no problem

Day 4 and still having solid poops. Woohoo! (you might be thinking- that's inappropriate for a blog, but to you i say what the Indians say, "it's ok, no problem"). So yeah. Yesterday I stepped in a bag of poop (?!), and the day before that a bird pooped right on my head. But neither of those experiences really grossed me out at all. What did gross me out, however, was walking next to one of the giant piles of trash yesterday. They tend to be pretty smelly (garbage and other rotting stuff in 100+ degree heat and extreme humidity generally are), so i usually like to walk by as fast as i can. But yesterday as i was walking briskly along, trying hard not to gag, I managed to suck a bug or a flying piece of something right up my nose and into my thoat. talk about gag. I went straight to the Blue Sky Cafe and ate the spiciest thing i could to try to kill it.
Kolkata is a crazy place. I remember thinking last year that i'd never be able to forget any of what i saw, that it would just be imprinted in my memory forever, so i was surprised when i was walking around to realize that i had forgotten about a lot of things until i saw them again this time. there's so much to look at, and so much going on everywhere. even after being here before, i still feel like it's so different that it seems semi-impossible for what i'm seeing to be real life for the people who live here. so many people sleep on the sidewalks, or on top of their food stands, in taxis, or under their rickshaws, etc. The men/boys bathe in faucets on the sides of the road, soaping up in their dhotis (men's wrap-around skirt things), and the women get up to bathe early in the morning before everyone else gets up. I see men getting their nose-hairs clipped on the steps of buildings, and sitting and drinking chai/reading the morning paper in plastic chairs on the side of the road. i'm sure there's a word for privacy in Bengali, but I can't imagine it gets used often. lives here are lived in the open, and lived together.
Some things about Kolkata are so ugly- the poverty, the filth, the living conditions... but at the same time Kolkata is so beautiful. When i returned to the US last year after being in Kolkata I remembered thinking that the city had been beautiful, but besides thinking of the people who lived here i couldn't really verbalize anything else that i thought was beautiful about it. Now that i'm here i see things everyday that remind me why i think this place is beautiful. Today I waited at the bus stop with a few other people and a brown cow. The greeting people use to say hello is namaste, which means: the divine in me bows to the divine in you. Yesterday was Kate's birthday, so some of the waiters at the Blue Sky bought her a birthday cake from a bakery, and everyone sang to her and ate some cake. The guys at the Blue Sky are so incredibly kindhearted and sweet to all of us. Despite not having much in the way of material goods, so many people here seem genuinely happy. it's pretty incredible.
There are these beautiful trees with crazily overlapping/gnarled trunks and roots, growing out of everything- trash piles, pavement, brick/cement walls, etc. and when i think about them i feel like in some ways they're the perfect representation of what kolkata is. with the environment they're in (trash, cement, etc.) it seems that all odds are against them and that it'd be impossible for them to survive. but they do. and they flourish. all the different roots that are intertwined as the trunk (i don't know which is which for these trees) are arranged in ways that seem chaotic and confusing, and can't be broken down into roots, trunk, and branch categories. nothing here is clear-cut like that. but everything here somehow goes together in a way that works, and despite the chaos, the people flourish. Whew, I just way extended that metaphor. Maybe you understand, probably you don't, and if you don't understand then you're starting to understand more. You're probably thinking "what?!" Don't worry, it's ok. No problem.


For you who are still confused about the time difference- check out the sweet clocks that Annie put on the right side of the blog, down at the bottom.