Village Visit

Nov. 8^th, 2012

After Mama left, I went with Mel, Mal and Joe out to a friend’s village a couple hours outside of Kolkata. The village was the home of our friend Abdul, who we knew from long before when he worked at the infamous Sudder Street food stall Tirupati. His good friend, Kartik, with whom he lives in Kolkata, also came with us. Kartik and Abdul are both deaf and dumb and are something of icons on Sudder Street. They know a lot of foreigners and somehow communicate with their Indian sign language and simple, common sense hand gestures. I had known of them during my first time in Kolkata, but didn’t get to know them like Lizzy (Mel and Joe’s older sister) had. Mel and Joe spent a lot more time with them than I did, but I always enjoyed hanging out with them when I did. They were some of the most kind, friendly and generous people you could possibly meet around Sudder Street.

I was excited to out to visit Abdul’s village and see a bit of rural India; something I had not really experienced. We left in the morning and walked to the train station. That in itself was an experience, as Kartik (Abdul was already at home in the village) took us through streets we had never seen before. I kept wanting to stop and look around at what was going on around us, but unfortunately we were moving through the streets too fast and I was having a difficult time keeping up with the crew of fast walkers. When we got to the station, we had a difficult time getting tickets. Kartik had some sort of passes, so they weren’t even sure how we would go about getting our tickets. They didn’t even seem certain of what train we should take and which stop we would need to get off at. The lines for tickets were long, but Mel and Mal found a women’s only line that was shorter. They figured out what tickets we needed and bought four. On the way to the track, Kartik pointed over to a secluded corner of the station. There were two bodies underneath plastic coverings. He said that they had probably been hit by a train. We walked up for a closer look. There was some sort of official or security guard standing around them. I thought he would get angry with our nosiness, but he paid us no mind. As we got closer, he uncovered one of the bodies to take a picture of it for records. It was shocking to see this body that had been living just minutes before. Although it was a gruesome sight, I was surprised how little of a mess someone hit by a train had made. Just a couple lacerations across the neck and chest. We walked on and Kartik showed us a bulletin board next to one of the station’s offices. The board was covered with polaroids of bodies that had been hit by a train and had not been identified. Some of them were difficult to look at, like the body that had been cut in half by getting run over on the tracks. So many of them were unidentified because train victims are often poor people without family that live around the tracks. They have a reputation of drinking or abusing drugs and falling off the platform at the wrong moments. Others, however, are often murder victims that have been disposed of on the tracks.

When we boarded the train, we somehow managed to get seats before everyone else piled in. We were seated next to what we came to understand as some sort of train gang. Not many people in India look tough to me, and these guys were no exception. But the way they acted showed me that nobody wanted to mess with them. They were loud and playing cards. Nobody would sit too close to them, and they would bully and laugh at the vendors that came on to sell their wares. I saw a couple of them get bottles of Sprite from a vendor without paying. Another vendor was selling something in a small packet I had never seen before. When one of the guys saw my confusion at what the vendor was trying to sell me, he simply grabbed one and gave it to me. I was glad to be on their side. It was some sort of dried ginger candy that I felt was not worth the theft or the five rupees.

We got off the train after and hour and were surprisingly far from the city. We were in a town that seemed to exist almost entirely because train tracks went through it. We still needed to get transport to Abdul’s village. Kartik knew where it was, but still had trouble figuring out how to get transport. We assumed that since Kartik had been there and since he was Indian, he wouldn’t have a problem getting there. However, he had more trouble communicating with Indians as we did. He tried communicating through gestures and sign language to rickshaw and taxi drivers. They had little patience for his charades. We also didn’t know where we were going. He tried to explain the directions to Mel, who could understand him pretty well. We were looking to go to a village with a mosque and a school. Eventually we found someone patient enough to help and he directed us to a shared van that would be going that way. Naturally, Joe and I climbed onto the rack on top when it started to get crowded. After about 30 or 45 minutes, we arrived. It was another twenty-minute walk through the surprisingly compact rural village before we reached Abdul’s home. We were greeted warmly while kids from around the village took notice and started to drift our direction. We sat on the front porch of Abdul’s little one-room home. After greeting us, Abdul’s wife went inside to prepare lunch for us and tend to their baby. It was weird to see Abdul living this typical small-village lifestyle with a wife and a kid, as I had known him as the complete opposite: on his own in the big city. The lunch was a spicy and delicious beef curry (Abdul is Muslim) with rice. I felt bad that Abdul was giving us meat, since it is expensive. However, knew that a couple days before was Eid-al-Adha, the Muslim holiday that usually involves sacrificing goats or sheep, though for some reason in India slaughtering cows seems more common. So there was lots of meat and this was probably left over from the holiday and needed to be eaten. Kids from the village gathered around as we feasted, sitting on top of the ledges of the porch. Abdul chased them off, then poured water along the edges, a trick I had seen shop owners use in the city to keep stray dogs from loitering around their business.

The day passed slowly and not much happened. We sat around, relaxed, talked, drank tea, had some arm wrestling matches with macho dudes, etc. We walked around the village and visited some of Abdul’s friends. One family invited us into their compound, which was constructed from mud in an adobe-like style that reminded me of what I had seen in Northern Ghana. It seemed like half the village followed us in just to gawk at us. It reminded me a lot of how things were in Malian villages. Peaceful, hospitable and lots staring. As we waited for them to prepare tea for us, mothers handed us babies for us to hold. One of them, who was a little bit older, maybe two, was handed to Joe. As soon as the little girl looked up at him, she started screaming and jumped out of his arm. It was a good time for all.

A bit later we walked through the nearby fields that bordered the village to walk to the nearest road that had shops on it. I can’t remember why we went there, but I think everyone else needed to pick up some bottled water since the village did not have clean water. It was a long, slow and meandering walk through the fields. Occasionally we would see people at work in the fields, casually tending to their crops. It was a warm and comfortable dusk and everyone seemed to be in a good mood. Save for the obvious shortcomings (bad water, far from shops, flooding during the monsoon, etc.) this village seemed idyllic. Close to the paved road we were going to there was what looked like a large smoke stack. It was actually some sort of kiln for making bricks. Huge stacks of bricks were piled up around it and they looked like giant pieces of PEZ candy.

Kartik and Mel

oe giving Kartik a piggy-back ride.

Look at his hat!

A bit later we walked through the nearby fields that bordered the village to walk to the nearest road that had shops on it. I can’t remember why we went there, but I think everyone else needed to pick up some bottled water since the village did not have clean water. It was a long, slow and meandering walk through the fields. Occasionally we would see people at work in the fields, casually tending to their crops. It was a warm and comfortable dusk and everyone seemed to be in a good mood. Save for the obvious shortcomings (bad water, far from shops, flooding during the monsoon, etc.) this village seemed idyllic. Close to the paved road we were going to there was what looked like a large smoke stack. It was actually some sort of kiln for making bricks. Huge stacks of bricks were piled up around it and they looked like giant pieces of PEZ candy.

That would be pretty much the end of my time in Abdul’s village. I had plans the next day, and decided to go back to Kolkata that night with Kartik. Mel, Mal and Joe would be staying behind for the night. It was getting dark by the time Kartik and I were able to flag down the next van headed to the train station. It was already packed, and even our spaces on the roof rack were cramped. I had to hang on tight as the van barreled down the narrow, potholed road. It was one of those surprisingly rare moments when I am traveling that I realize I am really far away from home, and it gives me a feeling of wild freedom.

We waited on the platform for far longer than we expected. We sat at a tea stall and chatted the whole time. “Chatting” with Kartik is far easier than I expected it would be, considering he can’t hear or speak. I knew a few of his sign words for the people we knew, places and a few verbs and nouns. Mostly, though, I was picking it up along the way. As with learning any language it is a tremendous strain on the brain and you have to stay focused. Then, once you understand what someone is saying to you, you have to think of how best to express your ideas through that language, which is often the more difficult part. An interesting side effect of our conversation was the attention we got from passersby. Both a foreigner and a person speaking sign language would be enough to turn heads. We offered both of these. Some people would just walk up, stand a few feet away, cross their arms and just stare at us making our gestures to each other for a few minutes and eventually walk away. Sometimes a small crowd would gather and shamelessly watch with completely blank expressions from up close as we conversed. This did not faze Kartik in the slightest. He must have been used to it. I learned that Kartik was quite the gossip. A lot of what he talked about was sexual and I had to re-confirm several times that I was understanding him correctly. One thing he told me was that Abdul would dress in lady’s clothes and “spend time” with men on the sly for money. It was pretty shocking to hear, and couldn’t be too sure that I was really understanding him correctly. Mel and Joe would later tell me that he was probably talking about what he did, but saying it was Abdul just to test the waters and see how I would react. I am not sure how I even reacted to this, but I imagine I was pretty casual, just responding, “oh, really? Interesting. Well, if that’s what he does, then whatever.”

It was an interesting evening, to say the least. During the hour and a half wait for the train and the hour on the train, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about Kartik, Abdul, their lives, as well as a lot of their sign language.

Back home at the Modern Lodge, I arrive to find Raju and Raju already asleep.