riding in crash position

Kolkata, India
November 6, 2005

Every time I have come to India I have landed in Kolkata. And every time I make the journey from the airport on the outskirts of town into the megapolis of this beautiful hell hole, I feel astoundment and deep fear that this life experience is not a dream or at least is not softened like the dreams I am used to calling my waking life. That humanity can exist and thrive and be so colorful so close to death is paralyzing at the same time that it is jaw droppingly amazing in its beauty and elegance.

I shared the taxi with Steve and on this glorious night that Hindus were still celebrating Diwali, the festival of lights for the birth of Krishna, and the Muslims celebrated Eid, the end of a month of Ramadan fasting, all joyous and in the streets with musics live and recorded, thumping from large speakers too small for the volume being outputted and from bands of musicians parading through the streets with a variety of orchestrations from Indian marching band all the way around to Scottish bagpipe with knee length kilts and socks riding high, it was Las Vegas meets Mad Max meets Blade Runner meets Fellini.

Steve has spent three years off and on in India doing things that he would later tell me about that I had to use both hands to pick my jaw up from the floor after hearing but who was currently donating three months of work to an NGO to test and teach local farmers how to create a non-synthetic based microbial soup, a biofertilizer that would save them money, add years to their life because they wouldn’t be applying agent orange-like chemicals to the ground, and stick a thorn in the side of the agrochemical industry/mafia who were the same multi national corporations who also made arms so that people could kill each other. Steve describes himself as a committed activist, a revolutionary, and despite his "naughty boy" past, he confessed that he was finally ready for some reform on this front, at least enough to slowdown and live a kind of life that he had never been ready for before – one with a future.

Being in the backseat with him as we weaved in and out of busses coughing and belching smoke from the exhaust and dust from the roads, motorcycles and auto rickshaws, and other 1950s era British designed Ambassador taxis – the ubiquitous Kolkata automobile – all shouting through horns deep and bright, a post modern symphony of chaotic and ecstatic humechanic conversation. I knew that he had been here for some time – a veteran – because while I continued to pile my bags between my legs and around me, straight arming the seat in front of me, ducking and weaving my head with each near miss of a crossing pedestrian or triple club sandwich merge where our car was the crispy bacon in the middle, he would barely insert the slightest pause, the subtlest glance forward in the midst of another of his great stories. I was the only one in the car flinching. Steve referred to the driver who had one hand on the stearing wheel and one hand on the horn, as a Jedi master who was with the force. Steve, unlike me, wasn’t transfixed on the road in front of us and the jumping pedestrians around us. Everyone else had assumed the roll of the joyous pinball in the humanity’s arcade game.

I never feel closer to the tentativeness of my own existence than I do while diffusing into the cellular membrane of this wonderfully frightening place, that people either love or hate, called Kolkata. I for one love this place despite the way it makes me want to wear diapers in trying to get across town in a taxi.

It is the life that is on the street, right in front of you, nothing seems hidden away in the privacy of people’s homes. Celebration, food, family, prayer, gathering, social confluence of every type and the flirting and fighting that come along for the dance of this existence. People here live with each other and like no other place, it is a shared humanity that inspires a fresh joy and vulnerability within me.

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more stories from being on the road in India: http://www.rakuloren.com/india/writings/StoriesFromTheRoadIndia.htm

see "coming into the country (again)" about the last time i rode into kolkata