Aila

May 25, 2009
A slum in Howrah, and an upscale neighborhood in south Kolkata, West Bengal

I was holding her and the world was revving up, bare bottom against impending rain, tiny legs and withered feet nearby, upset trees pushing walls and pulling concrete sidewalks, fast enough to pass easily to the other side, bright orange sindoor streaked through oiled black hair and false pairings so that at nineteen or maybe at sixteen with some years tacked on she looked like a painting of the immaculate conception – because some days you don’t want to think about the other way – soft cloth draped around wide eyes and quietly pursed lips, a smooth forehead given over to lack of choice catching the pot before it boils over and bending easily so that wading through plastic bags locked through sandal straps and half-submerged dogs seem like small annoyances, a privileged taste of daily discomfort to chastise human adaptability.

We talked about automatic car washes the sound of rotating whipping strands hitting heavy glass with a soapy thud in monstrous rollers slapping up and down and around the perfectly sealed bubble so that even the slightest leak would cause a gasp of surprise but the whittled bits of water flying sideways through the mostly-rolled up windows and gathering on the rotting rubber door seals caused only enough worry to move the electronics to a different lap while the wheels bumped up the curb and carried us down the sidewalk, around the improvised road black through patches of eye-induced sunshine bright enough to illuminate the slowly changing scenery of endless traffic jams, buses stuck near the top of horizontal trees and small white sedans pulling back branches to slap the next kid in line with a wet green surprise.

Under an easy stream of hot water, through yellowed glass and maybe a metal grate or over a low concrete wall, I could see the palms bending backwards over the railway tracks, silently swirling wide skirts, just on time for their date with the nearest edges of the city – it was a flying ceramic roof tile that had sent us scampering in the first place, umbrellas bending into angry upside-down spiders and black tarps snapping against twine leashes as we scurried between doorways and submerged drains, down six-inch alleyways, towards infrastructure less prone to unintentional scattering so that now, roof tiles three floors above me and walls thick enough to block electric signals, windows double-barred, beds made with space to spare, where generations are three decades apart and babies given five times their weight in antibacterial plastic playthings, the storm seemed safely tucked away in bed long before I set out through freshly swept streets in search of dinner.

At the end of the story – weeks later, ensconced in heat rashes and air conditioning – the communists drove up, white hammers crossing nicely curved sickles on red flags flapping a low flat-bed truck draped in donated clothes forward, an old man seated like a sometime king in the center, looking nonplussed and oddly out of place as younger men scurried to doors and stores with canisters and requests for change – anything to help the victims, baby food for the little ones in the sunderbands, stacks of mismatched scarves flowing over strong city worker arms so I scurried off down the street, calling for the bill, bag of bulging chiffon and cotton on the way back, momentarily not minding the sweat pouring easily through every pore in a single-minded mini-quest to feel less guilty about the piles I was leaving, to align some abstract goal with the current exit plan in the hope of being a responsible guest ready to slip out the side door through one more massive city-side traffic jam, one more dinner, two more lunches plus a handful of airport meals, through re-immersion movies and back to the far side of the storm.

[This was written on June 14, a day and a half before leaving Kolkata, and posted from the US]

The Great American-Bengali Passover Seder

April 8-16, 2009
A Journey

1: At large
I had only eaten rice-based foods that day – idly for breakfast, and an extensive south Indian thali (rice, rice, dal, vegetables, and curd rice) for lunch – so I decided to put off Passover by one sundown in order to mark it better. My last supper was kebabs, parathas, and curries served aboard an imaginary train on the top floor of a freakishly slick Hyderabadi mall.

This was my second Passover in the City of the Nizams, and it passed as easily as the year before – the restriction on eating leavened bread hardly noticeable save a few moments in airports, where I had to walk a few steps past the coffee shop to find a masala dosa for breakfast.

2: In miniature
I arrived in Chennai on what was officially the second night of the holiday, and celebrated on what was unofficially my second night of observation.

Two of my co-workers insisted, almost, on helping me, sharing something. I heard myself warning them, repeatedly, of the length of even a shortened version of the Passover seder, saw the three of us, home-brewed wine drops spilled to the count of ten and the sweet and the bitter combined, sleepily searching for dinner in the last canteen left open. But the re-telling – that I did first, coherently for a deconstructed fable of imagining a homeland, followed by an incantation to equality in freedom.

3: Just right
I landed in a headlong rush home, slouching in the back bench of the flaking yellow taxi, calling and texting, arranging food contributions and personal absences. Once inside, I gleefully flung off the rubble I’d collected through the past two weeks of travel, throwing sweaty salwars, a slightly mildewed toothbrush, emptied bottles of shampoo and lotion off to their respective corners, flipping switches and re-arranging until I had completely arrived. It is important, when preparing to celebrate a holiday about exile from slavery towards freedom, when in the fourth quarter of a life built in a foreign land, and just returning from an excursion to sites marked with first footsteps and bloodied knees and dance floor histrionics, to have arrived before getting ready to leave again.

I gathered the recipe and washed the lentils and turned on the stove. I begged the gardener to find me a new can of gas, and waited on the doorstep for as long as it took me to realize it would not be long enough. I rinsed off the remaining airport grime, and, large metal pots bulging from a creaking woven bag, threw my arrival to the dirty, humid Kolkata wind, and caught an auto-rickshaw to a friend’s house.

We cooked, and listened to good bad music (this is required for long spells of cooking), and vaguely discussed what we were going to do with fifteen people who had no idea what was going on. The fifteen people – five less than we had guessed, but just the right number to fit in a circle of chairs and bed and floor, mostly Christian, Hindu, and various identifies between there and determinedly atheist – arrived, with wine, and sweets, and quiet chatter. We followed an order – which is, after all, what seder means – and interrupted it consistently with our own deviations.

There were four Jews, and thus four opinions – but we agreed on ‘Go-down Moses,’ and although we started on the far side of off-key, and the rising chorus lit up the evening. By the time the meal had finished, the room was half asleep, and the weight of travel, the release of the determined burst of energy that had taken me through the holiday caught me up and carried me home. The next day was the Bengali New Year, and I spent the day inside, cradling my queen-size two-inch foam mattress and meditating on the dirty but elegant lace curtains that separated my known and daily re-created world from the adventures on the other side.