Popagandhi

I’m a Singapore girl, through and through. We spend so much time wondering what makes us uniquely Singaporean, but I’ll tell you what it is: you’re half city girl and half small town; you never really know things like extreme cold or extreme heat, and monsoon to you is just that hair salon Channel 8 uses.

One people, one nation; one weather, all year: just hot. But not just hot like it is in Thailand or Cambodia, you know, because the Thais and the Cambodians know monsoon too. What are our seasons? I frankly don’t know. I’ve lived all 21 years of my life never having to think about outerwear or even think about carrying umbrellas - if it rains, well, just duck into an underpass, walk to a mall (connected by underpass) and spend your time people-watching in the air-conditioned comforts of the cafe.

Before this year monsoon to me was just another funny word. So what if it rains, right? Now I know better: there’s a good reason the alliteration, Monsoon Madness so frequently goes hand in hand with each other. It never rains but it pours. I remember walking home in the rain once with an evangelical Christian, who happily said, “It’s just God showering His blessings on us.” Well, God is really showering blessings after blessings on India and Bangladesh.

After a particularly slow week with the prospect of having to stay on in Calcutta for longer than I wanted to, we’re all grouchy and sick and… no… not again, I’m not eating at Blue Sky again, not ever talking to more French volunteers or English girls.. you just want to shut yourself up in the air-conditioned room, not think about whether or not to take out your waterproofs and brollies, and just watch some Monty Python or something. This fucking rain eh. And when it’s not raining, it’s burning in here. Some of the hottest Calcutta days have been had here of late, power going out for hours at a stretch, everywhere on this street. Monsoon is twenty hours of rain a day (Goa, last month), wading out in ankle deep water, carrying ziploc bags with you wherever you go (Calcutta, at present), electricity going out all the time (India, anytime). Accha, accha baba.

Dragging ourselves out of bed this morning to go queue up at the Bangladeshi consulate for our visas, it was one grouchy moment after the next. Two starving people deprived of sleep, standing in line, having their queues cut into all the time, and finding a bureaucratic process that simply went over and above our heads - FOREIGNERS please line 4, you have no form? Please xerox passport page, visa page, queue up again. It’s never ‘foreigners’ or ‘hey you guys there’, or ‘tourists’, but FOREIGNERS and NON-INDIANS, in that shouting way just one stop shy of ALIEN. We get to the front of the line after fending off a billion Indians - every man and his brother and boy seemed to want to go to Bangladesh or something - a German, who’d obviously lived there long enough to learn how to get ahead, before we, one Englishman and one Singaporean woman, two sticklers for order and efficiency and queues, finally made it there.

Consulate officer examining our applications: “What is you address in Bangladesh?”

Me: “No idea sir we haven’t got a hotel!”

Consulate officer: “I cannot give you visa if you don’t know your address in Bangladesh.”

I wrote Dhaka under that column. That was obviously the wrong answer.

Me: “But we’re going to find one when we get there!”

Peter: “The thing is, we’ve got loads of money, see..”

Consulate officer: “Then you write, any hotel.”

Me: “Can you tell me the name of any hotel?”

Consulate officer: “Write there… under Address… ANY HOTEL, Bangladesh.”

Now you know, boys and girls, if you ever go to Bangladesh and don’t know what hotel you want to stay at, just write in the embarkation card and visa application form: ANY HOTEL. That’s the correct answer. If they say no, tell them Calcutta says so.

Turning to Peter, he continues to say: “You sir, write… ANY HOTEL (3 STAR ABOVE).”

After the whole visa fiasco we had to pick up our cameras from Canon. In India, if you’re ever lost, you just need to stand around and look quizzically at a piece of paper. At least 5 people will gather around to help you, talk among themselves to determine the precise location, pass around the paper with the address written on it, each examining it intently, all of them necessarily disagreeing with each other, stopping random strangers to ask “do you know this place” (or so I assume, though it could very well be “do you want some chai”), then these strangers stopping to do all the same things right up to hailing more strangers, including motorists by the road who actually do stop to stare intently at the paper and do all those other steps. Then at the precise moment when you’ve started to think this is all futile and you’re hungry, a taxi will pull up right into the middle of this group, and offer to whisk you away to that place for 50 rupees.

Accha accha.

After some coffee at the Indian Coffee House, all our angst faded off. The Indian Coffee House on College St is that kind of place in which you can’t stay angry for long, for coffee isn’t just coffee at the ICH. It charms you with its history, faded walls, waiters with fancy hats. You’d be sitting in a corner where students from the University of Calcutta across the street might be plotting resistance to the British, where you imagine conspiracies abound over coffee and letters were written here by great Bengali minds to their counterparts, to Einstein or to TS Eliot, or deep soulful discussions on Tagore and Keats. That’s the Calcutta Indian Coffee House for you. Basking in this ICH-love, we step out into a street full of nothing but books, streets after streets and alleys full of books spilling onto the roads, rickshaws carrying books, got into a taxi and smelled this beautiful strain in the air. It was the smell of the air, tentative before the rain. Hesitation before the monsoons. The two of us, jaded by travel and by India after all these months, looked out in the streets again, properly this time, and remembered why we were here. For the love of India, India eh, acchaccha.

You could almost forgive the monsoon when there’s so much love in the air.