Sane on Sudder St

The plan was for Peter to get to Calcutta before I got there, so we could meet, get some supplies, and fly out to the Northeast immediately. As luck would have it, he ran into problems in Delhi with Canon not fixing his 1Ds Mk II properly (that bloody err99 problem), and I wound up with the prospect of having to spend 2 days on my own in Calcutta. Last night, however, he was consumed with guilt and worry about my safety so he caught a late night flight to meet me, without telling me in advance. When he got to my hotel at two in the morning (2 a.m. in Calcutta, especially in Sudder St, is not a pleasant place to be in), the hotel manager happily told him: “Your lady friend went off with a Mexican woman and said she’d be back tomorrow morning!”

Obviously that sounded like a dodgy prospect, which led him to curse at what he thought was my skipping off after every exotic skirt I meet. I had to spend the morning persuading him otherwise: “She has a girlfriend!” (“Yeah did you ask her that at 6 this morning? I had to tell the hotel I was your husband before they let me stay!”) The truth was, Alex and I were the only two girls on our own on Sudder St, the other foreigners in their respective ethnic cliques (French, German, etc), and when you’re alone in a place like that, it takes only a few minutes before you start losing it. Especially when dodgy old men are following you shouting “Pot? Marijuana? I have good stuff!”... a girly ‘summer camp’ staying up talking about how much we miss our girls, puts everything wrong about night time Cal right.

This place is crazy, in more ways than one, but as my first Indian city, it’ll always stick closely to my heart. And when I miss India, what I miss are the Bengali sweets, the adda, the Calcutta Indian Coffee House, beautiful strains of Bengali as read by Tagore, and that little finger-to-finger handshake greeting I learned from the heartbreakingly beautiful street children.