though still kind of moldy-scented), and then the next day, trying again, end up where we are now -- a hotel with rooms that doesn’t smell of mold, with comfortable pillows and even cable TV so we can watch Bollywood movies and episodes of Hot Seat -- the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

I’m incredibly grateful to finally be in a place where I can sleep through the night and wash my clothes without fearing they’ll be infested with mildew spores before they’ve had a chance to dry. Especially because, in all other respects, Kolkata has been a really fun and interesting place so far. The food has been fantastic -- it deserves a whole separate essay -- the museums interesting, the parks lovely, the architecture beautiful, and the shops enticing. In fact, I would highly recommend a visit to Kolkata to anyone planning a trip to India; I’d just recommend booking a room in advance, or at least trying really hard not to arrive in the middle of the night.

More updates (and new photos) soon -- for now, we’re off to do some more shopping and sightseeing. Much love.

February 15, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Sarah: I keep trying to figure out how to begin.

We’ve been in India for three weeks now, and already I feel like I have a book’s worth of images to relate, and many years’ worth of fodder for discussion and questioning and study. This is a country with an incredibly rich and diverse history and culture, and it’s also a country with a lot of problems, all of which feel complex and daunting and interrelated.

Everywhere we go, there is poverty and pollution, sexism and corruption, hassle and suffering; at the same time, everywhere we go, there are welcoming people and important religious sites, delicious foods and brilliant colors, interesting architectural styles and catchy songs. We laugh dozens of times a day, but sometimes it’s just because that’s the best way to stay sane amidst all the chaos. India is not an easy place to travel, but it can be an incredibly rewarding place to travel -- already I feel thankful for the experiences I’ve had here and the things I’ve been learning.

But all this ambivalence I’ve been feeling -- this emotional whipping back and forth, a hundred times a day, between things sacred and profane, beautiful and hateful, life-affirming and agonizing -- can make it really hard to figure out how to begin to tell the stories. But enough equivocating; I’ll just try to dive in.

In the last update, Patrick described our first few days in Delhi, which we spent recouping from jetlag with Season 3 of The Wire, and our amazing luck for meeting warm and welcoming people in the city of Chandigarh. As if on cue, just hours after Patrick had posted that entry, a friendly gentleman waiting next to us in line to purchase train tickets invited us for dinner at his home that evening. We spent a nice few hours with the Prakash family, talking about India, America and New Zealand (where many members of their family now live), and looking through an album of wedding photos from a granddaughter’s recent wedding. By the time we left Chandigarh, we’d added whole pages of contact information to our journals from the numerous friends we’d made, and were feeling pretty amazed by all the attention.

The next day, we headed east, up into the low foothills of the Himalayas to the town of Rishikesh, which lines the banks of the Ganges near its headwaters, and is known to some as the “yoga capital of the world.” We went there to meet up with one of my best friends from DeKalb, Hannah, who’s been travelling in India and Nepal since October. It had been a couple years since I’d seen her, but within minutes we were laughing and talking each other’s ears off, just like we used to late at night over tea in her dad’s living room or parked in my driveway for hours, unable to end the conversation. The three of us spent five fun days in Rishikesh together -- eating yummy thalis and steaming hot apple samosas, hiking to a waterfall, listening to the nightly chants of the aarti ceremony on the banks of the Ganges, and even watching one of the omnipresent street cows munch its way through a flaming pile of burning rubbish one night.

During our time together in Rishikesh, Patrick and I talked Hannah into travelling with us for a little while, and on Monday the 29th we all headed down to Haridwar, an hour’s bus ride from Rishikesh, to spend the day exploring before catching a night train to Lucknow. In Haridwar, we poked through shops selling glittering bangles, Indian sweets, colorful fabrics and gleaming stainless-steel dining ware in a bazaar that lined both sides of the narrow, winding streets. We walked down to the banks of the Ganges, where pilgrims were participating in bathing ceremonies along the ghats -- stair-steps leading down into the water.

On board my first night train in India, I unfolded the stack of clean white railway-issue bedding and climbed into my narrow upper berth -- Hannah below me in the middle berth, and Patrick an arm’s length away on the upper berth across from mine. I slept lightly and fitfully on that ride, unable to find a comfortable position, and arrived in Lucknow with that strange sensation that the world is still rocking back and forth around you, even when you’re on solid ground.

Lucknow is the capital of Uttar Pradesh, and marks a good midpoint between Haridwar to the north and Bodhgaya to the southeast, which is where we were headed; it’s also a city with a lot of Mughal history. The Mughals were the Muslim rulers of vast swaths of India during the 16th and 17th centuries; Shah Jehan, a Mughal emperor, was the builder of the Taj Mahal. We were looking forward to checking out some Mughal architecture and sampling some Mughlai food -- tasty mutton dishes and spicy kebabs and thin crepe-like roti breads -- before continuing our journey to Bodhgaya.

We also took advantage of the Lucknow branch of Fab India -- a rapidly expanding chain of clothing and home decor shops (there’ll be one in the U.S. any minute now) -- to purchase some salwar kameez outfits for me. Salwar kameez -- a knee-length top with split sides worn over baggy pants with a long coordinated scarf called a dupatha -- is a common outfit for Indian women, and a helpful tool for western women hoping to combat some of the stares and occasional street harassment by Indian men that can result from even conservative western clothes. (An added bonus of the salwar kameez top that I was grateful for yesterday is that it actully provides a fair amount of privacy when squatting to pee in a rice field -- the long split sides form a sort of screen. You never know when that’s going to come in handy.)

From Lucknow on February 1st, we took another night train (on which I’m happy to say I slept much better) to the city of Gaya in the state of Bihar -- currently the poorest state in India, with a largely rural population. Our destination was the nearby town of Bodhgaya, where, 2550 years ago, under a banyan tree, Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment and became the Buddha. The fourth generation of the Bodhi tree -- planted from a cutting of a cutting of a cutting of the original -- still grows at the Mahabodhi temple in Bodhgaya, marking the spot of the enlightenment. Consequently, Bodhgaya is the world’s holiest pilgrimage site for Buddhists, and there are dozens of temples scattered throughout the town, representing various countries with Buddhist traditions -- Japan, Bhutan, Tibet, Cambodia, Thailand, Sri Lanka. A large community of Tibetan Buddhists spends part of the winter here, and the Dalai Lama is a frequent visitor.

As luck would have it, we arrived in Bodhgaya on the same day as His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and were able to attend a reception the following day at which he spoke after enshrining some Buddha relics in a newly built temple. The town was packed over the weekend -- with hordes of maroon and saffron-robed monks and nuns; crowds of white-sari-swathed Sri Lankan pilgrims; bands of beaded and dreadlocked westerners from dozens of countries; and swarms of bowl-waving beggars of all ages. Bodhgaya has been growing steadily quieter throughout the week as we’ve stayed on.

The main reason we’d come to Bodhgaya was to visit a friend of Hannah’s, whom she’d met at a Hindi language school they both attended a couple months ago up north in Mussoorie. Diane Kirwin, Hannah’s friend, is the founder of a nonprofit organization, KIRF Bodhgaya, that is setting up schools for poor children in some of the villages around this area. We were able to visit two of the schools yesterday and meet the children. I think we were all impressed by how much they had already learned in the limited time the schools have been running -- they could recite and recognize all their English letters and do complex arithmetic problems; some kids even had quite a bit of English vocabulary. At the same time, it was clear how vast the needs of these poorest-of-the-poor communities are. Many of the children are malnourished, and their parents -- mostly tenant farmers of the lowest, untouchable caste, called Dhalits -- have little hope of breaking the cycle of poverty without a significant amount of assistance -- far more than the local development community can yet provide.

On Saturday, after a little over a week here, we’ll be leaving Bodhgaya -- saying goodbye to our small and tidy guesthouse, which has been pleasant enough despite the clouds of mosquitoes that seem to be breeding in the bathroom and flowing in from the open stairwell to the roof; and to the friendly owner of the store across the street with whom we chat every evening while we buy bottled water and crackers; and to the eclectic assortment of Tibetan, Bhutanese, Chinese and Indian food that graces the menus of the restaurants throughout town; and to Diane and the other KIRF Bodhgaya volunteers we’ve met here.

Our next stop is Kolkata, where we’ll bid a sad goodbye to Hannah after a few more days. After a week in Kolkata and the surrounding area of West Bengal, Patrick and I will endure our longest train ride yet -- nearly 30 hours -- down the east coast to Chennai (a.k.a. Madras) and the state of Tamil Nadu. I’m excited to continue our explorations of this crazy subcontinent, and will try to update you on some more of our adventures, frustrations, and observations soon. Much love to all.

February 09, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)