Bits and pieces

I thought that things reached a new low on the rat front the other day: there was a half eaten rat outside my front door. It literally was half eaten, but I won’t go into gruesome details for you. But then yesterday I was talking to Lakshmi and Tabassum and I realized actually I have nothing to complain about. It is monsoon season at the moment – although the rain hasn’t been as torrential as I expected there is still enough of it around. And in the slums this means flooding – Tabassum says it sometimes the water comes up to her waist. And with the flood waters the rats come out. I came across Lakshmi laughing with another girl in Bengali, and I asked what was funny. It was this: Lakshmi lives in a one room house with 7 people and one bed – so she has to sleep on the floor, with rats running around. She can’t sleep, she can’t cook, she can’t keep things dry. All she can do is laugh about it. And for Tabassum - when the shacks flood there is no place to cook so they have to cook on a shelf above their bed. Some people in their slum shelter in a primary school when things get too bad, but there is never space for Tabassum and her family because three of them are disabled. I thought I was beyond crying, I thought I had reached a subconscious level of acceptance of the poverty here, but how can I accept this? What can I do? These are no longer just work colleagues, they are friends, and I am powerless to help them in any substantive way. Kolkata is really challenging some of my most basic beliefs – it is not possible to always be the good Samaritan, the extent and level of suffering means that in many cases I do have to walk on the other side. But then, more positively, it never ceases to amaze me the tenacity of the human spirit, and the way the girls are able to continue living and smiling, even in such awful circumstances.

There have been two telling bits of news in the last week related to India and poverty – the first is that an Oxford research report has concluded that 8 states in India (including West Bengal) have in total more poor people than 26 of the poorest countries in Africa. Unbelievable. And almost on the same day it was reported in the Indian news that DfID may significantly reduce aid to India. They cite the reason as being the India’s substantially growing economy. Why has India’s wealth not trickled down to people living in circumstances that can best be described as inhumane? Why can I sit in a rickshaw next to a girl using an Iphone and drive past a little boy suffering from diarrhea on the street, as he has no other place to go?

I didn’t mean for this to be a really depressing blog, because actually I have been more positive recently. I have less than two months to go, so I am trying to relish every minute (well, as far as that is possible with the heat, humidity and rats) as I know I will miss it when I am back home. And, after 3 months of living here, I am finally becoming more comfortable with Kolkata as a city – I am enjoying wandering around the market after work now instead of getting stressed about being run over etc. And I am going on holiday soon to Ladakh!!

I will finish with some things I have learnt in the last couple of weeks:

- how to slam the door and assertively walk away from a taxi driver who shouts at me insisting I pay triple fare (as well as learning ‘I may be a foreigner but I am not a fool’ in Bengali and Hindi)
- how to hold a conversation in three languages (I speak in English, someone whose mother tongue speaks in Bengali, and someone whose mother tongue is Hindi speaks in Hindi, and we all kind of understand)
- how to work in an organization when at one point only 2 other people spoke English
- where to get good food – there is an expensive restaurant down our road which we went to the other day – we all ended up with swollen and itchy feet due to MSG. From now on I will stick to the outdoor fast food vendor – at least if I get ill I’ll know it is because of good old dirt.
- h ow to deal patiently with bureaucracy (keeping my temper when I have to fill out exactly the same form twice, with exactly the same information that the official already has in triplicate in front of him. Once I had filled it out he ticked my answers, obviously making sure that the colour of my eyes (yes, really) and my father’s name hadn’t changed since last time.