Chaos and color in Kolkata

After getting so many kind comments, I have to apologize for the lag on my update. While India may be one of the burgeoning technology capitals, it's been difficult to find a speedy internet connection near where my mashi (Bengali for my maternal aunt or mother's sister) lives--in my desperate quest, I even took a bicycle rickshaw to the nearest internet 'toilet' (her term, not mine!) and discovered only more dial-up and ancient computers. Broadband connections aren't uncommon in Kolkata though; my cousin Avi, the resident sixteen-year-old computer technician of the house, says that although all his friends use it, their family (i.e. he) hasn't had time to switch over. Hopefully, he'll get a chance soon so our families can use Skype to stay in touch more often.

Still, I fear that unreliable internet may be a frequent problem for me on my travels since I just don't know what the situation will be as I go from place to place. So, dear friends and family, I simply ask that you please bear with both the lulls and deluges of posts and pictures that may be forthcoming.

Since my last airport post, I flew from Detroit to London to Kolkata, arriving on June 20 after a sixteen-plus hour flight through British Airways. The changed spelling of Kolkata, formerly 'Calcutta', has been part of a national attempt to revert Indian cities from their anglicized British names to their local spellings and pronunciations. For a taste of a few cities that have been 'renamed': Bombay has changed to Mumbai, Bangalore to Bengaluru, and Madras to Chennai. As can be expected from such a drastic change that happened in the past five or so years, there are some lingering leftover terms--for instance, the airport code for Kolkata is still CCU. The difficulties in renaming seems to be an awkard but mostly accepted process--my mashi noted that there was some resisitance to 'Chennai' since the name is slang-based and even considered obscene by some. Still, this sort of complication and contradiction has been inherent to my experience in India during the past three days.

It's strange to write about my initial impressions of Kolkata because how I feel now, after three days, is incredibly different. To be honest, I was in complete culture shock in the first couple of hours after I arrived at the airport. When I stepped off the plane, almost every disparaging adjective about 'developing countries' seemed to be immediately true about India. It felt filthy. Slow. Seedy. Inefficient. Unsafe. Ugly. After being on the only flight to come in at 5 AM and waiting 90 minutes for my baggage in a dingy and dirty terminal alone, I found solace in
seeing Boni mashi and her husband, Hari uncle, for the first time in eight years. But as we stepped outside the airport and waited for a taxi, I caught eye contact with a dusty streetgirl, begging, "Didi (older sister in Bengali), please, didi..." I mirrored my mashi, peeling my own face away from the girl who couldn't be more than nine, and tried to saturate my mood with memories from my last visit and her enthusiasm.

As our taxi darted in front of, between, and almost through rickshaws, pedestrians, and other taxis and cars, I couldn't shake my feeling of disgust as I saw dellapitated buildings and palpably poor people. Indians blackened from the sun-blistering labor with toothy smiles seemed to be everywhere in the outskirts of Kolkata, hobbling on the sides of the roads while we zipped by.

As I collapsed into bed at my mashi's house for a jetlagged nap that lasted most of the day, I searched my brain for these memories of Calcutta--was there really this much poverty eight years ago? Didn't everyone tell me that India was much more modern now? Why did it hurt to see these conditions and these people? Aren't I the eternal humanitarian? Haven't I seen this before--in Jamaica and Puerto Rico? If this was my India, why could I barely bear to look at it? How was I supposed to survive in this strange place where I just couldn't belong?

Strangely enough, I now think my first reactions were rooted not in rejection, but rather, connection to what I was seeing. Although I have seen and worked with poor people before, there was something disturbingly painful about seeing the suffering of so many people that looked like me. Simply by living in the United States, I never realized how much I had become detached to the specific poverty of my own people. I may have heard regurgitated 'some Indians live on less than a dollar a day'-statistics, but because of my own American middle-class college student identity, I never personally processed it. However obvious it sounds, when confronted with what felt like seas of poor Indians, I had to recognize that while I may be lucky enough to escape this purely because of my parents' sacrifices, I certainly had no idea how much of my own family and race was not. Sadly, I find myself flailing for words to describe this experience for an outsider. I suppose the best I can come up with is to cast your own reflection in poverty and multiply it by millions--to assume it would be humanizing is a euphemism, as if you'd want to reach out and hug them all. If you aren't a better person than me, which you very well may be, I wouldn't be surprised if you wanted to run like hell away from this place.

But it's funny how much can change in three days. As my mashi advised on our ride home, "Monica, India is a place of so much good and so much bad. It's up to you to decide what you want to keep." To see only these terrible things is completely innaccurate about a place like Kolkata, where life is certainly not easy yet all sorts of wonderful at the same time.

I'll detail more about Kolkata later, but in light of my mashi's words, I can't leave this post so one-sided for my darling readers. What seems so clear to me now as I dash the streets of Kolkata in our death-defying cabs (hopefully video-footage soon to come) is the beautiful array of colors in almost everyone's wardrobe, poor and rich alike. But please, don't misunderstand my observation as a travel writer's playful remark. I've read and heard many people call India generally 'colorful', as if the country is a crafted photo reproduction of life at best, or a daughter who's discovered her mother's makeup at worst. More accurately, I mean that Kolkata's color lets me see how whitewashed and ashy the the United States seems to be. If clothing mimics local hues, then it's so accident Americans find themselves wearing sterile whites, asphalt grays, and wood panel khakis. As my mashi asked, seeing my own light gray khaki pants, "Do you need to get those cleaned? What color is that supposed to be?" My grandmother, who's visited the U.S. several times, tried to unsuccessfully vouch for me, "They do wear those light colors," as if I'd personally bleached out the natural color before modeling them.

But can I blame my mashi or my grandmother? I see the rich reds from the krishna shuru flowers on the tree by the terrace, as the orange sun overhangs on a bed of blue. The buildings and shops, however old and worn down, are almost all washed in shades of peach paint or mint green. I even notice the shirts workers wear to the office, tinted a light violet--my father once explained because of the most common brand of cheap Indian detergent. But even that seems to be a joke on me and my American khakis...

With luck, lots of pretty pics soon to come, as well as exciting family discoveries.

And we start from here.

I would venture to call myself a researcher. A young and naïve researcher, of course, since I am barely over two decades old, but a researcher nonetheless. I find myself constantly asking why and how, causes and consequences, reasons and remedies.

And yet, the curious thing about many researchers is that despite all our questions, we often miss the subject right in front of us.

During the past three years that I’ve spent in James Madison College at Michigan State University (go green!), I have devoted myself to studying what most would consider abstract tragedies--rampant underdevelopment, mass onslaughts of sexual assault, genocides and gendercides. My academic research primarily has circled the African continent, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Sudan.

A year ago, if asked where I expected to be this summer, I easily would have answered, “Tanzania,” “Kenya,” “South Africa,” or another of the fifty-something African nations I still hope to visit one day.

Yet the title of this blog gives away that those summer plans have moved to the wayside. As I write now, I am sitting alone at the Detroit Metro Airport, eagerly awaiting my flight to India--a country I last visited with my family when I was in seventh grade. I stayed in Calcutta and Delhi for a little over three weeks, with a few other sightseeing stops, such as in Agra. If you can imagine what most teenagers are like, I assure you I was no different--our family album has photographs of me in pure angst and lankiness at the Taj Mahal. Even one of the world’s wonders could barely dent my thirteen-year-old torment.

Since that trip eight years ago, the relationship between me and India has been tenuous, if not completely estranged. By most standards of Indianess (yes, some of my white friends may be amazed there is even such a thing), I haven’t fared well. I’m not pre-med. I don’t bhangra. I can’t speak Bengali or Hindi. I can probably count the number of Indian friends I have on two hands. For all intensive stereotypical purposes, I joke that I am a self-proclaimed ‘coconut’--i.e. “brown on the outside, white on the inside.”

As ridiculous as the coconut metaphor might sound, at the core is a clear shard of truth in the joke. I know virtually nothing about my heritage and family history beyond my parents and my younger brother. I couldn’t tell you my grandparents’ first names, let alone any of the anecdotes and stories that comprise their lives. I haven’t met the vast majority of my relatives, and of the few I know, I’m not sure how we’re even linked to begin with. To be frank, I don’t know where I came from.

So we start from here. From June 18 until August 6, I am devoted to uncovering my India story. I arrive on June 20 in Kolkata to see my mother’s family (her sister, mother, and my cousin Avi). A few days later, I go on a whirlwind trip with my father’s brother to visit his side of the family. From July 8 to 28, I get to be part of an international student seminar by my uncle’s nonprofit, the India Foundation. The seminar, titled “The India Story,” appears to be a multidisciplinary crash-course on the nation I have neglected for so long, including everything from ecology and geology to classical dance and sightseeing. Also sandwiched into this exciting trip is three weeks with my boyfriend, the famous circumnavigator, Nick Micinski, as well as even a chance to learn reiki, an alternative healing practice.

For more reasons than I can detail in this brief post, there is something about the identity of an Indian American that is worth investigating. Cultural negotiation, assimilation, and the immigrant experience are alive and well--I hope you will join me on my journey.