Back to business

Right, time to fill in some gaps.

First things first: if you want to hear amusing and graphic descriptions of burping waiters and marauding goats, please visit Dixie's blog, dixieontheotherside.blogspot.com. She's funnier than I am, and besides, she has a much better memory for the specifics of bodily functions.

It's the fifth of January. Our two protagonists are (sob) soon to be separated: Dixie is going south tomorrow, to work in Chattisgarh for three months. And how did we celebrate our last day together? By visiting a graveyard. Actually it was a lovely spot, with row upon row of tombs belonging to British officers or their 'virtuous' and 'artless' spouses and daughters - Hindus, of course, cremate their dead, so a graveyard is quite a rarity in India, especially one so calm and sad. Struck by a particularly beautiful epitaph, I had whipped out my journal to take it down when, very suddenly, something else became much more important. The nearest toilet was a desperate five-minute mince down the road.

Ha ha! Dignity (fully) restored, I rejoined Dixie in the graveyard and we briefly doubted the moral correctness of playing cards over somebody's eternal resting place, and did anyway. Then, continuing our attempts to forego the comforts of the West, we perused a Borders-style bookshop and took Assam tea and lattes in the upstairs cafe. Dinner that evening featured no burping waiters but a wealth of undercooked chicken instead.

And, on the 6th, the time came for us to say goodbye! Please, stay strong, everyone. We got up late, for old times' sake, and packed with heavy hearts. The day's excursion was to Dalhousie Square (renamed, wickedly, after the three renegades executed for attempting to assassinate Williams Dalhousie). Bizarrely refused a picture of the place, we dodged the trams and taxis to a local lake/cesspool. After sulking our way back downtown to pick up our bags, and then sulking our way to the station, it was time to leave. I saw her off at Platform 19, where we kissed publicly a lot more than we were respectfully and even legally supposed to. In honour of
mum I ran alongside the train as it took off, and endured the bemused gazes of a platformful of Indians on the long trudge back.

Sudder Street has quite a few characters. Besides the profusion of three-legged animals there's a blind man who sings like an angel around town every night, a couple of deaf lads who make jokes to each other about you in sign as you sit eating at their stall, and your usual share of burned out hippies. In my dorm there lives an weird old American woman called Maggie. She might seriously be anything from an incredibly wrinkled 40 to an incredibly wrinkled 90. As far as I know she's as old as time itself. This decrepitude unfortunately doesn't extend to her flirting - she keeps pinching our cheeks, me and Roger, and calling us 'lovely lads' in her croaky, undead Californian twang. You have to be very careful if she mentions her foot - there is a story that goes along with how she injured it, but it's not worth the effort of listening, not even the first time round. I think I will hear the terrifying sound of her snoring in the night for a long, long time.

That night, I was staying in the Hotel Maria - in a dorm, for a paltry 70 Rs. a night. I've since moved down the road to the Hotel Paragon, which is ten ruperts more but has a nice roof where you can sit and read a book/escape Maggie. I've made some great friends, English, Irish, French, Belgian, and am on nodding terms with about a million Koreans - a big volunteer party. Last night one of the Frenchies was leaving. Rafael his name, and he's so bloody French he should have accordion music accompanying him wherever he goes. We all had celebratory chai on the roof, before the Koreans took over.

And that, I suppose, is it. There was the advert, which was a lot of waiting around and a few moments of pure Indian farce, in organisational terms. They made the classic mistake of employing shepherds and their flock to make up the backshot (this is on the Maidan, in the very centre of Kolkata city), and I'll never forget the irate director screaming 'Will somebody move those fucking sheep?' down the microphone. Yesterday, I finally managed, after several days of trying, to get into the Asiatic Society, after several days of trying - it seems they open when they feel like it. It consists of a huge library and musuem, an endless corridors and dark offices and clerks sitting around covered in dust and reams and reams of paper. As a visitor to that library, I personally used up two or three acres of rainforest. I entered the building, signed a ledger, was sent upstairs to the library, then sent up to the third floor to get permission to enter the library and sign a ledger, then back down to the first floor to deposit my bag and sign another ledger, then into the library and into the office of the chief librarian who issued me a temporary pass in order that I might actually be able to read a book after I had, yes, signed a ledger. It was like something out of a Kafka novel, a nightmare vision of bureaucracy gone mad. And getting a book was no mean feat. You must browse the catalogue, fill out two forms indicating title, author's name, catalogue number, time of requisition, your name and your pass number. Anything from ten minutes to two hours later, a librarian will shuffle up to you with an old, wood-worm riddled tome. By this time, you have already gone mad and are chewing on your shoes.

There has been civil strife in 'Cal'. Something to do with land assignation. Whatever it is, some people are very unhappy, and on Monday a mob marched through the streets forcing shop and restaurant owners to close or be trashed. In other parts of the city, there are riots and violent demonstrations, even a few lynchings. In the newspaper yesterday, I read the testimony of one little boy, who watched his father pleading for mercy before a mob kicked him to death and threw him on a fire. It seems he had criticised the action of tearing up the roads, taken in order to stop government troops from entering the suburb. Chastening stuff, anyway.

But life on peaceful Sudder Street ambles on. I am in one of the three internet cafes, soon to be at work once more on my application for MA funding. I get the feeling I may be guilt-tripped into doing charity work while I'm here, but for the moment I can be lazy and selfish and use Shakespeare as an excuse to hide behind - he really is a writer for all occasions.