In love with LED

Kolkata takes words and leaves them trembling, colourless.  It seems pointless to try.  And yet…

In the dark from the airport, bikes swoop and stutter and our driver keeps his finger in a frantic staccato on the high beam- a stabbing language of light that seems both aggressive and somehow regal.  Our progress from airport to city is marked in bursts of light and sound.

In the bleak industrial wasteland of new construction and old dreams that mark both sides of the road, everything is garlanded in neon.  Everything is held together, it appears, with sticks and hope and fairy lights.  Above what must surely be vast slum entrances, tiny globes flicker in strings of orange and blue and red; huge arches lit with light and the faces of gods rear up from alleys and lead nowhere; dogs and children scrabble beneath strings of flashing jewels. 

Kolkata is in love with LED.

The contrast leaves you reeling because the city, at first glance, is falling apart.  Everything is patched together and the skeletons show plain: buildings, dogs and even, you imagine, people themselves.  Through the streets, relatively quiet at midnight, bikes rush with men and women three astride; rickshaws both pedal- powered and motorised; trucks monolithic and colourful; children and dogs and chickens.  From the pavement rises the steam of cooking pots; the lights from hundreds of tiny roadside shacks selling soft drink and electrical goods.  Leering from the darkness- half finished buildings in hulking concrete; tiny dwellings in cloth and stick and god knows what.  Skeletons.

I take it all in from the backseat of the four wheel drive, holding Brydie close and a sick bag even closer.  Earlier, half way through the four hour flight from Singapore, deep in 3am sleep, she sits up shuddering, eye lids jerking.  The vice-like grip of nausea only relents ten minutes after we land at Kolkata Airport when she vomits into the specially-packed sick bags with foolproof lock away top.  Heaps better than the clip- lock bags we pioneered in Bangkok. It’s a new personal best.  Ten minutes in the country and she’s thrown up already.  As in Cambodia and Fiji, the upside is that her near-comatose state gets us through Customs in a big hurry.  Five minutes from our hotel, Brydie throws up again and immediately feels better.

Our hotel is in an alley where people are crouching around a low stove cooking something, accompanied by dogs.  The air is full of the sounds of car horns, even at this hour.  We follow Bron and Akino into the lobby- register carvings, wooden stairwells, cool marble floors.  We stumble into single beds in two rooms across the hall from one another on the third floor.  Brydie sleeps fully clothed.  There are threadbare blankets, bottom sheets, one towel.  A TV and a fridge.  It’s after 6am Sydney time when sleep claims us to the frantic whirr of a fan.

It’s birdsong that wakes me, 6am local time.  Birdsong, and I can hardly believe it.  White light reaches a finger in under the curtain above my head.  Jem sleeps.  I put my feet onto cold tiles, investigate the view from the bathroom window through an elegant and rusted curled grille.  Galvanised iron roof tops, garbage, the smell of heat and car fumes and something cooking. Washing hangs from windows.

Early morning unfolds:  cold shower in stuttering spray; choosing clothes that are  modest but don’t give away too much to the promise of a heat that already hangs heavy on the skin; hard boiled eggs and toast with jam and bright orange juice sniffed suspiciously.  Jem is waning already, Brydie bright with relief from the night before.  We stick our heads out into the alley- bikes and trucks in a growing cacophony of noise, a ‘sidewalk café’ ladling something out to passersby, the fast-walk of colourfully dressed locals and men in long trousers and sandals. Optimistic dogs that Brydie eyes with friendly compassion. 

“I like India!” she announces gamely, taking my hand in her own as we head back down the alley to the hotel in search of breakfast, and I could just about scoop her up and cover her with kisses.   

Cradling water bottles, we load into two vehicles; a mini bus and a jeep and head into the funk and fume that is 9am Kolkata traffic.  Brydie and Mum are in the jeep- the rest of us in the bus.  The noise and spectacle of the city fills me with that same utterly bewildering sensation of conflict and energy and exhilaration and despair I sensed in Phnom Penh.  It leaves me all colours and reeling.  I leave the photography to Dad.

It sprawls, it leans, it crowds, it smells, it shoots gap toothed smiles and weaves crazily in and out,  pressing in against the windows.  There are green spaces and white domed palaces in the distances; bridges and buses spilling people from roof tops; a child holding a baby in his arms threading his ways between rickshaws; bikes swaying elegantly through traffic with casual passengers at crazy angles; billboards and roadside shanties and everything held together with the frailest, boldest of hopes.   Every single face, flashing by the window upturned, downcast, meeting your eyes for just a moment- every single face a story you’d hardly dare to read, even if you knew the language.  In the background, above all else there are horns.  Honk if you love Jesus.  Honk if you don’t.  Just honk.  Just honk.

Tonight we are curled beneath an orange double mosquito net with bright red roses on it, like being inside our own special hot house.  Jem thinks it’s elegant.  A fan stirs the air above us.  We’re in two rooms at either end of a corridor upstairs in the school house, with a school room in between.  A mural of Madagascar and some Disney Princesses grace one of the walls. 

“Disney/Pixar,”  says Doug.  “Bringing the world together.”

Durgapur feels rural, although we’ve not seen much of it yet.  St Michel’s Compound, where we’re staying, is tucked away on a back street, a ‘campus’ of sorts minus its children because they’re on school holidays.  It caters for children from the nearby slums; it boards students and has a multi-faith and peace centre.  We’ve eaten with the staff- two meals which for Brydie consisted entirely of rice.  Could be a long week for the little one. A bright green gecko, whom Jem has named Gerrard, watches me from the wall above the bed. 

Tomorrow, a two and a half hour trip to Sarenga, a tribal area north of here.  My little troopers are game and exhausted, grinning stoically in the heat and the humidity and the uncertainty of strangers and the utter chaos of the landscape.  Tomorrow they’ll come face to face with people for the first time.  Tomorrow ‘the other’ comes close.