The first couple of days in Kolkata I didn’t do much besides walk around the neighborhood near my hotel on Sudder Street and get my bearings. I discovered a local vegetarian restaurant a few blocks away from where I was staying where I could get a super filling plate of rice, a bowl of dal, alook sak(spinach and potato curry) and roti for 28 rupis, which is less that 50 cents. It always amazed me that I was the only foreigner and woman in the restaurant. I have to admit that before I came to India that I was very worried after hearing so many stories about the way that women are treated; however, I haven’t received any extremely unwanted attention. Obviously you have to be smart and not engage in long conversations with strangers and also dress conservatively, but the biggest annoyance has definitely been people trying to rip me off. I think being a bigger woman and darker skinned also helps. People can tell that I wasn’t born in India because of the way that I act, but they’re often surprised that I’m from America. “You mean South America? You don’t look like you’re from America. You look like Indian girl. Did your Mom or Dad give that to you?”
The heat in Kolkata was slightly overwhelming after visiting high altitudes in China for a month. Kolkata was noisy, crowded, incredibly hot and poor. Pigs, stray dogs, women begging for milk for their children, men selling food and spices, rickshaws, British style taxis, colorful buses and hordes of people inundated the streets of that city. I stayed in a very simple, single room at Ashok hotel on Sudder Street. Initially I thought that my bed might have bed bugs because I kept waking up itching in the middle of the night, but then I started to think that my skin was just being irritated by the sweltering heat. There was a fan in my room, but it did little to mitigate the heat emitted from the 9 a.m. sun. Connected to my room was a small bathroom with a shower that didn’t work and a toilet that didn’t flush. There was a faucet beneath the shower and a bucket underneath that collected the water, so I had to get creative. I would fill up a 2 liter water bottle, lather myself up with soap and then pour the contents of the water bottle over me. The water bottle shower proved quite refreshing in the morning after waking up hot and clammy from the heat of the night. I would then pour the excess water that had been collected in the bucket down the toilet and discard of my waste. I wasn’t necessarily dissatisfied with my accommodation as I was simply happy that it was only Rs 350 a night ($6), which seemed cheap for Kolkata. It was also very close to a lot of services so I could just walk through the alleyway to Sudder Street to get my shoes fixed, find someone to clean my laundry or to access the internet.
While I was in Kolkata I visited the South Park Street Cemetery which I would definitely recommend visiting if ever you’re in the city. It was a labyrinthine cemetery filled with dome-shaped or pointy peak graves dating back to the 1760s. The most interesting part of the cemetery were definitely the engravings. Many of the graves were for workers or their spouses of the East India Company.The graves had very poetic epitaphs. What was crazy was that many of the graves were for people in their early 20s- younger than me now. Walking around the cemetery I couldn’t help but think about how much the city must have changed since then. It’s incredible that people used to hunt tigers on Sudder Street just a couple hundred years ago.
After the Cemetery I went to Mother Teresa’s house to see the little room that she lived in and to visit her tomb. There were orange flowers on her white tomb that spelled out: ‘We pray for you Mother Teresa.’ All that she did in Kolkata was impressive. She built many schools and even left the parish for a year to live in the slums of Kolkata to help poor and dying people there. While everything that she did was very admirable, I was slightly surprised that her reason for helping the destitute was because she was receiving messages from God. She thought that God was telling her to go to the slums to help people there and to spread the message of Jesus.
Later on that evening I took a taxi to the BBD area because I wanted to visit Old Chinatown and to hang out with my people. Old Chinatown had a large Chinese Christian community for centuries. The taxi driver was confused because there are now two Chinatowns and he didn’t know where the old one was. He ended up driving me around for over an hour, when it should have only taken 20 minutes to get there. We stopped every 10 minutes to ask for directions. Finally one person we talked to said that it was in 10 minutes walking distance, so I told the driver to stop because I was getting fed up and I could not be in the back of that taxi any longer. Before I got into the taxi we had agreed that I would pay RS 150 but when he stopped the vehicle he told me it would just be Rs 1000 (which is about $20 instead of the $3 we had agreed on.) That’s a big difference anywhere, but India especially. I guffawed, “You’re joking!” He wasn’t joking. We then yelled at each other for a bit, him arguing that he drove all around the city and me yelling that it wasn’t my fault that he got lost. He growled at me, I screamed profanities at him and then I threw Rs 200 at him and leaped out of the taxi. I briskly walked away and he tried to run after me but luckily there was a traffic jam so he had to weave through taxis. That was probably the most exciting thing that happened to me while I was in Kolkata. I finally reached Old Chinatown on my own but Nam Soon, the Chinese church I wanted to visit, was closed and the entire area seemed rather anticlimactic. However, I did meet a couple of elderly Chinese men who I spoke Chinese with for a bit and who told me that they were born in Kolkata. Interesting!
On my birthday I went to the Blue Sky Cafe, a restaurant near Sudder Street, and saw an older man who I’d met there the day beforehand. Bob was an Irish musician with a bald head and a long, raspy white beard. He talked about his travels around the world in his melodic, now watered-down, Irish accent. He told me about a dream that he’d had a month ago that he was hitchhiking around the U.S. with Mother Teresa. They started in Texas and they really wanted to go to D.C. to meet Obama. They got to D.C. and Obama let Mother Teresa into the white house but not Bob. Mother Teresa had a long cane with a hook and she told Obama to give some money to her charity otherwise she would hit him with her cane. Bob then told me that yesterday he went to Mother Teresa’s house for the morning mass and he was pondering whether or not to volunteer. Suddenly a rather staunch nun from Texas approached him and told him that they needed volunteers. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.
He was also advising me to allow myself to steer from a plan and to end up in places that I hadn’t anticipated visiting. He told me a story about going to Bolivia and ending up on a bus going to a town that he hadn’t intended on going to. However, once he got there it was beautiful so he decided to stay for a few days. One day while he was roaming around the small town he ran into a man who he became rather friendly with and who told him to check out a nearby house. He wasn’t impressed with the simple house so when he visited his friend again he asked him what the big deal with the house was- it was nothing to write home about. His friend told him that a very nice man lived in that house for 15 years, but he would only leave his home once a week for the market on Thursdays to sell his marmalade. One day the man just disappeared. He had been captured by the Israeli Police. The man was a Nazi called the Butcher of Leone, apparently a very notorious Nazi from France who’d been missing since World War II. Bob was an interesting chap- a great storyteller.
Later on in the day I visited Victoria Memorial, a grand marble building erected to commemorate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. The park was quite nice to lounge around in for a couple of hours and to contemplate my 26 years of life. Afterwards I sauntered over to the Fine Arts Museum and St. Paul’s Cathedral which were all in walking distance. There wasn’t much to see in Kolkata, so I don’t think that I will go there again when I come back to India, but it made me all the more excited for the other cities that I will visit in India.
On the 10th I took a night train to Varanasi. It was quite difficult for me to find my hotel, Shanti Guesthouse, because Old town is just a maze of alleyways. There were often power outages in my guesthouse (which I think is common all throughout Old Town), but the bathroom and shower were working and the private room was only Rs200. My guesthouse also had a rooftop restaurant that awarded a good view of the Ganges and Manakarnika Ghat. Varanasi is like nowhere I’ve ever been before. Cows, buffaloes, stray dogs, motorcyclists, people and food all coexist in the same very narrow allies. Above it all the monkeys reside in the urban canopy, leaping from building to building. I definitely accidentally stepped in cow poop a couple of times. Varanasi is so full of color, sounds and smells.
My second day there I visited the ghats near the Ganges river and watched a few bodies on stretchers decorated with flowers being carried to the burning ghat, Manikarnika. Later on I visited Vishwanath Temple, The Golden Temple, in old town. I wandered around the temple like an idiot, not knowing what to do. A priest pushed my head down onto the shrine and then dabbed my forehead with clay and a red powder, forming a tikka…and then he laughed at me. I was slightly taken aback by this entire transaction. Later on that night I took a boat ride down the mata ganga (the Ganges River) and watched people bathing and swimming, buffalo wading and people tending the logs at the burning ghats. Although the river was surrounded by death, it didn’t at all feel like an unhappy place. Instead it felt vivacious and rich with culture. My guide (Sonny) bought some Kingfisher and snacks for us so we sipped on our beer as he shared stories about the city. He told me that there are so many palaces in Varanasi (around 20) because kings would come to the city to die but they would want to stay in a palace during their last days. After they were cremated their homes were donated to the city so many poor people live in the palaces now. Sonny also told me that there were five types of bodies that weren’t burned at the burning ghats: children under 10(because they don’t have sense), pregnant woman(because they have a child in them), holy men, people who have been bitten by a snake and people with leprosy(because leprosy is considered a sign of holiness). Instead a huge rock is tied to their limbs and they’re dumped into the river. Buffaloes and cows are also dumped into the river when they die. Knowing all of this I was surprised that Sonny still dipped his hand into the river and sipped on the holy water. I asked him if he’d ever gotten sick from it and he cried “of course not!” He said that he believed in the mata ganga- she was his mother and she would never do him wrong.
The day before I left Varanasi I met up with Anja, a German girl who I’d met on the train. We spent the day walking around the city and visiting the Durga and Hanuman temples. I have a feeling that I’ll probably be sick of temples in a couple of months, but the Hanuman temple was interesting. There were monkeys in a fenced-in area at the entrance. Initially it seemed like a monkey reserve. Inside the temple there were people drumming, singing and playing an instrument that looked like a horizontal accordion. It was nice to spend the day with someone else, especially after being alone for nearly two weeks. I don’t feel particularly lonely yet, but it would still be nice if I could meet someone to travel with for at least a few days. Later on that night I saw the nightly ceremony to celebrate the Ganges Rives and Shiva that takes place at the Dasaswamedh ghat. Four men swung around a holder with several burning candles in unison while music featuring a traditional flute and a man singing with a sturdy, deep voice serenaded the audience. There were probably a thousand people present for the ceremony. Some were sitting near the stage or on the stairs while others were sitting in boats on the river. I spotted some people sitting cross-legged on the boats with their eyes closed and their hands clasped in prayer as they mouthed the words of the song. As I retreated to my hotel and walked down the promenade of the ghats I took one look back at the mata ganga with the candles that were illuminating the boats nearby and the hundreds of people surrounding the Dasaswamedh ghat. The sweet music flowed through my ears. I want that impression of the city to remain in my head forever.
This morning I arrived in Agra, where the Taj Mahal and red fort are located. The hotel that I’m staying in, Tourist Rest House, seems like the best hotel that I’ve stayed in in India so far. My room is about Rs 400 and it’s spacious and clean…and everything in the bathroom works! The hotel also arranged for an auto rickshaw to pick me up from the train station, free of charge. Tomorrow I’ll dress in my traveler’s Sunday best and head to the Taj Mahal for the sunrise.
bridemarriedtoamazement 