Adventures of J Godoy

Crash landing in Kathmandu

The most jarring thing about traveling is suddenly being in another country for the first time. There are ways to pad your mind from the shock. Going with a group from your own country for work or study, for example. Visiting on a short trip, determined to make the most of it, cameras blazing. Reading books beforehand to give yourself an idea of what to expect.

All of the above put you and the country into a shared context: you at least have some idea, in the broad sense, of what you’re doing there.

First time in Nepal: none of the above. I thought maybe a 14-hour bus ride, seeing half the country in one fell swoop, would at least provide more context than flying.

The night I arrived in Katmandu, these were my initial thoughts on the subject:

***
Demoralizing is the word for the 16th hour, when you’re still climbing, still breathing in smog and dirt and all the lights have gone out. You’re to believe there’s a town up there somewhere, a great town that knows just the spot to stick it to a weary backpacker. But all you can see are the dirty headlights of an overturned truck and a weary ambulance.

How did a capital city come to be situated in the stark middle of nowhere? Your nose knows: it sprang from a pile of dung. Tiny lights like flies’ eyes glisten all around, and you must have arrived somewhere because people are disgorging themselves from the bus.

Suddenly you’re in a sketch cut from Night on Earth, jumping in a battered Honda taxi and speaking Japanese in the back seat. You can’t remember your lines because chatting with the driver, who is busy dodging little girls and potholes, is somehow out of the question.

You feel like you’re a pioneer spelunker, wondering just what in the hell you are getting yourself up into, in total possession of the knowledge that you ought not be leaving the way you came.

The driver takes you around twists and turns, deeper into the fetid labyrinth. Meat appears on slabs with hollow-eyed men staring tiredly on. Streetlights are absent. You cross a river, and are suddenly in a cave full of crystal light, bathing in marketing and spicy tea smells.

Back to the Jim Jarmusch shtick. The driver doesn’t know where to take you. You are no help. He enlists a friend who jumps in the passenger seat and starts jabbering, yelling, commenting on his driving. From the looks of them, it’s a good place to be spending your 18th year on earth. Too late for that.

Has traveling overland really added any context? Or just taken a couple of years off my life?
***

Despite the physical rigors of a 16-hour bus ride on bad roads, it was an overture to life in Nepal. Instant noodle advertisements outnumbered the rusted world vision billboards about hygiene, nutrition and appropriate cooking fuels three to one. Most of the buildings had rebar sticking out of the top, waiting for the time when their owners would be able to afford to build up. I understood, with my every vertebra, that Nepal is a land of many rivers: sitting in the back of the bus I got a foot of air every time we crossed a bridge.

Cycle Rickshaw Heroes

Bacterial gastroenteritis, the Russo-Japanese war, and me

The inevitable happens when it will. I knew a parting gift from Kolkata’s street vendors was in the post when I left on an overnight train to New Jalpaiguri. It arrived on the bus to Panitanki, the Indian-Nepalese border town.

I had chosen a seat at the back, luckily by the window. The bus filled up gradually, stopping every few minutes to let on more passengers. The sun beat down on my head and left arm and I started to feel dizzy. When I broke out in a cold sweat I knew this bus ride was going to be too long.

We stopped at a gas station. The ground had stopped moving, I had a fixed target. No sooner had my stream of vomit startled a man below than we were off again. The serious pain in my stomach continued as I tried to miss the women walking on the side of the road.

I had finally gotten rid of the contents of my stomach, a few fried snacks bought at a charity boutique. Arriving at Panitanki I stumbled off the bus and into one of the grotty little hotel/restaurants on the side of the road.

It was soon clear I wasn’t going to be let off with just a little upchuck. I made for the toilet, which someone was in the process of hosing down. I waited outside, taking irregular breaths and pouring sweat. After doing what had to be done, I went back and sat down at the table only to feel the pull again. A tiny child was in the bathroom trying to do his business, and just as I thought I might blackout, his mother mercifully pulled him out of the way despite his loud protests. There was a repeat of this scene as I was back again before he was able to finish.

I sat down at the table, literally drained. I felt an overwhelming urge to sleep, and doubtful I would make it anywhere that day, started to consider spending a night, or at least a few hours, at the hotel.

Luckily Tamio had already had gone through his first round of intestinal troubles and had bought some packets of electrolyte drink. I drank a half liter in cautious sips, in between shamelessly lying down on the restaurant’s bench. Eventually, I thought I could cross the border without being taken for a zombie. The wind on my face felt refreshing as we rode over the river border in a cycle rickshaw. To Tamio’s chagrin, we settled for the second hotel we saw. To me it was the only logical choice: we were already there.

I spent the next day and a half listless and feverish, thankfully too much so to think about the filth of the room or anything else. Between naps I counted the mosquitoes that died waiting on the outside of the net.

On the second night I downed some dal baat. On the third morning I was back on another bus with the full cooperation of my bowels.

The secret to my recovery was the stinking medicine Tamio gave me. Called seirougan, the pills are dark little acrid balls supposed to be good for digestive problems. They remind me of the medicine that Sen gets from the river god in Spirited Away. Tamio’s learned of the medicine from his father, whose father was in the Japanese army. Though the kanji has now been changed, the name seirougan used to mean “medicine to beat the Ruskies.” I would feel a little weird about it, but I’m too busy being thankful to have my body’s water content back. Arigatou, seirougan.

Baul Singers of West Bengal

Diwali in Shantiniketan

After a diligent hunt to make sure we were on the right platform, we took the train to Shantiniketan. In the words of our host’s daughter when I asked her whether she wouldn’t rather fly long distances than take a train, “the train is nice in a different way.”

Men jumped on at each station toting huge aluminum kettles. “Chai-coffee, chai-coffee-chai!” they called down the aisles. In one three hour train ride, I had at least 30 opportunities to drink a steaming plastic cupful of sweet, milky tea or instant coffee, not to mention the samosas, muri (a snack mix of puffed rice, beans, lentils and peanuts), pulp fiction and trivia books, handkerchiefs, and other sundry goods on offer. The doors of the train stayed open the entire way and hawkers strolled off at the last minute as it rolled away from a station.

A barefooted saddhu in orange pajamas sat with his legs dangling outside the train. He started to talk loudly with us, but we had no idea what he was saying. Boys crawled under the seats with rags, cleaning the floors and asking for pay. A contortionist cleared the aisle and performed along it. A Baul came around singing and playing an ektara as the forests and rice fields of West Bengal sped by.

In Shantiniketan we had a wonderfully relaxing time. So relaxing (and so long ago) that there’s not much to write. We took walks around the area and visited a local market where we saw another group of Bauls perform. That night we celebrated the festival of lights with a barbecue and fireworks. Fireflies lit the warm night sky four months after we thought we’d seen the last for the year.

Kali Puja

Now we’re in Kathmandu, after a month in the Everest region. But the end of October had its share of excitement. The next few posts pick up where we left off.

The weekend after we arrived in Kolkata was Diwali and the markets were all filled with decorations and candles in tiny terra cotta pots. Buildings decked with strands of lights and roadside firework stands made it feel like a giddy mix of Christmas and Independance Day.

Diwali is more popular in the north than it is in West Bengal. But during the same weekend Kolkata had its own holiday: Kali Puja. As during Durga Puja, the city’s best known festival, idols of the goddess are made of clay, worshipped, and then chucked into a body of water.

Someone we met said that her driver had been flummoxed when he found a goddess abandoned in front of his house. Bad idea to go and dump a girl like that, especially when she’s the goddess of mayhem.

During the festival she was enshrined in everything from life-sized cloth and bamboo palaces to grass huts. In a field by the railroad tracks one goddess was housed in a mosquito-net topped by a rainbow-colored umbrella.

There’s a PA at each of the temporary shrines where music is blasted for 3 or 4 days. On some nights the locals gather to dance. On one of the days a goat is sacrificed.

On the final day she is taken to her watery resting place with a parade of other idols, people dancing in the streets, and drummers.

When we left to celebrate Diwali in the quiet village of Shantiniketan the whole city was preparing for Kali Puja. Which explains why we found ourselves in the middle of a 6am a Mardi Gras at the railway station. All the drummers of West Bengal had come to perform at the festivities. At the time I felt a little disappointed to be leaving, but the weekend had better things in store.

Volunteering in Kolkata

On hearing I would travel in India, a friend of mine advised me to find some volunteer work to do. She said that being surrounded by people living in desperate conditions on a several week trip had made her wish she was doing something rather than just being there as a tourist.

Somehow, I felt it was more important to learn something about the country before going, and that I would be able to learn more from novels than non-fiction. Maybe I am lazy, or maybe short-term volunteerism is just not my thing.

Through couch surfing an opportunity came looking for us. A friend of our host who had lived in Kansai for several years works for an alternative school in Kolkata called Shiksha Mitra. She had seen Tamio’s website and wanted him to do a workshop in her class.

We arrived at the school around 20 minutes before our class was to start. The school occupies one floor of a small building in a nicer part of town, but the students come from underprivileged backgrounds.

25 students around age 7-13 were waiting, having just finished their writing class. We sat on the floor in a large circle as she asked the children if they knew what a diary was. After passing around some examples, she again asked them what they had seen in them. Tamio showed his journal and then started to make an example. Afterwards everyone made their own journals from butcher paper.

I helped one boy to make his book, and he insisted it be smaller than the example. So we made it together, and he then spent an hour meticulously decorating the edges of the cover.

Each of the students was allowed to run with their own ideas, and I was amazed at how quickly and enthusiastically they all started to create their work. Teaching in Japan, I had gotten used to uncertainty and hesitation among students doing something for the first time.

One student had lingered in a corner during the explanation, only to become absorbed in creating his journal, cutting out his name from some colorful pages of an old encyclopedia. And while the boys each did their own thing, many of the girls were bent on cutting out the prettiest pictures of women from magazines. One girl working quietly on the side was making an abstract tropical motif opposite a picture of a forest. Our host’s friend explained that she was to be married but that her family had agreed to let her attend school for one more year.

At the end, we showed students how to write their names in Japanese. Lending your hands in a food line must is a humbling experience, but it was great to be able to share something of ours and see each child make something of their own.

Bengali breakfast

All I ever ate with our curry was naan. Maybe a roti. I knew the first thing about Indian food: that much of it was vegetarian. After that, I hadn’t a clue.

“This is a typical Bengali breakfast,” she said, as we got up late once again.

Dal puri, a flatbread made from ground lentils. Aloo dam, curried potato with ginger. And jelabi, a small funnel-cake like sweet that is immersed in syrup after being deep-fried.

For lunch, we had some fried bitter gourd, a dish with pointed cucumber (like a cross between a cucumber and zucchini with seeds that crunch like cardamom), and a thin dal seasoned with bay leaf and chili.

Another morning we had some fried pancakes made from powdered dal (besan) that resembled a cross between an omelet and Korean chijimi.

Last night we had fried luchi (a thin fried puffed bread) with aloo dam.

When we went out, we had a south Indian thali, but since nobody was there to guide us through it, all I will say is that a thali is an extreme amount of food.

I would also like to tell you how strange it feels for a vegetarian who has been living in east Asia to suddenly be able to read an entire menu, know that everything on it is vegetarian, and still have no idea what anything is.

Another day, we chose masala dosas, large pieces of thin, crispy flat bread curled around a helping of spicy potato filling.

We ordered momos, a north-east Indian version of Chinese dumplings.

My last good street food memory of Kolkata is the roll. A thick, pan-fried flatbread with fried vegetables and paneer rolled inside, truly deserving of a place in the sandwich pantheon.

And, last but not least, the wonder of Indian sweets. Vegetarianism in India does not exclude dairy, and sweet shops are a common sight around the city. The result is that tiny chunks of cheesecake are waiting for you around every corner. Cheesecake with a rose-petal, Neapolitan cheesecake, and drier pressed squares of cheesecake decorated with silver foil.

The Call

Street side shops are set up on porticos. The street side looks like a shelf made for life-sized dolls. The display case-cum-desk that the boy at the cell phone shop sat at was just the right size to be pushed back into this nook and shuttered for the night. He sat on a crate with holes in his jeans, fixed cell phones, and sold SIM cards. The other half of the nook was just big enough for an old man and his shelves of homeopathic remedies.

The booth was on Sudder Street, about an hour from where we were staying. We first visited it on the second day of our trip. Most of the times we saw the shop’s proprietor, he was talking on a cell phone while testing the connections inside another and answering the queries of several people.

He must have been 17, but he evidently took his work quite seriously. We had first approached another boy of similar age at a similar stall on the same street. His manner was more salesmen like, and his price higher. That our association with the kid with ripped jeans started.

He told us we would need our passport, a passport-sized photo, a copy of all relevant pages of the passport, and the address and phone number of the place we stayed. Because Tamio was the prepared we took the card in his name after much thumbing through his passport and a long call to the company. “What’s this?” he asked of the page with the chip in it. We explained, bemused by but also understanding of the level of scrutiny. After all, we had nothing to hide.

There were a lot of people out before Diwali, and the shop was busy. When he had gotten around to us, a group of policemen strutted up and threw a phone on the counter, asking questions in an insistent tone. The boy with the answers dispensed with them after a few minutes.

We didn’t have all the copies needed, so when he had a free hand he had us sit on small crates inside his shop and wait. As we waited, the old man with hair as white as his prayer cap turned to us and said, “I’m being called to prayer, please watch my shop!” And with that we were left to ourselves, two foreigners tucked away inside a cranny.

In time the fixer of cell phones came back and we sealed the deal. I bought a few top-up cards, and he explained to us how to get proper top-ups from other shops. We thanked him and went on our way.

Two days and several ring-tone telemarketing calls later, the phone rang. I thought it was a wrong number, and answered curtly. I was already annoyed by being tailed by guards who made it difficult to enjoy the peace and quiet of the Tagore house.

“This is the shop where you bought your SIM card,” he said. “So why are you calling me?” I asked. “Your serviced will be disconnected,” he told me, because of a problem with the copy of the passport. “Come on Monday,” he said.

That night we were in the area again and I greeted him and asked him what had been the problem. He asked to see the passport. The handwriting of the date on the immigration stamp was not clear. When we came on Monday he would have someone from the company come to clear it up.

On the Monday after Diwali even Sudder Street had the pleasant air of holiday. There were no crowds out, even the weather was forgiving. The company too was on holiday and no one would come. Come back tomorrow, he said. We threw our hands up, smiled and parted ways.

The next day we once again covered our faces with handkerchiefs and took the hour-long bus to Sudder Street. The boy made a call. “Ok, make color copies of these pages,” he told us. Eventually, we found a tiny net cafe in possession of a color printer. It was full of school children printing out pictures of calculators, mushrooms, and the Taj Mahal for some unfathomable school project. Thinking I might also get a SIM card (the point of having them at all being to have contact with each other), I copied both our passports together, wondering if the person from the cell phone company would wait.

The boy with ripped jeans frowned. “No, this is no good,” he said. It was clear by this time that no one would come from the company, that only the copies were needed. A4 sized copies to be precise.

Tamio went back to the den of children while I waited. The boy tried to explain. “It is just the writing on this stamp, it is unclear,” he said. We had already decided against buying another SIM card there. Tamio was not sure if we could trust him. I was simply unwilling to go through this rigmarole again. We would be leaving for New Jalpaiguri. There would be no question of another trip to his shop. He looked at me with a furrowed brow. In his eyes was the intense look of a youth that had taken on responsibility and a person whom people relied on to understand things they didn’t. “Will you take the other SIM card?” he asked. I asked him to wait, and stared at the 2007 calendar of public holidays in West Bengal posted in the old man’s shop. He persisted; I felt uncomfortable and walked away.

We came back with the copies, and Tamio handed them to him. He asked again about the second SIM card. “No,” was the reply.

I wondered if he really would send the copies on. It would have been simple for him to say that we had refused to make them.

That night I got a call. “This is the cell phone shop. Your cell phone has been reactivated,” he said.

Reading India at Cafe Coffee Day

Looking from outside at people chatting over chai and coffee, I assumed it would be quieter inside this coffee shop than outside in the mall food court. Instead I have my tea and lemon to late 90’s electro-pop with a twist of death metal. But I only notice after I have taken my seat, upon being told to do so by the man at the counter. You don’t order at the counter here. This is not a Starbucks.

Cafe Coffee Day started as a small teashop. It has since grown to a nationwide chain, explained my host yesterday over drinks at another of the locations. Again I was reminded that this is not a Starbucks, delighted to find the sandwiches all labeled clearly “veg” or “non-veg.”

While such a chain coffee shop could be called a sign of “westernization,” sitting and chatting over a hot drink is hardly a particularly western tradition.

Some have made malls in India to symbolize westernization, globalization, and the income gap. Our host had had a guest who refused to go to a mall in Kolkata, saying something like that she had come to see “the real India.” She was reminded by our host that “this is also real.” “It’s not as if ordinary people don’t come here,” she said. She often shopped for groceries at the store in the basement-floor.

Turning your nose up at a shopping center in south Asia is as bad as running to a McDonalds. Both attitudes act on untested presumptions. It would be naive to criticize the pervasiveness of consumer culture while blinding ones’ eyes to it.

As I sat sipping my vegan shake with my host and her friend M. talking about malls, I couldn’t help but think of The White Tiger, a booker prize-winning novel about the vicissitudes of class and social pressure in India. M. didn’t appreciate the book because she said portrayed “the India people in the west want to see.”

As literature, the integrity of the work gave it gravity. But rather than taking the book as a snapshot of India, I read it to glean details of what life is like here. I can walk down the street and know that the red stains on the sidewalk are from pan, a stimulant made from betel leaves. I was forewarned about the exhaust on the streets. The problem for M. is that Adinga only portrays two classes, the very poor and the very rich. Indians are either the rich man inside the car or his driver, who lives a life of humiliation. Whatever can be said about the income gap, the middle class in India is also real.