Kolkata People

Kolkata is obviously a fascinating city, chock full of interesting individuals that will amaze, disgust, challenge or simply provoke you. But this city also attracts a rich cast of characters from all over the world. Many of them can fit into the categories of hippie traveler on a spiritual journey or religious idealists out to save the world. However, this is simplifying things, and many people I met did not fit so neatly into these boxes. Here are a few stories of the characters I encountered while existing in Kolkata.

The Drunk American

One evening at the beginning of Durga Puja  I was walking down Sudder Street and I heard a guy yell out to me in an American accent, “Hey, where you going hippie?” I stopped, not sure whether to be amused or insulted. Usually people giving you a hard time on the street are not American. I turned and saw an olive-skinned man with a baseball cap sitting on the curb. I looked at him incredulously and just said, “what?!” He said, “Come here!” I did, and I asked, “what makes you call me a hippie?” He laughed, saying, “oh come on. Look at those pants!”. It was true that I was wearing a baggy pair of tie dye pants I had gotten in Mali. I guess I didn’t expect to be lumped together with the stereotypical young backpacker in India since I did not have dread locks, tattoos, piercings or wear the typical traveler uniform of Ali Baba or Thai pants, at least one colorful scarf and a t-shirt featuring a Hindu deity. Alas, my pants gave me away. The guy invited me to sit down and have a drink with him. I saw a plastic bag with a cheap bottle of whiskey inside. I had nothing better to do, so I sat down and took a pull off his bottle. He was a little drunk, and very condescending. He seemed like he needed a friend, but didn’t have more than whiskey to offer. All he could do was complain about Kolkata. I asked him why he was there, but he had no idea himself. “This place is disgusting. It’s gotta be the worst city in the world. Goa, now that’s a great place. Beaches, parties, girls, drugs. Yeah, how come I’m not in Goa?” I wondered what had even brought him to India in the first place. He explained that he knew the country a little bit because his father was Indian. He said he was on his way to Bangkok, a real city, where he could have some real fun. This guy was quite possibly the worst American I’d ever met while traveling, but I found it intriguing. “I bet you voted for Obama!” he scoffed out of the blue at one point, “You hippie liberal.” Then he offered to buy me a beer at the Fairlawn, one of Sudder Street’s oldest and most iconic hotels. I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, but I did appreciate the fact that this was one of the most unique conversations I’d had with a traveler in India.

When we walked into the Fairlawn he started to chide the security guard outside the gate in broken Hindi. The got in a brief spat, yelling at each other over who knows what. After getting inside he explained how that guard was a real jerk and had kicked him out before. I was starting to regret coming in here. As soon as we sat down, this guy’s eyes locked on a young man sitting with his laptop at a nearby table. “Hey, how’s the book coming?!” he yelled to the man in a mocking tone. The writer glanced up and said in a Kiwi accent, “Piss off.” I seemed to be sitting with the least popular foreigner in Kolkata. I couldn’t believe I was finally meeting an American traveler who lived up to every terrible American stereotype. He explained that he had been kicked out of there a week before for getting into a fight with this Kiwi guy. He was not discreet at all as he explained the situation to me, and even seemed to raise his voice as he continued to make fun of the guy, whether it was for being from New Zealand or being a writer or whatever else he could think of. It wasn’t long before the wait staff, whom he was constantly making demands from, was encouraging us to leave. He knew the score and seemed like he didn’t want as big of a confrontation as he had apparently had before. He just wanted to push everyone as close to the breaking point as possible. When he knew he couldn’t afford to be any more obnoxious, he pushed the second half of his beer toward me and told me I could finish it. Then he paid for the beers and walked out.

I apologized to the Kiwi author, explaining that I was not associated with that man at all. I had never been so embarrassed by one of my countrymen.

Adam

Adam was a tall Swede who looked almost as much like a crazed Viking as anyone I had ever seen. He had long hair that balanced somewhere between wavy and poofy. His beard looked about 9 months and he had dyed it bright red with henna. He always wore a green, loose mesh tank top and baggy Thai pants. He always carried around a deteriorating plastic grocery bag which held his water, cigarettes and money, which just floated around there freely. I saw him repeatedly drifting in and out of Kolkata, coming and going without notice. He had traveled all over India, over the course of a few long trips, but his heart was in Bengal. He was a musician and was fascinated with the Baul musicians of West Bengal and Bangladesh. The Bauls are some sort of minstrels; traveling musicians who lean towards Sufism, but also include Sunni Muslims and Hindus. Adam had made friends with some of these musicians and would go and spend days at a time with them out in the bush or in their villages, just playing music. He was always excited to talk about them and promote their music, but at the same time was always a little secretive or cryptic about his experiences with them. He was an eccentric dude, and I was disappointed that I had just missed him upon returning to Kolkata for the last time.

So

On one of Joe’s first few days in Kolkata, I came back to the guesthouse to find him hanging out with a couple of new guys. One was Israeli and the other was Japanese. I sat down and introduced myself. I saw a notepad on the table with some writing on it. After I shook the Japanese guy’s hand, he grabbed the pen and started writing something. He showed it to me, and it said, “My name is So.” It turned out that he was deaf and mute. Joe and the Israeli guy had been talking to him for a while, using a notepad and easily understood gestures.

So turned out to be a lot more interesting and easier to hang out with than the Israeli who could speak and listen in English very well. So So ended up hanging out with us a lot and even started volunteering at Prem Dan. I could not believe how brave he was. Anyone that has traveled to somewhere like India knows how hard it can be, even with the ability to speak and hear. To anyone who has ever expressed the interest to travel, but said they couldn’t due to flimsy excuses about not speaking the language (or anything that might make travel difficult) I want to tell them to shut up, and point them towards So. And this was his first big trip outside of Japan. He had been traveling for a few weeks before arriving in Kolkata and had managed to make it there somehow. He was so positive and had the kind of spirit that makes you feel terrible for ever complaining about the difficulties of traveling.

Joe spent a lot more time with So than I did, and he actually got pretty good at learning some Japanese and English sign language. One night, over beers on the roof of our guesthouse, we got a good lesson in the names of countries in Japanese sign language. Most of them were funny and surprisingly based on simplifications and stereotypes. Act like you are waving a red sheet in front of a bull, and you have said Spain. Motion the shape of a sombrero over your head and you have said Mexico. Wipe some vodka off your lip…Russia. And so on and So forth.

One day we all met up with our friends Abdul and Kartik. They also happen to be deaf and mute. We were all curious as to how well they would be able to communicate. Sign language, like spoken languages are different everywhere you go. Not only was So very skilled in written English, he could also speak English sign language. It turned out that they were able to communicate quite well, since however they were speaking was similar to English sign language. I am curious how much of Indian sign language actually borrows from English, or whether they were just speaking a mix of the two to make themselves more understood. Either way, it was so interesting to watch the three of them communicate, and try to decipher what they were talking about. Mel was good at communicating with Kartik and Abdul, and Joe was getting good quickly. I still couldn’t say much, but it was thoroughly entertaining to sit there in silent communication with the five of them.

American Students

I started my volunteering in Kolkata around the same time that a group of American students arrived. They were part of a program that seemed to amount to a six-month backpacking trip. There were about fifteen students, and all were all fresh out of high school. Three of the girls were from Portland, and had recently decided to shave their heads, as I find most girls from Portland tend to do when they go to India. Spiritual cleansing, I guess. Or lice removal. Something like that.

I had never seen a program like this before, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Led by a charismatic and rugged young man, the students were spending three months in India, traveling around in typical backpacker fashion. Then they would fly to New Zealand and work for three months. It looked like a great way to expose young people to new cultures and give them a taste for travel. At the same time it made me feel uncomfortable about what it meant for backpacking and budget travel. One nice thing about being bold enough to go travel independently around somewhere like India is that you generally leave the obnoxious tour groups behind. I would be terribly disappointed if backpacking became a popular thing among trust-fund types that wanted to see the world in what they saw as a Bohemian style, but were afraid to do it without their hand being held. The leader of the group, who I spoke with a lot while we volunteered, was well-traveled and seemed to have a plethora of interesting work and life experiences under his belt that made this job look relatively dreadful. The students were lucky to have him. He told me that these kinds of programs weren’t just in India, and that he’d lead another one through East Africa as well. I was impressed, but like I said, couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. The students were nice and open-minded, but also seemed ever bit as naïve and sheltered as you might expect.

I had thought that this kind of group was a rarity, but another one, came through about a month later. In Varanasi I also ran into another one of these groups from Scandinavia. While I would take these kind of tourists over the typical tour bus types any day, I still felt that these people didn’t need to have their hand held throughout India. You learn so much by just being on your own and having to figure it all out on your own. But then again, maybe they couldn’t get daddy to pay for the trip if they didn’t agree to the safety of a guided tour.

Public Health Worker

I have to briefly mention a woman that I met in Kolkata that I found to be so impressive as a person and as a traveler. She was an American public health worker. She had just been in Egypt, where she had been working for the past several years. She had been in Cairo throughout the first nine months of the Arab Spring. In fact, she landed in Cairo the day the protests broke out and had no idea why they were telling her she could not leave the airport. Surely though, this was not the most dramatic thing she had been through. She is the only person I have met to have visas from both Iraq and Afghanistan. She had some serious stories and she was tough enough to handle whatever came her way. I assumed she was the type that you couldn’t faze easily. Then, after her first day of volunteering, she told me that upon entering Prem Dan (home of the disabled and destitute) for her first day of volunteering, it took all of her power to keep herself from breaking into tears from the mere sight of the women she was there to care for. It was a much-needed reality check for me that what I was surrounded by really was that awful, and I had to remind myself not to get jaded.

A traveler’s Future

A couple months into my time in Kolkata, a small group of slightly more mature travelers popped up at the guesthouse. One part of the group was a beautiful woman in her 30’s who was an aid worker in Bangladesh and taking a week off from work. Then there was the Spanish chef who was traveling India to look for inspiration for new menu items. Finally there was the couple that was perhaps in their early 40’s and had a young child. The didn’t know each other before arriving in Kolkata, but they formed a little clique separate from the volunteer/backpacker crew that would generally congregate for drinks on the roof at night.

A life of traveling can lead to a lot of positive things for people. The aid worker and chef were proof of this. The couple with the child, however, was proof that a traveler’s lifestyle can go terribly wrong. Everything about them seemed tense, and the father seemed like he was incapable in taking any part in caring for their child. This is mostly because he was dealing with a serious drug addiction. When he first came arrived I didn’t think much of the fact that he would ask me if I had any hash. He would ask me every time he saw me, and eventually seemed to not believe that I really didn’t have any. Hash wasn’t his problem though. On his third day there, and maybe his eighth time asking me if I had any hash, he said, “Come on man! Please you HAVE to have something! I NEED it man. I’m coming off the brown river and I NEED something.” It was safe to assume that the “brown river” was heroine and he was desperate for something to help ease the painful withdrawals. I couldn’t imagine what this could mean for their child. Could you imagine being pulled around India at the age of three by your vagabond mom and heroine-addict dad? The mother was holding it together though. In the evening, the four of them would gather in one of the common spaces and have some drinks. I would join them sometimes. More often than not, the mother would go to bed early with their child, while the father would get rip-roaring drunk and act unruly. Most of us were just waiting for him to pass out.