Riding for my life in Calcutta
Added on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
Travel across Calcutta is an eye-opening experience.
After a day driving around the customs offices of Calcutta airport, my freight handler Bishur was starting to answer his phone with a faux English accent before falling back into Hindi. As usual the cargo export people, whilst genuinely delighted to deal with something other than a box, were confused about how to deal with the consignment. In the Thai airlines office an underling made me declare that the air had been released from the tyres followed the bombshell that the bike had now to be properly crated instead of being allowed to stand on an aluminium base. Bishur immediately called the boss of Thai who rescinded that commitment. That seemingly insignificant action would have lost me three days.
Driving to and from various buildings, nobody seemed to know what to do with the ASA carnet. A custom official got into the car next to me, his mouth full of pan. Made up of fresh betelnuts, catechu, cardamom and lime it’s the perfect mouth freshener but when tobacco is added the concept changes. An Indian will keep the package tucked neatly in his mouth absorbing the nutrient before gobbing out accumulated saliva that has sat under his tongue as a pool of red paste. Most corners of India’s buildings and streets show the strain of generations of men who leave it there as a part of the rhythm of their life. “Carnet, tikka, achcha!” I think he said, and nodded sideways to indicate that everything was fine, even if it wasn’t. Bishur told me that not all the officials has seen a carnet before and we were working with the ones who knew nothing. Five hours later the job was done. On the way back to the city we stopped at lights where an old begger woman stuck her can against my cab window reciting a mantra of poverty. This carried on until the lights changed and we drove off she swore at me with a scowl.
Calcutta is one of my favourate cities. It’s an odd choice because it isn’t clean and tidy and in a hundred years it probably will look the same tired old place but it’s where I finish my journeys across India. Any journey across this vast sub-continent is challenging, not just the clichéd way in having to deal with the poverty, but more in having to ride in such a contained way in what is the most extreme traffic conditions in the world during the monsoon which is one of the most uncomfortable climates.
Different expeditions have different issues so crossing the North Pole or any Arctic walk will be cold and frostbite or falling down a crevasse is an ongoing problem. Here, the trucks are like wild animals and every day, thousands of local people are killed in road traffic accidents. It’s a fine line between accident and manslaughter because the rules of engagement are so extreme. A truck will aim for it’s position and it’s up to you to get out of the way and if you don’t you will be crushed. Dogs fly out into the road all the time but are street wise in the way a polar bear understands the power of a gun. Water buffalo and cows continue to walk whichever way they were going while goats tend to run back to the road edge if threatened and donkeys don’t move. Smaller animals make a dash for it and birds fly low in front of your visor always looking for scraps.
Children have road sense but adults often walk across the road without having looked if any traffic is bearing down on them. I’ve missed people who had no idea I was riding at speed and would have hit them had it not been for me taking avoiding action. Fate and destiny are wrapped up in their thinking so if it’s meant to be then it will happen whatever they do. That’s the uneducated view of fatalism because in Hindu culture you are allowed to make choices but having made that choice, then that is your fate whatever happens.
The poverty does affect you, or more specifically the dirt and the debris. There is little national identity among Indian people, certainly the concept that ‘India is Great’ is known, but people are concerned mostly with their immediate environment, their homes and family, and the catastrophic landscape is not their problem. This is a fair point of action because the problem is so over whelming it cannot be contained. There are no council garbage collectors in rural areas and in the cities; the poorest people on the food chain who recycle the rubbish supplement the few that do exist.
To a westerners mindset this is debilitating. The lack of beauty is not often by the roadside. In the arctic, pristine wilderness is at your fingertips so psychologically there is an important and positive psychological imperative that has real magnitude. In India, as a road wallah, sifting deeply into your own road movie, the sh** and carcass of what is otherwise a magnificent and pleasant land dulls your appreciation of this. Yet, and yet, because of the difficulties you face riding your bike across this monumental rubbish bin you are forced to look elsewhere, to drag out of your observational skills an ability to see beyond the filth to the beauty of the people. Given the difficulties of having to survive their own massive burden of population, there are no friendlier inhabitants on earth.
And so the need to end a journey in a place like the Fairlawn, where for 27 years I have been staying with Violet and until recently her late husband Ted. At 4pm the gong sounds for afternoon tea and then again at 6pm for dinner. Just after Violet invites select guests for gin and tonics on her balcony where they both used to regail you with stories from the past. For a few moments, a day or two at most, I am safe, and alive, drinking my tea and eating my biscuits.
Outside in Sudder Street, the traders do their noisy business. I would have my breakfast in the hotel but lunch and dinner at the Blue Sky Café across the road. There, the wireless signal from Net Freaks next door would allow me to internet. My friend Biswajit was sorting out the paperwork to export the bike to Bangkok so my route across Calcutta was from the Fairlawn to his office and back. The next day I was to fly out to Bangkok.
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