Where In The World Is Evan?

Having stepped off the plane, collected our bags and left the airport, there was no denying that we’d entered somewhere very strange. Row after row of archaic looking ‘Ambassador’ taxis flanked the squat, diminutive airport. A taxi driver waved and motioned for us to enter his anachronistic vehicle. As we approached another man can running up, screaming abuse at the cabbie, and motioning us towards another taxi. Having already bought a fixed price ticket we weren’t that fussed, so we got in and set off into town. The dilapidated outskirts of Calcutta reminded me fondly of Kathmandu, and as Alex and I gawked out the windows we speculated on how long it would be before we encountered a cow blocking traffic.

Arriving at Sudder Street, the chief backpacker slum of Calcutta, everything looked filthy, cramped and decaying. As the hostel we’d chosen from the LP was full, we wandered a few meters up the street and checked into a dorm at a hostel with a rather incongruous hammer-and-sickle flag hanging above its door–The Paragon. After dropping off our bags and stepping back into the courtyard, to light a cigarette, the first thing I noticed were the missing posters plastered to the walls. It seems that even today Calcutta can be something of a black hole, as every now and then a tourist simply disappears forever.

Deciding not to stick around too long in the hostel we set out onto the street. As The Paragon is located in a small alley off Sudder St. it has the delightful convenience of being directly adjacent to what passes for a public urinal in India (i.e. a patch of wall where men piss directly into open gutters). Staring down at the gutter Alex was a little shocked to see a huge rat glaring back at her in the light of day. “Get a hold of yourself, this is India, it’s just a rat.” she thought to herself. Looking closer, the rat was standing in a pool of liquid, and appeared to be wet all over. Following the line of water with her eyes, Alex realised that it originated from the old homeless man pissing on the wall a meter away from us. With his dick hanging out in full view, their eyes met, and Alex was greeted with a toothless grin.

Welcome to India, undoubtedly the filthiest place I’ve ever been!

Taking a couple of brisk steps up the street, and away from this confronting scene, we heard what was to become the single most asked question in Calcutta, “Do you want hashish… marijuana…?” After being something of a chronic stoner back in Australia, and after 10 days of enforced abstinence in Thailand (I’m not willing to die for it), yes, I did want hash. The disgusting squalor of the whole scene, however, repelled me such that I decided it was best to wait till I got somewhere cleaner.

Not being very impressed with the state of Calcutta’s streets, we returned to the hostel and rested through the afternoon. Alex, who’s only experience with Asia is Thailand, was a little overwhelmed with culture shock, so I picked out one of the nicest restaurants in town and we had a fantastic meal atop a high-rise hotel, with unobstructed views of Calcutta’s filthy, polluted skyline.

The following day saw a little excitement in the hostel, as one of the solo Japanese travellers appeared to have gone insane. During the night he’d been bursting into people’s rooms, staring them down in their beds and jabbering incoherently. In the morning a representative from the Japanese embassy was called, but the crazy guy refused to explain himself. When a doctor arrived to conduct a physical examination, he became violent, managed to struggle free and dashed back upstairs into his room. In the end the doctor called for a stretcher, and he was tied down and carried off into the waiting ambulance, not to be heard from again.

Considering our initial reception in Calcutta, Alex and I decided get out of there as soon as possible. After applying for the necessary permits to enter Sikkim province at the nearby government office, we headed straight for the train ticket office, to by our tickets. Having consulted the map I worked out a route in my head and we set off. As we walked down one of the main streets the number of pedestrians seemed to be increasing exponentially. As we approached a major intersection up ahead, police in white uniforms were beating back the crowd with sticks to allow traffic to pass through. After being detained on the corner for a few minutes we joined the rust of pedestrians who’d slipped through an opening in the police lines, and suddenly we found ourselves drawn into the centre of a huge political protest. Tens of thousands of people surrounded us on every side, and loud, angry voices yelling into megaphones boomed overhead. Having no idea what this was all about, we made a bee line for the edge of the crowd, to escape the commotion.

Emerging on the other side of the large central square, in roughly our desired direction, we were approached by an extremely friendly Indian man, Ronny. Introducing himself in perfect English, he inquired as to where we were going. We gratefully accepted his offer to show us the way, and chatted during the walk about the reasons for the protest we’d just seen.

For the last 30 years, or so, the communist party has ruled the province of West Bengal. It’s leader is renowned for his corruption and dirty tactics, but recently he’d been accused of hiring a bunch of goons to beat up the female leader of one of the opposition parties. She was consequently hospitalised and was now on a hunger strike. In support, all of the opposition parties had rallied together and declared a unified day of protest. The hunger strike itself was something of a convenient pretext, as the much hotter issue was the current round of inadequately compensated land seizures by the government. Ronny predicted that there would be over a million people protesting once business hours had ended, so we resolved to be back in our hostel well before then.

As Ronny and I chatted about politics, Alex had inadvertently acquired a stalker. Some Indian guy had spotted her walking a step or two behind us, and been following her for several blocks. Seeing his chance when she was cut off from Ronny and I by a bus that refused to stop, he slipped up next to her, stared directly into her eyes and in a sleazy drawl said, “I like your hair…” Without answering she crossed the road and stuck closer to me until the guy was well out of sight.

While waiting in the ticket office we realised that we wouldn’t have time to queue for our tickets and then make it back across town to pick up our permits for Sikkim. So Alex caught a taxi back to the government offices and left me to buy the train tickets. After securing tickets leaving the next day I decided that I’d walk back through the protest to check it out again, now that I knew a little of what it was about. Taking a slightly different route on the way back I soon got disoriented and had to consult the map. Seeing what was marked as a tram depot up ahead I decided to cut through it as a short cut back to the main square. Unbeknownst to me, however, the tram depot is where beggars go to die. I’ve seen a lot of poverty in Asia before, but nothing as wretched as that place. Blackened cardboard shanties lay everywhere, with crippled beggars out front so totally covered in filth that many barely looked human, and a thick haze of wood smoke rising off the many rubbish fires made it hard to breathe.

Emerging out the other side in a bit of shock I soon re-entered the fray of the protest. No longer feeling like sticking around to take photos I walked as briskly as I could back to the hostel, in great anticipation of our departure the next day. When I arrived Alex and I grabbed some beers from a nearby bar and went back to the courtyard of our hostel to drink with the other guests. A few beers later we where approached by a tall white guy, wearing a kaftan, and sporting a full Hindu beard. In thickly accented English he asked if he could have a beer. Instead we directed him to the nearest bottle shop and kept drinking. About an hour later he came back and repeated his request for beer. When we reminded him of the directions to the shop he became quite agitated, as if we’d just insulted him. So I poured him a glass and he sat down.

Alex seemed rather intrigued by this guy and started asking him questions. “I am from Stockholm, the city of the Nobel Prize!” he proudly announced, and from there, everything went sharply downhill. Within minutes he’d insulted everyone at the table with racist proclamations–Alex and I were criminals because we were Australian, the slim Dutch woman we’d been talking to was fat, because all Dutch women are fat, etc. After the stressful day I’d just had this guy was the last thing I needed. Alex, however, kept asking him questions, while the rest of us just stopped acknowledging him. After announcing that he’d been living in India for 30 years, Alex asked him what he did to survive. “I am a Karmic Yogi” he mumbled, in barely intelligible English. When Alex said she didn’t know what that was he became highly agitated, as if she’d just spat in his face. When he started yelling at us for our ignorance and baseness I had finally had enough, and demanded that he leave. Not content to just walk off, however, he went up the stairs to the first floor mezzanine and glared silently down at us for half an hour.

But that’s India, the country where any nut-job can declare himself a holy man and demand free beer.