I have found it difficult to do very much in one day. It's best to make an excursion out of the hotel room a couple of times a day. Over 5 hours in the streets of Varanasi or Calcutta will leave you drained and tired. There is a constant energy and background activity in even back alleys that makes these Indian cities unique.
My plan for the day was to walk around to Moiden, Calcutta's version of Central park. It was a very large area providing ample space for cricket of various levels of organization and even a polo field. I walked around slowly for a while, moving towards the impressive but illogical Queen Victoria memorial (Queen Victoria never even visited India and it was completed 20 years posthumously).
Generally when I would stop, people would come sit or stand near me and eventually ask me where I came from. I sat under a tree and bought a chai from a roaming vendor with a pot and contained fire. He mixed milk powder and filtered the spices through a handkerchief. The chai was small, hot and satisfying. Two young men came and stood by me, staring and smiling. They were thin and dusty, particularly their shoeless feet. These Bengali brothers asked where I was from and after a few minutes one asked if he could sit beside me. I put down my book and said yes. We didn't understand each other well but had a slow conversation with minutes of silence breaking our respective questions.
The younger, 19 year old brother told me they were very poor. Working as housekeepers, they earned 15 rupees (35 cents) per day. They lived with their parents in a village (slum) not far from where we were sitting. He offered to take me to his house, which I declined. He told me he was not happy, mainly because he did not have enough to eat. He and his brother had never been to school and he discovered I had gone to school for Engineering. The moment that followed was quiet and weighted with our gross inequity brought to light. I tried to break it by stating the glaringly obvious fact that I was lucky.
He looked off across the field, after a minute he turned back to me and said that he was unlucky. He complained that his body wasn't working well for him and I thought I heard that he had hepatitis. I had no answer or wisdom to offer, I could only agree that I was lucky and he was not. He requested that we meet up again and wanted to give me his mobile. I didn't have a pen so he recited his number while I pretended to memorize it.
I got up to leave and gave him 100 rupees which he had not asked for. I told him to go with his brother and eat. As I walked away, I felt physically sick and thought I might vomit. The gaps of our lives were clearly shown to both of us. My wealth felt so repulsively excessive. I was planning to take out 10,000 rupees to cover my costs for the next 2 weeks. This money means nothing to me, because I have an excess of it.
I think that broken conversation humanized some aspect of poverty for me. It was one thing to know it exists, even another to see it but hearing the pain and frustration in this boys voice was an acute reality.
As I walked across the field in a haze, a cricket player shuffled over with a big smile to shake hands. I continued past a baby crying, sprawled on a blanket in the sun. An old man with a large white beard was beside the baby and he smiled and waved at me. It comforted me as I walked out of the park, back unto the busy streets of Calcutta.
This evening I was walking with a British lad I'm sharing a hotel room. I told him I don't think I could view India as anything but a developing country. A well dressed Indian man overheard me and joked that India was stronger than China. We kept the banter going and I asked him to recommend a Bengali restaurant for us. He insisted on coming with us and ordering the food. He works for UNICEF and with street children around Kolkata. We had good conversation, mostly about the Indian elite and cricket. We wanted to hear each others impressions about the $1.3 billion dollar (that's right, $1.3 billion USD) home that's been built in Mumbai. Mumbai is well known for it's sprawling slums, as depicted in Slumdog Millionaire He answered many questions for me and wanted to know our impressions of the city as we walked around. After chatting and walking for several hours, we sent him home to his wife who had been calling.
All in all, I've been out around Kolkata for 7 hours today. After what I've written about here and the omitting several other stories from the day, you can start to understand why it is more than enough time. Great, great city, people and travel.
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