Equivocality

It’s tentacles, tentacles coming in, trying to creep around the edges even as I spin and slam the door. Calcutta gets in anyway, climbs the crumbling brick façade and pours in through the window, saturating my tiny room heat with scent and sound and honking, honking, there’s no escaping the relentless honking. I shed all my clothes as fast as I can and collapse onto the bed to stare at a spot on the ceiling that doesn’t move.

Calcutta you are motion! Calcutta you are noise and smoke and all the impolite truths of humanity stacked on top of each other in one place. You are sound and light and fresh fruit juice, a man yelling mango juice mangojuice mangojuice! into the crowd on the corner. Step right up and get your slice of life! There’s nowhere to run anyway. The streets are packed with cars and carts and bicycles and rickshaws and pedestrians, and usually no sidewalks. The sidewalks are for sleeping on.

Down the street, no street. It’s construction. They’re digging everything up, without machines and without shoes. Barefoot workers at the bottom of the trench dredge the mud out one wicker basket at a time, passed from dark hand to hand dumped on the sidewalk next to the shantytown. Rice-sack plastic roofs, cardboard walls, and people washing at the standpipe on the street, bathing grooming shitting as the cars whirl by five feet away. A young girl lies on a blanket with a seriously infected scalp. The mothers have collected the other children into a circle in the midst of the noise and given them slates and chalk. No nigger ever learned on the streets like these kids do.

They aren’t so squeamish about injustice as we are. Luxury cars sold just down the block. They don’t feel the need to be euphemistic about the fact that people are dying in the streets here.

And living! Chow head noodle cart rushes by the bench where I am drinking chai. The juice wallah grinds his blender but the beat is louder, and the young hustler from the young country dances in the street, screaming along with the song “Hey mister DJ, DJ!” He’s trying to impress the white girl nervously nibbling a tikka roll. Step, step, dodge as a flashy motorcycle – did you see that tricked Pulsar, baba? – clears a path with its horn and its speed. I draw in my legs so they don’t get run over. I’m learning. It does smell here though, piles of rotting fruit next to the juice stand, and I think someone likes to piss behind this bench. So, incense! Can’t make it quiet, make it loud! Incense burns sweet and clots the air in a riot, the same riot of colors and signs and saris that burns the eyes, the same swirl of tongues and horns and yells and cell phones. And music! Always music, not the careful ambiance of the West but something louder, faster, sweeter, more! Volume and concentrated life to overwhelm and ennoble the ancient and mistreated speakers and streets!

And all at once I see it, I understand. The market is revealed to be a stage. Old men sit on the bench and drink tea, young men stand at the puri stall and devour their business lunches with sticky fingers. The sweeper class walks bent low and sweeps the trash along the broken tarmac at their feet. Women shop for vegetables, teenage girls in Western jeans flirt as they pretend not to, and a thousand hawkers hawk a thousand things. Now I see it. The dance number begins, the choreography kicks in. Old and young and new glide around each other in a unity of purpose and step that I still can’t match. Except by letting go and letting the tide of Calcutta sweep me out to sea. There’s a syncopated rhythm here I couldn’t sense before. It sounded like noise, but it’s a symphony freed at last from the conductor. It directs my motion as the music plays and the celebration starts as the camera sweeps back to show the huge final number golden in the afternoon sun.

And I collapse on the bed, blinking. Blinking and confused, but smiling now with scented oils in my hair and the taste of rose soda on my lips. I see now that I’m standing at the center of the final triumphant scene, a climax that never lets up.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 4:14 am and is filed under Blog-like, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.