delays n detours

morning and i am feeling helpless. such hair i have grown, long and dry and falling out in the heat, in the stress, in the everything, and all i want is someone to get it under control for me cuz i don’t know what to do with it anymore. i dilly i dally and then i sally forth to the neighborhood hairdresser... to find it closed at almost-noontime. i revise my schedule. i do a little more studying and sit around wondering where it is all going to. i give the hairdresser another try. still closed and the guy repairing shoes by the entrance shrugs it all off, who knows when it will open? i had been sure the french girl had told me it was open from morning. why isn’t it open from morning? or, why does always no place here post their hours? sometimes i feel like i am flying about in circles always hoping for one thing on the circuit to work, feeling hopeless and out of control like a puppet train jerked around on the rails by invisible strings. it is no good that today is feeling hopeless already anyway even without the failure to get a haircut..... me hopelessly struggling at my tabla, hopelessly trying to cram bengali into brain that is just like no more give me vacation, hopelessly trying to explain first hopelessness and then nandigram and other issues of west bengal politics which i dont even understand to schmabil on phone but he is i think hopelessly wiped out by his own fight against deadlines, final papers, the end approaching...

afternoon and i am with my bengali tutor, as we labor laboriously thru a sad story of caste n class, some poor guy caught stealing a fish from the zamindar’s lake. outside the wind is whipping up the dust and dirt, rattling at the shutters, and in the air u can feel the rain coming. and in a moment, it does come, it is there, sudden and complete as always, dropping and drenching and spraying and splattering, reaching us where we sit with a rumbly roar through the walls of the house. i would be going, but she won’t let me—how can i go in such rain? instead i wait for tea, the clock ticking away thru the minutes, my sense of time drifts. inside there is my inner voice freaking out again, i will be late for dance class! but i try to suppress that, i cannot run out on a sweet old lady who has me waiting for tea, chill schmemma chill they are only minutes...

i am already twenty minutes late for a class that is thirty five minutes away. but my taxi driver is delighted by my miserable bengali and goes tara-tari when i tell him to get me there tara-tari, so soon enough i am skipping about over potholes and puddles down the block to dance school. pishi (guruma) is in a mischevious mood, and teaches us makan chori, the thieving baby krishna after the butter, announcing, today there will be a thieving of butter! she is excited, and so her english begins to fall apart. we are krishna’s mother, milking the cow and then churning. pishi directs us, us who are having trouble cuz we cannot help but giggle when she says, "this this, what is this? milky! yes milky, first you do milky, first milky then pitchering... then you bosh on floor again, legs crossed, bosh bosh, put down pitcher."

she feeds us fried eggplant, sitting in front on the divan with her big newspaper packet of 30 baingan for only ten of us... students plead but pishi will have none of it, pishi will feed and then overfeed each and every one of us. towards the end of class she gets clever, there are only a few of us left in the class and she still has some eggplant to get rid of, so she tells me oh these are still hot they have not become cold hold one see! i say and what will happen then? once i am holding it? no i will not hold it. but as usual there is no point protesting, since she refuses my refusal, calls me the goonda of bhawanipore, tells me today i have been so naughty, too naughty, and has the eggplant given to me by another student. happily, she has emptied her packet.

then i am stolen away by k-di, a tiger lady. she is older, i think sixties, and she is always coming to these dance classes to sit and watch in the corner, protesting that she is old and cannot be dancing so much. that is until she sees something she doesn’t like, and jumps up and shooing everyone in front where they can see, shouting at the poor tabla and harmonium players to do it right, she tears into whatever bol is at hand like some crazy tornado, occassionally stopping halfway thru the bol to yell again at the musicians who are half cowering half breaking out in laughter that they are doing it wrong, and when she is finished she says, there, that is it, now you know. and there is no saying no to her. k-di also happens to live near where i live, and every so often she gives me a ride home. today again she did this, but when we got out of the taxi said to me, you want soup? in a voice that would accept no nos, and so of course i said yes. but then she decided that first we would stop by her home cuz of course i would need to take rest before i went off for eating and sleeping. she took me into her home had me recline against the cushions as she arranged them, telling me she would show me how to relax, turned on the fans opened the windows dimmed the light and told me to relax for a bit, then we would go. the position is a little awkward but i go with it, and close my eyes at her instructions. in a few minutes, she is back in the room and with no warning starts wiping ice-chilled rose-scented water all over my face, saying, eyes closed eyes closed! i surrender, even my giggles i surrender, maybe this is normal i don’t know. she finishes, tells me still to rest, and then goes out again. ten minutes, and she is back, and we are ready to go.

by the time i get home it is after nine, i am full of soup and smelling of the bel phul garland that k-di has given me to sweeten the air, the day has been whispered away and i will have to get it all done tomorrow. so i push all my plans a day further down the line like i always do, and crawl into my bed, garland of flowers beside my pillow, the familiar sounds of dogs barking and goods carriage tata trucks rattling by lulling me into sleep.

random observations

chordi (dance teacher, guruma's senior-most disciple) was talking about the sunderbans today, the wildlife preserve near kolkata where the royal bengal tiger lives. she said, "don't go there, why go there? you won't see! who sees? no one ever says they have seen! you know why? you know why?" (i have no idea why) "he is the king of the forest. you think you will see the king of the forest just out there?" (gestures towards the streets of kolkata) "no, the king stays in his place, in the den. not wandering out for you to see!"

warning to jody ann: she says she will call u, and call u back to kolkata. she seems to think she will be persuasive. i do not know how u will say no. the omelettes daily continue, without the tall girl to feed them to. and green mangoes with black salt. litchees. really, everything u could ever want.

north kolkata adventuring

a day of explorations... things new to me but old to the world.

marble palace. mid-19th century mansion of raja rajendra mullick bahadur. hidden down some small streets off of chittaranjan avenue, where everything looks much the same as everywhere else in kolkata. then you look up, and there it is. this extravagant creation in a dazzling white, a leftover from the days of the "city of palaces" (since replaced by the city of probably no palaces unless you mean ones that are fallen apart or else hidden where you will never find them). there is no photography allowed but i sneak a snap of the exterior anyway. then me n laura walk up to the gate with our permits in our hands, and the gatekeeper motions for us to enter. the grass is green, the statues that dot the lawn are motley (lions and buddhas, etc) and there is someone’s laundry hanging in the corner of the garden. at the entrance (not at all grand, some sad little side door) we are given a guide who mostly just sweeps us on along thru the rooms, giving us names of objects but very little other information. there is a queen victoria of oak as big as an elephant. there are in fact many images in various media of the english queen, scattered throughout the house. there are ming vases, chandeliers, paintings, some by famous artists like rubens or reynolds, some of them disintegrating. busts of bare-chested curly-haired women, statues of greek athletes. gorgeous marble floors. and in the courtyard, cages of sweet little birds, chirping away.

college street. really i had meant to go here for a long time. it is an impressive place, stall after stall chock-full of booksbooksbooks, piled high. the street is really and truly bursting with books, some new but mostly old, ranging from classic english literature to guides to computer science to test-preparation manuals to political tracts to lord knows what else, in both bengali and english. with this as a permanent kolkata institution, i wonder at the excitement around the annual book fair (boi mela)—compared to this, it is nothing. i feel overwhelmed, unable to take in all of the choices, which is probably better what with the limited space in my suitcase; i cannot afford any more books. we slip out of this commotion and into the coffee house.

the indian coffee house. that college street institution. a legion of whirring fans in a cavernous space made to feel cozy by the crowd of tables, clusters of conversationalists, the clutter of cutlery and talk. cigarettes are smoked with abandon and waiters circulate in turbans that seem a little silly considering the informal atmosphere. an image of tagore looks down on the assembly from above... too bengali for words. delicious coffee, both cold and hot, paired with a miserable tomato and cucmber sandwich and some hopelessly spongy, cold pakoras that no amount of ketchup could save. the food is lucky to be rescued instead by this being the notorious college street place to be...

pictures from rabindra sadan performance, 27 april 2007

on the 27th of april, us students of guru bandana sen and senior disciple suchandra banerjee put on a show at rabindra sadan, a pretty big-time stage in kolkata. us intermediate students performed a bunch of bols (short dance compositions), some tatkar (footwork), some gat, some thaat, all the mish-mash of a standard kathak performance... but with some eccentric choreography by suchandra-di. then some of the elder students performed a tharana, which i guess you could describe as a bunch of bols and footwork woven together with a sung verse it keeps coming back to.

it was crazy and chaotic. the stage was squishy. the lights were blinding. the dancers were underpracticed. i was exhausted, half-sick, dehydrated... but it was pretty amazing. somehow it all came together, somehow there was no catastrophe... anyway, here are the pictures.

posing in the green room.

spinning on the stage

ta dum! we make it thru another bol.

senior students do tharana

more senior students, more tharana.

park street cemetery

a view of the cemetery

resting place of "hindoo stuart", famed brit gone native

we found our way into the cemetery from some ghetto side entrance, where men and crows were sorting thru dumptrucks full of garbage. some of it overflowing onto the street that we were trying to negotiate ourselves across. from that, the stickiness and the stink, coming into the cemetary was like stepping into another universe. a universe of deep quiet, old monuments surrounded by grass and trees, that lush bengal greenery that in all the dust and dirt you sometimes forget is there. and set amid it, headstones bearing poetic epitaphs, grand mausoleums, impressive obelisks. some still standing, some slowly falling apart like old greek temples. definitely an unexpected retreat from park street and all its blaring commercialism that lay just on the other side of the wall which enclosed these graves, its mcdonalds and its kfcs and its music worlds. a hidden world of old stones and hidden paths long overgrown by grass, imposing and even majestic commemorations to the early english of kolkata. one of those lasting marks of colonial extravagance. but striking within this extravagance to note the ages of the dead. so many under the age of 25, especially women, people who came and within only a few years died, victims of an unfriendly climate. so out of keeping with the grandeur of their final resting places. all the wives of the officers—you walk down the row reading about beloved elizabeth dead at 21, dearest rose dead at 23, sweetest mary dead at 22. the men with slightly higher ages at death, tho one suspects that that is only because they came to calcutta at an older age. amid all the intense green and quiet, monuments to the hopelessness of early british colonial life, in that marshy swampy place called calcutta. i can only imagine how in a time when life was so fickle, so easily stolen away, it became so important to remember the dead, enshrine them in these grand constructions, how this somehow must have felt reassuring to a community so unsure of itself.

one day

sweat sits on yr skin in the bus, u flinch at the crunch of bodies that means another arm slippery with hot sticky moisture touching yours, you cannot believe it is only early morning and already the heat has descended like a steam room in open air.

the small man skulks, lurks, squints thru his eyes at us waiting before the dance school, squints at jody ann trying to read what is written in her blond(ish) hair and pale eyes, hovering like a bee unsure if it is flower or plastic. what to do? ignore, keep on in loud american voices.

cool and shady, the fans spin on above us and the lilt of mirabai bhajans rises scratchy out of the old boom box to fill the space between these peeling, crusty old walls. the mice scratch away across the floor to hide behind the harmonium, a baby lizard crawls across my path, and the sweet cadence of mira's song carries our feet across the floor, our hands thru the air.

it is bummy afternoon, and it is me in the bathroom with a bucket full of soaked-up sudsed-up clothing. i dream now of washing machines, or alternately, laundry-men that don't wear my clothing out faster in the washing than i do in wearing them. the resident lizard pokes his head out from his hiding place and stares at me with his black gumball eyes. after giving up on getting any more dirt out, i rinse rinse rinse hang out dripping things on a clothesline and settle down for a newspaper reading, my door open out onto the open-air corridor.

standing out there, leaning beyond barrier and looking out into the courtyard, i can feel the evening breeze brushing up into my face from the enclosed garden, our own little cloister, with its smiling sunflowers all atremble with the approach of coolness and night.

foodfoodfood

*to the sounds of clapping hands*

egg roll
mutton roll
chicken roll
french fry
fried chop
ice cream

the younger girls are sitting in a circle in dance class playing a hand game featuring some of the favorite street foods. all oil soaked n calorific (well ok no oil in ice cream). but the dancer-guy who i will call luscious-locks because of his well-kept, truly luscious locks of hair that fly in his face and force him to dance blind (somehow he still manages to be incredible) and who has confided to me more than once his internal battle between belly and sweets raised his trumpet-like voice in objection--nonono! you have to sing about healthy foods! and tries to call out over their voices,

salad
apple
guava
vegetables

or something like this. they laugh and ignore him. i admire his health-mindedness, in the land of rosogolla faces and rosogolla bellies and the rosogolla roll of these larger ladies walking, you might even call him truly courageous.

(see image of rosogolla, also known to non-bengalis as rasgulla, above)