Expert Mother tongue: English Posts: 7093 Joined: August 12, 2002 Location: China
Arthur's Calcutta Diary
Rolling to the terminal at Kolkata International Airport early on the warm almost misty morning of this year’s Pearl Harbor Day, the only aircraft in sight were a sleepy B747 and an uncuddled DC-3 off in the distance. At passport control, we were only three or four persons per queue and one officer was going around among us to check we had all filled in our forms properly for faster processing. I was out the main exit in about ten minutes. Outside among a small crowd of folks waiting to pick up more or less loved ones, there were only two taxi touts. Each understood “No thank you” the first time.
On the drive into town, my friends’ car took us through Stinkytown, the nickname of a neighborhood worthy of no less than a Sheraton hotel. But till further notice, the emissions from the nearby Chinatown tanneries dominate the smellscape and I felt the sort of the seasickness you would expect from a longer dip in a tank of diarrhea. But they say it’s really really nice inside. The hotel, I mean.
Kolkata is in Bengal: West Bengal. Confusingly, it lies on the East coast of India. Nobody has told me where East Bengal lies yet so I cannot confirm its existence right now. Kolkata is Bengali for Calcutta. It was the British capital here. They left behind lots of imperial buildings, social clubs and statues of Empress Victoria. Nobody calls her that anymore in the U.K., presumably because it would be unflattering to the reigning Elizabeth who is merely a queen. The clubs I’ve seen were originally athletic but drink and polite conversation got the upper hand somewhere along the way and when your wife wonders where you are, “the club” is your perfect answer: she has been there till bored to tears, cleared it as safe for husbands off their leash and will ask no further questions.
Kolkata also has Kali, a sometimes fearsome-looking female divinity (or ‘patron saint’ if you must) who might have arisen from the murkiest depths of a male’s worst fears: the classic statue shows her sticking out her tongue from between two fangs at you as she tramples her husband underfoot. Were it not for a third eye, some representations might pass for the intriguingly black Virgin Mary of Czestochowa. And lemme tellya, the women here stress what nice helpful men they have in Bengal thanks to her. Unlike anywhere else in the country, they cheerfully add. As the story goes, she got really teed off with some demons and came down to kick ass. But every time she killed one, each of its blood drops spawned a new demon so took out her tongue and started lapping up every drop she spilt. But unfortunately, this was working too well and all the bystanding Gods panicked when they realized she was set to destroy the whole planet. And the only guy they could think of to try and stop her was her husband. I don’t know how keen he was about going, but he went and she was in such a state that she started stomping the daylights out of him until, midway, she realized who she was doing in. Now the husband is supposed to be God to his wife and presenting your tongue is a gesture of apology here. But it’s also her personal WMD, so my take on this is that she most delicately incarnates all the beauty of perfect ambivalence.
Sitting across from my hostess on her bed one day, my jaw dropped when the conversation turned to Gandhi and it wasn’t because of her husband’s unannounced arrival. It was just that nobody seems to like him. Gandhi, I mean. Because he let India get cut up in two: Neither Pakistan should never have happened and it led to enormous bloodshed (the second one turned into today’s Bangladesh after yet more carnage). And then, leaving the little wife he was always going around in public with two tasty young nymphs whom he swore were only hanging around with him to help show how immune he was to temptation. And if you can’t picture him without the knobby knees and anorexic calves, it’s because his spin doctoring was to wear his shawl too short on purpose to cultivate the famished flasher look. Even beggars have enough decorum to go for ankle-length wear.
No offence to Ben Kingsley of course.
If your mind is still in my hostess’ bedroom, bedrooms are legitimate social space for receiving friends in some homes here where living rooms are only for more formal socializing. The only things we took off were shoes. People do that in civilized countries. They like clean floors and imagine that shoes are dirty. Like your mind up to now. Otherwise, why didn’t you skip this paragraph after the first dependent clause?
But it did take me a few days to feel comfortable there, even with the door wide open and two maids in the home round the clock. That’s another touchy topic. Because we reason in workweeks. Because we do mention cases of abuse extensively to show how oppressed folks are in developing countries. I haven’t seen any media reporting that mentions a full month’s paid holiday (the US baseline is two weeks, right?) or that it includes full medical and dental coverage (how many US Americans still have that?) or that the employer has to provide dowry for the maid when she marries – gold jewelry at the very least but they usually throw in a few saris. And gold means 24K here. Nor do you just fire a maid: you place her with a relative or at least finance job retraining (how many employers do you know who outplace humanely?). When you hire her, she arrives with the clothing on her back. You clothe, feed and house her (OK, McDonalds gives you a cheerful hat and uniform). So by now you should have figured that servants have the de facto status of family member.
Anyhow, folks here say the real drive behind independence actually came from Subhas Chandra Bose, whom everybody just calls ‘Netaji’, the guide. In the early 1930s, he decided to get real military training for his men. First he tried Moscow but Stalin had already renounced international revolution since his ‘Socialism in One Country’ policy. So Netaji tried Berlin and Hitler liked the idea. Many of the first trainees were recruited from ethnic Indians in German and Italian POW camps. Netaji’s army needed only a few years to grow from 300 to over 3,000. (Pathological hecklers will enjoy learning here that, at this point, Netaji’s men took an allegiance oath which included Hitler so that they could draw pay directly from the War Ministry.) The original idea was for it to tag along to Stalingrad and then continue overland into India once the city had been taken. But when that battle proved an upset victory for the Soviets, Hitler sounded out Tokyo and suggested Japanese support. Somewhere along the way, Netaji died or disappeared. The official story is that he was in a plane that crashed after take-off from Taiwan but there are reports he was sighted alive and jailed in the USSR. With Sonia Gandhi still very active in politics, it’s a very touchy issue and the latest official commission investigating his demise is under heavy pressure to report new findings based on DNA evidence.
The nicest public transport surprise so far has been the metro system. Marble floors. Clean. Efficient. No smoking or other fun allowed. With a special section reserved for ladies. Indian Railways also has special wagons for ladies. Except for Bengal where a wolf whistle will get you hauled off to the local cop shop for a first-hand sample of police brutality – elsewhere in Northern India fondling is common enough to ruin a woman’s afternoon shopping spree. Why don’t the US Air Force and Naval academies fund some research into its applicability to the American transport industry?
The metro came to mind because it’s one way to get to the Indian Museum, now almost 200 years old. The director is unhappy right now because he had a Buddha bust stolen just the other day and, judging from the quality planning that went into the theft, the bust is probably already in Hong Kong. But that’s OK. There are lots of others left. Some have really unusual faces that express total serenity in stunning ways I had never before experienced. The more of their smiles I see, the less special I find the Mona Lisa. I guess it’s about as good as Western art has gotten in the last 500 years and you have to take what you can get.
The Invertebrate Section threw me before I even set foot inside. The centerpiece is Megaloceros giganteus – the bones of the Irish Deer, which include a backbone heavy enough to hang a few hundred kilos of meat. Go figure.
Turning left, there are flat, dusty wood & dirty glass display cases with short clear explanations of various periods. Because I am looking for new angles to help moderate a budding flame war at http://www.translatorscafe.com the name-calling there has so far been uncreative, I naturally looked to the Invertebrate Section for inspiration. Now the Pre-Cambrian Period was when, after over 3,500,000,000 years of just sitting on her earthly ass, Mother Nature finally woke up and turned this planet into Amoeba Heaven: nothing but single cell life all over the place in no time, geologically speaking of course. So I was thinking of insults like “your argument is a paradigm of Pre-Cambrian thought and sophistication.” And when you know that M.N. invented sponges in the Cambrian Period, you can use that to describe someone who firmly believes that, yes, there is free lunch. Of course everybody who mattered in all of these periods was invertebrate but I especially like “Ordovician fence-sitter”, which sounds infinitely more refined “spineless coward”? Likewise, you can opt for “Silurian canine” instead of “toothless bulldog” or “That sounds Silurian to me” in lieu of “fishy”.
Then there’s a nice little Egyptian section with an unimpressive mummy – I’m being hard here but I’ve seen the Tutankhamen burial gear twice. Still, I didn’t know that Ptahhotep had once quipped “There are no limits decreed for art” though I wonder if he didn’t say it to stonewall a journalist at a press conference or if it was official policy in a royal decree. Still, it was a nice thought.
Another touchingly dusty permanent exhibition with filthy display case glass and inadequate lighting is the Geological Section. These two attributes make a healthy third of the stones impossible to distinguish from one another although all the labels are entirely legible, except for a few that have been left knocked over long enough to collect dust on their upper surfaces. It was touching because a disproportionate number of rocks seemed to come from Norway and I guess some past director had struck up a warm relationship to some helpful Norwegian for the greater benefit of both nations’ museum visitors. And then there’s the display case filled with rarities like “geologist’s rope”, “geologist’s pick” and “geologist’s flashlight”. They can keep the flashlight but the rope looked brand new.
At the top of the stairs right after the main entrance, there is a statue of Empress Victoria. She is young and in profile she almost has the classic aquiline of the Bourbon nose. Small breasts. Big hips. And it was fun to learn that she’d had an affair going for awhile with Rabiindranath Tagore's grandfather. But then some partypoopers had him killed on his way home from London once. Nonetheless I was relieved that she had more sporting inclinations that the media would generally have us believe.
Just discovered that East Bengal is now called Bangladesh too.
At USD 50 apiece, ceramic crowns are a bargain and I’m told the quality of care matches anything you’ll find elsewhere so I had a go at the dentist’s this evening. It was a youngish husband & wife practice where the wife’s forefinger started in with oral penetration to line my gums with tasteless little tampaxes. Then she longly odorized four of my teeth with a long, admittedly slender diamond-tipped vibrator. This was all in front of her male technician.
She didn’t feel a thing but then again, what with the topical anesthesia, neither did I. And when she put on sunglasses tinted a bright red in the middle of our intercourse, it was only to monitor how well the resin filling was hardening. Not that they were Ray Bans or anything.
The crowns will take two days to arrive, so our relationship isn’t over yet but her parting words to me were not to “chew any bones.” Which left me leaving with my tail between my legs.
I swear I am not making this up.
India also has original ways of bending English into new meanings. In the resulting Hinglish and Benglish, a “body building shop” is where you take fenders to get the dents taken out. A “doctor chamber” has no whips, thumbscrews or cattle prods, only a physician, stethoscope and prescription pad. And then the other day I walked past “The Perfect Sex Clinic for Private Diseases” which left me wondering where to go if I had some public disease that was troubling my style or libido – and which one might that be? A common cold could set me sneezing in all the wrong places and would they treat it there? Or how do you like the athletic flavor and threat of open-air care in “Female Outdoor Department” instead of just plain “Gynecology Clinic? And if I ever get arrested, I’ll ask by name for accommodation at the “Shakespeare Memorial Police Station” because it sounds like I’d enjoy a superior general level of conversation there and I’d have nothing else to do while awaiting execution. It gets to the point where yesterday, when I saw an ad for the “Annapurna Hotel”, the first question that came to mind was: has it got an elevator?
(hopefully to be continued)
[Edited by Arthur Borges on January 10, 2005 4:58 AM]
Elite Veteran Posts: 600 Joined: March 17, 2004 Location: India
(removed)
Oh Calcutta!
Arthur, a most thorough report!
Now that you mention it, I seem to recall this boudoir practice in some other houses.
I get upset when people pick on Gandhi. Small people love to take pot shots at Giants. I recall the day after Mother Theresa died there was a middle in the newspaper where this idiot narrated how he had the honour of flying on the same plane as here once and how she took a bottle of wine as a gift.
Looking forwards to more about Cal- do go see a Bengali film for me- preferably an old one. Tui aamar bhalo bhashi, Arthur-da
Elite Veteran Posts: 600 Joined: March 17, 2004 Location: India
(removed)
You, you and you
Jacek-da(Brother Jacek), I think (Arthur will verify for us, of course) there are three forms of you in Bangla - a polite form (aapni), a more familiar form (tumi), and the most intimate form (tui).
I brought this Bengali way of saying: "Love you! to illustrate this.
Elite Veteran Mother tongue: English Posts: 702 Joined: June 5, 2003 Location: Canada
(removed)
RE: Arthur's Calcutta Diary
Thank you Arthur for this most enjoyeable reading. Not hard to imagine your surroundings with all the great images you provide. This is (hopefully to be continued).
Expert Mother tongue: English Posts: 7093 Joined: August 12, 2002 Location: China
Arthur's Calcutta Diary (II)
Letter to a very dear friend of longest standing in subzero New York:
Dearest B, Sorry about how God turned up the aircon on you and littered snow all over your sidewalk - sorry you're up to ears in it and sorry I'm not there to throw snowballs at passing cars. There are some things I have no intention of outgrowing. As you will have noticed over the years.
On mystics, well, it's worth a long talk over a bottle of one of the nicer Jameson's. To whet your appetite and keep a long story short, if mysticism holds that a chemical reaction is merely a psychic reaction seen from without, Heisenberg figured out in the 1930s that the observer of subatomic interactions was a hidden variable and thus an integral part of the experiment. Which is what Vedic science has been saying for cennnnnnnnnnnnturies. These days, you have to be a Hawking to declare that believing in God is only for people who don't know enough mathematics. I may be less bright than the former, but heck it's easier to outshine the latter in some classes.
True, I am smoking cigarettes made in Myanmar and we ALL know what THEY export. And for the cherry on top, the brand is 'Golden Triangle' but you'd wanna sue under Truth in Advertising legislation if you bought them expecting anything more than plain dumb tobacco.
On the Ravi Shankar meditation course, there are undeniable benefits: I have been smoking well under a pack a day since I started doing the yoga exercises which have you inhaling and exhaling in all sorts of ridiculous positions: laugh if you will but the benefits are sobering. Against that, the presentation is a bit too slick for my taste so far - I prefer the redneck wisdom of my Burgundy lamas and their highly psychotherapeutic divinity rituals. More on that if I ever get to Dharamsala.
On destiny, um, Jung said Nature was an aristocrat. He meant that each creature is born with a rank in a hierarchy. And it has a window of options within that rank. With extraordinary effort, it can reach way outside ("above" or "below", if you like) that window, but will tend to evolve within it, e.g. most fleas will remain wild, but a few will wind up in a circus and eventually learn something from the experience. Getting all cosmic about it, the rags-to-riches legend is rubbish: Nature recycles everything and the kid just carried over smarts from his last visit. Personally, it's easier for me to believe in child prodigies that way -- like five year olds that handle a piano like trained professionals. Happened to Mozart or was it Beethoven?
Anyhow, all my teeth are now properly fixed up for the price of a coupla cases of beer and I can now cackle merrily away like I used to. I asked the dentist if he did ceramic fangs but it got no laughs. And then she started looking around for something on the floor and I asked "What did you lose? Your license?" She smiled the way folks do when dealing with the harmlessly obscene, especially if they're mentally challenged.
By the way, CNRS seems to have coughed up: m neighbourhood ATM has just shot up my balance here from 65,000 to 150,000 rupees. Now if only I were in Indonesia, I'd be a multimillionaire again. Sigh.
Oh yeah, did I tell you how polite it is to eat everything with your fingers here and how I get to do it three times a day every day of the week? Mom would murder me for that. But grandma would've loved it. She was a pain though. Never used anything except pure water to wash windows, leaving streaks that drove her daughter up and down the walls. Personally, I could never figure out what the fuss was all about but yes, they might have been lots happier living apart.
You may be relieved to know that they use serving spoons however.
Sometimes.
Love,
Arthur
Holidays
[Edited by Arthur Borges on January 20, 2005 2:17 AM]
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