Birganj to Kolkata, November 26–30, 2003
If I said that my Thanksgiving plans for this year were made by my friends while trekking around Kalimpong and Darjeeling with the US Consulate to India, I might sound a little over the top, as if I was trying to impress whoever might stumble across these scribblings.
Actually, that’s about the simplest I can put it. My friends took some vacation, went to Darjeeling and Sikkim and happened to share the trail with the US Consulate. His name is Geroge.
George and his wife were nice enough to invite those guys and some of their friends (I guess that’s me) over to Kolkata to have Thanksgiving with them and some of the other foreign service staff there.
There were promises of 23 lbs. of turkey, sweet potatoes, and a swimming pool. But getting to Kolkata wasn’t as simple as it should have been.
The problem wasn’t in logistics, since Kolkata is an overnight 12–13 hour train (or bus) ride from Eastern Nepal.
We had about four days to get to Kolkata and return to Nepal to be within the good graces of Peace Corps/Nepal. It wasn’t simple because we’re morons.
After congregating in Birtamod we left en masse for Karkarbhitta and then to Siliguri, where we could catch an overnight train to Kolkata.
Andrew was supposed to have bought the tickets but because of the present security situation none of us where actually sure that we’d be able to go until the day before we left the country. So Andrew hadn’t bought the tickets.
Andrew emailed me from Kathmandu:
Dear Fool,
I am in Kathmandu. You are at post. I am watching the BBC. You are listening to it on a scratchy radio. I am taking hot showers. You are sitting under a cold tap. You are listening to the same, old music, while I listen to new, exciting albums that you have never even heard of.
I am staying out late at the discos. You are going to bed at 8 PM. You know nothing about the trip to Kolkata. I have all the control. I have the tickets. I am negotiating with the office. You do nothing. You sit and you wait for me, dog.
Sit.
Justin Timberlake
I was mostly confused because of how Andrew had signed his email. Strange man, he is.
Anyhow, when we finally saw him in Birtamod he informed us that, in fact, he hadn’t actually bought any train tickets. So we’d just have to figure it out there. And off we went.
Day 1, Wednesday
It was the day before Thanksgiving when we finally were allowed to leave Nepal and enter into India. By the time we reached Siliguri and the train station we were already throwing around a football and talking about white or dark meat, pumpkin or apple pie, swim or nap.
It didn’t take long at the booking office to realize that we weren’t going to get on a train for Kolkata. We’d require another means of transportation.
Those means were rather limited: bus. Kara sounded suddenly excited and talked about the bus she’d taken from Goa to Bombay back in April: seats that reclined into beds, air conditioning, comfort, et cetera.
We bought our tickets and waited around for our luxury bus to arrive. We sat around the travel agency playing hearts and spades until 7 PM. Our bus ride would last something like twelve hours, which would put us in Kolkata well before anyone carved anything.
Seeing the bus wasn’t nearly as disappointing as actually boarding it. It wasn’t any worse than the average Nepali bus, but it wasn’t any better.
As soon as Laurel sat in her chair there was a sudden squeaking as her chair fully reclined backwards, onto the legs of the man sitting behind her. It was broken.
I was sitting next to her and thought of how bad it would be not to be able to sit up for any of the trip.
And so my seat wouldn’t recline at all. I sat perfectly upright for the entire duration of the bus ride, which was, in all honesty, about twelve hours.
I was sitting forward enough that as soon as I nodded off I’d slowly lean forward until my head collided with the back of the seat in front of me.
And sometimes just the light from on-coming traffic burning into my eyes was enough to jostle me awake. No one slept.
And then at odd moments in the night, when I was neither asleep or awake, the bus would stop and we’d be herded off for food. We stopped somewhere in the black of the early morning, it must have been 3 AM.
I staggered off the bus and faced three identical rice shops, all burning with an incandescent glow, all with a single, bundled man in front screaming, but more of a chant, to get people to come in
I was cold. I was half-awake, half-dreaming, and there were three men, wearing sweater vests, somewhere in anonymous India.
I suddenly remembered how a few hours earlier I had awoken to find some man of the Indian Army walking up the isle in the bus with a digital video camera, sweeping the passengers’ faces, shining the camera’s light into our faces.
I remember waking up for a moment to think I was being kidnapped. And then falling back asleep.
Suddenly, the most bizarre sight: a midnight Bengali mirage of bizarreness.
I had walked off the bus to face three identical rice shops with identical touts shouting the identical things about the identical food was a little weird.
The touts chanted, HEY! WEGOTLOTSOFRICE! LOTSOFHOTRICE! OHRICE! OHROTI! YOUWANTROTIWEGOTROTI! HOTROTI! COLDROTI! LOTSOFFOOD! ROTI! RICE!
In the 20-odd minutes we had our rest stop, the three touts never stopped chanting nor, apparently, breathing.
I ate, but it didn’t help me sleep. The touts haunted my dreams.
Day 2, Thursday (Thanksgiving)
It was still early when we reached the US Consulate in Kolkata. The taxi driver had taken us without any difficulty to Ho Chi Minh Sarayani, the odd address of the US Consulate.
Apparently West Bengal’s long-standing (and long-ruling) Communist Party thought it quite clever to rename the street to tease the Americans. Kind of like when the British changed Kolkata’s name.
Anyhow, this was the day of relaxation. We had some breakfast and saw the Buddha that Laloo Prasad Yadav, the defacto minister of Bihar, had given George.
He told us a story about a man who’d met Laloo once to discuss the subject of Bihar’s poor record on education. Why was Bihar lacking behind other states in India?
Laloo looked at the man. You’re educated,
he said, Would you vote for me?
Bihar’s an interesting place. Even though I’ve been within spitting distance of it (the border town of Raxual is just on the other side of Birganj), I’ve never actually been there. For better or worse.
After coffee we played a game of touch football with the pigskin that we’d brought from Nepal. We’d been tossing it to and fro to entertain ourselves during the lulls of travel. Most people had assumed it was a rugby ball.
When we told them that it was US rules football, people just stared at the ball with even greater confusions, I assume trying to figure out how one would kick the oddly shaped ball.
Most people who handled the ball, however, were mostly amused that the ball was made in China.
The meal itself was wonderful. We’d all cleaned up and looked as presentable as possible. I sat near the head of the table, next to our hosts, George and Lee.
There were the seven of us PCVs, two other foreign service folks working at the consulate, and the mothers of George and Lee.
The table was set with beautiful china upon a brilliantly white table cloth, with a few candelabrum here and there.
Things got complicated when Andrew and I were both served the gigantic legs of the turkey. My first impulse was to use my silverware, but Lee quickly scolded me, We’re like your family. You can eat like Henry VIII.
There was a reason that the Peace Corps volunteers had been given these obtuse pieces of meat to eat. We were shameless. We’d been eating with our hands since coming to Nepal. The same goes for India.
So who cares if Andrew and I, in the US Consulate on one of the biggest US holidays, looked like we were on a poster for the Society of Creative Anachronism at a medieval festival.
Moser spilled his red wine all over the table cloth. He covered it up with his plate. Liz broke a glass in her bedroom. Several of us trampled decorative Deepawali lights while running into the bushes playing football.
We were a mess. They should have kicked us out.
But they were kind people.
Day 3, Friday
We’d set aside the day after Thanksgiving to do a few tourist activities before our departure on Saturday. We asked George’s mother to come along with us and she was game.
First we walked over to the India Museum. It was a strange place, the museum being just as interesting as its holdings. There was a display of a family of gorillas that had been donated nearly a 100 years ago.
Stitches down the middle of each gorilla dated the quality of the taxidermy. But even stranger where the clear presence of bullet wounds in the chests of each animal: Papa, Mama, and their two baby gorillas.
I imagined an old Honourable East India Company Britisher with an entourage of Indians wandering the jungles and killing every God-damned beast that crossed their path.
The gorillas were a gift to the museum by a man who, most likely, had a sufficient supply of stuffed, dead things. Just thinking this guy had blown away a family was slightly disturbing, but I guess that was a long while ago.
Hunting ethics are different, I suppose. Now, in Africa at least, the sport is for foreigners to shoot exotic animals caught in wildlife reserves that are tied to the ground.
Afterwards, we wandered to New Market. Mostly we found shop after shop after shop selling saris and a surprising number of wig outlets. I thought of the gorillas.
There were porters wandering everywhere and most spoke passable English. Or at least enough to convey that they had a special friend that would give us a special price on some very, very special fabric. It was the same gimmick used across the subcontinent: convince the person that they are being ripped-off and then rip them off.
Quite effective, actually.
I did find a shop with a reasonable prices and salesmen unlike starving jackals. Even there, though, buying a CD wasn’t as easy as I would have liked. I quickly found my CD and staff, seeing that I was actually buying something, began producing other things they thought I might be interested in: porno movies.
I thought back to Bombay when a man in an open air bazaar had asked me, You want sex?
I quickly told the man that I really wasn’t much of a spender and wandered back to find my friends. I saw one of my pals at a similar shop, flipping through a pile of adult films.
I felt foolish for having not realized what the other guy was trying to sell me.
Not like I was going to buy any. I always think that if I were to die somewhere along the way, what would my family think when they received my belongings, complete with what people call on the subcontinent ‘Blue films.’
We had arranged a time to met up to walk back to the Consulate together.
Andrew had been playing a strange game where when he was approached by beggars he’d direct them to another in our party saying, See those guys? They have money.
I gathered about ten or so of the girls begging on the street together.
Actually, it was a rather passive activity since about that many had congregated around me as I walked through the market to meet my friends.
When I saw Andrew standing aside, I told the girls, He has lots and lots of money,
in my occasionally passable Hindi.
In a matter of seconds the girls swarmed Andrew. Before he could get out of the market he had given the girls about 200 Indian rupees a couple handfuls of street food.
We had to jump into our taxis with kids chasing after us, enjoying our game (really, it was fun) as well as their snacks.
George’s mother freely expressed her contempt for our childishness. You just ruined it for the rest of the tourists,
she told us, holding back her smile.
Our taxi driver didn’t quite know the way back to the Consulate on Ho Chi Minh Boulevard. We filled two taxis and finally pulled over to see if the other driver knew the way back. The two drivers shouted various directions at one another in Hindi and I basically understood what they were saying.
I tried to give as best directions as I could to the two drivers, as if to jar their memories.
George’s mother asked Andrew in the back, How does he know Bengali?
Andrew looked ahead and said with a straight face, Gibberish!
She seemed convinced that I was just parroting the two men and remained quite for rest of the trip.
Really,
I thought, my Hindi isn’t that bad.
Later at the Consulate we’d decided to go to Tantra, supposedly the swankiest club in town. We all sat around in George and Lee’s living room questioning whether or not we’d even be able to get into such a place.
I mean, Kolkata’s quite a bit more sophisticated than Kathmandu. And even if we could get by there, all of us had stories about how we’d ended up places, parties and functions and what not, looking quite scruffy.
Lee overhead our talk and asked if we really wanted to go.
Of course,
we told her.
She picked up the phone, called a friend, and suddenly we were on The List.
I don’t think I’d ever been on a list before, let alone The List. We were excited.
While the club was far classier than any place we’d been in a while, it wasn’t what I had expected. Honestly, I’d been brainwashed by Hindi movies.
I’m smart enough to know that when I see a club or some hip place portrayed in a movie from the US I can say, Yes, this does not exist,
but I hadn’t quite been able to do that and had some pretty crazy preconceptions of what this club would be like.
I mean, just watch a Hindi movie. To prepare myself for the hordes of beautiful women who I’d have to fight off at the club I sat in the living room, drank Corona, and watched Fashion TV for two straight hours while everyone else napped and washed clothes.
Day 4, Saturday
The day before we left went quickly. I slept until nearly 11 AM for the first time in a long, long while. Granted, I hadn’t gotten to bed until 4 AM the previous morning, but the fact that I hadn’t been woken by people milling about, calling for milk, banging on my door, was wonderful.
After a hot shower and a cup of coffee, I walked over to Flury’s for a late breakfast. A few folks had gone to the Botanical Gardens to check out the world’s largest banyan tree. Others just enjoyed the Consulate’s garden and caught up on reading.
The day went quick and soon we found ourselves waiting for our train and wandering around the station. We’d bought tickets when we got to Kolkata and had been put on a waiting list, which didn’t worry us much. Several of us had been in the same situation back in April when we visited Goa.
I checked in at the station and got our seat numbers, illegibly written on our tickets. Six people were together in one car (I couldn’t make out the seat assignments, but knew they’d be posted outside the train once it arrived) and one person was alone in a separate car.
So I elected to be the guy alone in the separate car. As we boarded our train I waved my friends goodbye thinking that if I got bored enough during the train ride I could wander through the cars and sit with the others for a while. But a couple hours into the ride I found that our cars were blocked by a locked door.
I went back to my seat and settled in for the night. I didn’t sleep well since I was under the window and froze all night long. Plus I hadn’t brought a sheet let alone a pillow, so I woke early the next morning with quite a stiff neck.
All in a day’s travel, I thought.
Day 5, Sunday
When we pulled into the station in Siliguri I met the others at the entrance to the train station. They looked awful. Apparently, their tickets had been made so that two people were assigned to each bed, which are much smaller than a single bed.
No one had slept, all were grumpy, all were ready to get to Birtamod and take a shower. We quickly arranged for a jeep to take us to the border and put Liz in the middle of two people—out of reach of the doors.
It was the end of our living allowance quarter and none of us wanted to see another door get damaged.
We’d only be out of Nepal for around 60 hours and it really seemed like it when we arrived at the Indian and Nepali immigration offices.
Everyone remembered us and asked us how our Thanksgiving had been. Well, they didn’t remember the name, but knew we’d left for a holiday.
I was mostly interested in finding out if anything had happened in Nepal in the past, oh, 108 hours that we’d been away.
Peaceful. Quiet. Nothing to mention. And that was a relief. And for that I was thankful.
