Jalebi Yatra

Jagot Chekanidhara, the subject of my latest NYT post and the father of my host family, died this morning at his home near the Dorpang River in upper Assam.

Two weeks ago he developed a respiratory infection. At the local health center eight kilometers away, he was diagnosed with low blood pressure, and given an IV drip and a vitamin shot. We took him home, and the next day he was admitted to the North Lakhimpur Civil Hospital, in the district capital, where he was diagnosed with anemia and given blood transfusions. The doctors at both hospitals were diagnosing his symptoms and not treating the infection that was causing them. 

By the time we took him to Guwahati one week ago, he was in septic shock. After a bumpy nine-hour ambulance ride, he was admitted to the ICU at the privately-run Dispur Hospital, one of the best in Assam. For five days, the doctors pumped him full of medicines to cleanse his body and regain the function of his major organs, which were shutting down.

Every night that Jagot was in the ICU his wife slept on the floor of the waiting room. She would not rest in a lodge just thirty second walk from the hospital’s front door. During visiting hours each day, she would look at her husband hooked up to the respirator and walk out of the ICU muttering “bhal na hoy”, he will not get better. 

Saddled with 4,000 USD in medical bills, his family decided to take him off ventilator support and bring him home to die. Nine bumpy hours later, we arrived by jeep ambulance to his home. It was past midnight and half the village was assembled on the front porch to meet him. He survived another day.

His body was laid out where he used to milk and feed his four cows. We sprinkled petals from his flower garden on the white sheet covering his body. 

A note on getting there: Between landslides and bandhs (general strikes), travel in northeast India is an exercise in improvisation. To visit the bamboo bridge described in this post, I began with a night beside the Siang in an Adi household sleeping next to the fire. In the morning, I bumped along on broken roads in the back of a pick-up truck bound for mandarin oranges groves upriver. The crew in the cab took pity on me and handed back a bundled blue tarp to use as a cushion against the metal bruising my butt.  

To get back downriver, I climbed into the bed of an elderly Arunachal State Department of Power dump truck amidst rusty body parts that had fallen off en-route. Luckily, the radiator was snugly strapped in place with strips of rubber, and the hoses siphoning diesel from plastic jugs in the front seat to the engine were not leaking. The truck, piloted by a cheery crew of three, was headed for repairs in Assam.

The sun setting beyond the tea gardens washed pale colors into the sky and gave the Dibru River an ethereal sheen. 

Self-taught ornithologist and photographer Sanjay Das was pulling into the ghat with a boatload of thirty school children in matching red woolen sweaters. Sanjay had guided the students on a field trip through Dibru Saikhowa National Park, his home-turf. 

Though having seen Ganges river dolphins hundreds of times (he’s participated in dolphin surveys on the entire course of the Brahmaputra in Assam), Sanjay excitedly reported that the kids saw three today. 

After a meeting in Tinsukia town with a local NGO worker, I arrived at Guijan ghat, the entrance to Dibru Saikhowa National Park, in time to enjoy a last sunset on the Dibru River. Later in the evening I would head back to Guwahati on the overnight Rajdhani Express.

Firewood gathering expeditions in country boats were returning to the ghat laden with bundles of sticks. Once the women hauled the bundles up the steps of the ghat, they loaded them onto their heads or bicycles for the walk home. 

After nearly three months in Kolkata, I was itching for fresh air and natural surroundings. I found both in and around Dibru Saikhowa National Park on an early-morning bird watching expedition and an afternoon boat trip the following day.

Dibru Saikhowa, a salix swamp forest, is an island in the Dibru River in upper Assam. Home to the endangered white-winged wood duck, the park is known for its diversity of birds, many of which are rare like the www duck. The other draw is Gangetic dolphins that swim in the channels around the island, especially at the confluence of tributaries. 

On the side of a workshop about climate change adaptation, I made an early morning bird-watching visit to a wetlands area adjacent to the park called Maguri Beel. Ruddy Shelducks (pictured) flew into gatherings of Asian Openbill Storks. Bar-headed geese, one of the highest flying birds in the world’s skies, convened off on their own. Purple swamphens nestled in the hyacinths that locals had installed to attract the tiny fish they love to fry.

The day after the workshop, I joined two Guwahati-based journalists for an afternoon boat ride on the Dibru River and a stroll on the island park. 

We launched from Guijan Ghat where, in one corner, a crowd of men conducted the afternoon’s fish trading. After weighing the catches on a balance scale, middlemen slid small silvery fish into plastic buckets and metal canisters by the hundreds. Schoolboys then jockeyed the fish to a waiting jeep. 

On the water, residents of the riverine island crowded into a country boat. One gentleman in a purple checked lungi hoisted his clunky bike onto his shoulder and stepped aboard. With the boat loaded, the boatman began poling his way across the 300 meter wide Dibru River channel.

We headed downriver in our own boat. When I visited here two months ago, the river was swollen with the last wave of a particularly bad flood season. Now the water level was much lower, exposing a slightly eerie riverine landscape with a base of grey sedimentary deposits.

At the southern edge of the island, the bank made a vertical drop to the water. Looking at the sharp edge from our boat on the river, we could see the precariousness of this island’s existence in the sandy composition of its banks. 

The Brahmaputra River and its tributaries like the Dibru River are constantly making and breaking islands like Dibru Saikhowa by eroding the loose sedimentary material and depositing it elsewhere along the river’s course. The four hundred or so residents of this island, among an estimated million people who populate around 2500 river islands in the Brahmaputra basin, are at the mercy of this geomorphological churning.

 My compartment was pleasantly chatty on this overnight train trip to upper Assam, except for an Assamese granny who sat near the window and flashed a goofy grin when someone said something funny.

Two guys headed to Dibrugarh sat across from me: a final year med student at Dibrugarh Medical College and a 51-year old State Bank of India employee. 

Next to me was a 31-year-old Naga lady, heading home to Dimapur for Christmas. She has lived in New Delhi for a decade, first as a student at Delhi University and now as a research analyst for a US-owned executive search firm.

“You’re a headhunter”, I responded, before thinking about who my off-hand comment was directed towards. She is a member of a tribe from Nagaland, where headhunting used to be common practice. 

Male warriors collected human heads as a symbol and source of their courage. 

The practice has by and large stopped, but the label “headhunters” remains attached to the tribes of Nagaland.

When I began apologizing to my fellow train traveler for making a joke linking her profession with her tribe’s fearsome reputation, she stopped me. “It’s OK. We’re proud of it”, she said with a reassuring smile. 

She was excited to see her family in Dimapur. This was her annual visit; her last time home was last Christmas. 

The final member of our compartment, a quiet but well-spoken Naga guy who I bunked across from on the upper berth, had been home much more recently. He studies at a college in Bangalore, and had returned to Nagaland during “the Northeasterners exodus” in August when tens of thousands of people from the Northeast fled from other places in India over fears that they would be violently targeted.

These fears of mass violence against people from the Northeast, fortunately, never materialized. But it showed the potential for electronic communication to whip up hysteria--the threats to the Northeasterners had spread through mass SMSes. 

In the far corner of a parking lot outside the Guwahati train station, I peed in a fetid creek. Nearby, men working the night shift were unloading 55 kg jute sacks from a cluster of trucks. While in midstream, just 10 meters away from me, a drunk guy sat down on the cement curb separating the creek and the parking lot to slap his kid. By the time I finished peeing, he had already given him two hard whacks. 

A woman, presumably the drunk’s wife and the mother of the six year old, was trying to talk him out of taking his drunkenness out on the boy. The tumultuous trio made a sorry sight. Likely derelicts, their clothes were torn and dirty. The man’s beard was, for an Indian male, uncharacteristically untamed. 

The wife’s pleadings took on a more urgent tone after he broke a beer bottle that he had found nearby and began threatening the boy with it. To the woman’s more aggressive prostrations, he broke off more of the bottle and made an unserious lunge at her neck with the remaining jagged shard. Then he went back to threatening the kid with the glass.

I scanned the area—the few people watching from the periphery weren’t looking like they were about to do anything. I stepped in (while still maintaining a safe distance).

“Araam se, dada, araam se”, I said in my most coaxing Hindi, settle down, big brother, settle down. He looked me in the eye. “Kya hua, bolo”, I asked. Tell me what happened.

He looked up, and my foreign face seemed to bewilder him. Perhaps it was his first time speaking to a videshi (foreigner). He temporarily snapped out of whatever nightmarish intentions were driving his rage. But he still held the piece of broken bottle. 

“Bottle wahan pai rocko,”, I said, pointing to the creek. Put the bottle there. 

He looked at the creek and then at the bottle. His demeanor remained calm, and he seemed to be considering my advice. So I pressed him further.

“Bottle pani mei dallo”, I said encouragingly. Throw the bottle in the creek. Apparently convinced, he flicked the broken bottle he was still holding into the creek.

But I guess a moment later he began wondering why he had listened to this firangi who had just appeared out of the night. He started hurling slurred aggressive mumbles towards me. 

By this time, another man had arrived who seemed already acquainted with the drunk guy and his traumatized family. This man caught my eye and motioned for me to go as he stepped in between the drunk and myself. I did.

Across the parking lot, nearer to the train station, middle-aged career military men milled around camouflaged school buses. I approached one of them. “There’s a really drunk guy over there beating his kid. He has a broken bottle. Who knows what he will do”, I told him in simple, deliberately pronounced Hindi. 

“This happens here” he responded with a half-smile.

Next I tried two “on-duty” policemen sitting in chairs even closer to the railway station. I made the same entreaty for them to investigate the matter. Unfazed, the older cop have directions to the younger one who then walked off in the direction of the railways station—in the opposite direction of the violent drunk. 

As I entered the station, I was feeling shitty that I had not stuck around until the child was safely out of his father’s grasp. 

Seven years ago, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh flagged off a car rally in Guwahati that was bound for Indonesia. Yesterday, that rally, in its second iteration this time in the opposite direction, officially ended (“flagged down” in rally terminology) in Guwahati. 

For the ASEAN-India car rally, eight ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries and India fielded teams to drive identical Mahindra 500 SUVs from Yogyakarta in Central Java to the capital of Assam in Northeast India. On the way, they clocked over 8,000 km and passed thru eleven countries.

The Assam State government pulled out all the stops for the “flag down”. Dance troupes from every state in Assam gave a choreographed tour through the “Seven Sisters”, as the regional grouping of seven states is called. Assamese rocker Joy Boruah excited the thousands of school kids in attendance, bused in to fill the stadium’s stands. And the Assam State Police’s Panther Unit performed daring tricks on their Royal Enfield Bullets. 

The rally, a diplomatic publicity stunt commemorating twenty years of India-ASEAN relations, was intended to promote connectivity between Southeast Asia and India through northeast India. “Northeast India is not an enclave, but a gateway between Southeast Asia and India,” said the Commerce Minister of Cambodia, speaking at the rally in Guwahati. 

In the twenty years since India initiated its “Look East” policy, it has tried to link the subcontinent with Southeast Asia through Northeast India. Geographically and culturally, this makes sense, but it remains an elusive aspiration.

Myanmar’s isolation and wars with ethnic armies on its periphery have put a block on India’s land connectivity to Southeast Asia. But its recent reformist attitude and increasing openness marked by India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s historic visit in May could change all this. 

Still, hurdles remain. Drama ensued in the Northeastern state of Manipur a day before the rally was to reach its final destination in Guwahati. An organization representing the Kukis, a minority tribe in Manipur demanding a separate state, threatened to blockade the national highway and halt the rally. The blockade never materialized, but still the threat served to highlight ongoing ethnic tensions in Northeast India. 

Blockades and bandhs¬, or general strikes, have become the preferred tactics for a multitude of political organizations and are commonplace in the Northeast. They are a drag on trade, contributing to the slow pace of economic development in the region.

And then there’s the actual roads themselves. Rally drivers reported good road conditions (the best in Malayasia), except in parts of Myanmar and northeast India. 

Isyanto, a member of Indonesia’s rally team, recalled especially poor road conditions in a hilly section of Myanmar after just crossing over the border from Thailand.  “The road is stone, not pavement. It’s 100 or 200 meters down with no fence. If you slip the car, you are dead.”

Yet Isyanto’s fondest memories of the rally came from these same parts of Myanmar where the road conditions were the worst. “In Myanmar, people are very poor but they welcomed us sincerely with smiles and food. Whatever they had, they gave to us.”

Members of Indonesia's rally team.

On my way to the metro a baby was crying on the footpath.  She was lying on a sheet of yesterday’s newspaper, bulging plastic sacks of her family’s belongings piled behind her. 

For twenty meters down each way of the footpath there were no people, let alone someone attending to this upset child. Likely her mother was sorting trash just around the corner, the curious toddlers assigned to watch their little sister having wandered off. I thought about comforting the child, but, instead, turned away and walked on to enter the metro station. 

I was already in a funky mood due to my destination, and the crying baby was disconcerting. But my reaction was oddly reassuring. Not trying to comfort her meant that I had already put up an emotional shield and was ready for the night.

I was on my way to the oldest and largest brothel area in Kolkata—Sonagachi.  

An NGO worker in a different red light district in Kolkata said that if his organization tried to do the same work in Sonagachi “they would all be dead in a week.” The brothel owners would see to it.

Only NGOs doing health work are tolerated there. Earlier in the day, those organizations were likely doing AIDs education work. It was Saturday, December 1st, World AIDs Day. 

I had commemorated the occasion in a smaller red light area near the famous Kalighat Mandir. All of the sex workers there were invited to New Light, a shelter supporting the prostitutes and their kids, for an education program and special lunch. As a volunteer at New Light, I also attended.

The celebration afforded me a rare opportunity to speak with these women. In the evenings on my way to tutor their kids at New Light, I pass them in their thick make-up and eye-catching saris waiting for customers at the entrance to narrow alleyways. I don’t even make eye contact with them most of the time; with only a few do I have light conversations in Bangla. 

But today they were cajoling me to photograph them with their children and with each other on New Light’s sunny terrace. Inside the shelter, we sat together listening to New Light founder and head, Urmi Basu, honor each staff member. Sitting beside them, I asked about their age and where they came from and how long they had lived in Kolkata. 

A slim, 28 year old, mother of three, said in fluent Bengali “Jokhon chota, Nepal theke eshechi”, when I was small I came from Nepal. She was serene, and I thought I would try to dig deeper into her past by searching for a childhood memory. I asked her whether she ever thought about the mountains of Nepal, but she shrugged off my question like it wasn’t even a thought. Her life, and her business, are in Kolkata.  

I connected to other women by talking about their respective children at New Light whose liveliness and warmth I have come to love. “Apnar khub bhalo chele achey”, I said to one (you have a very nice boy). “Badmash”, she corrected me with a betel-stained smile, “[he’s a] naughty guy”. 

So why, following a meaningful afternoon meeting these women, would I then, come nighttime, visit Sonagachi? 

In 2010, while a graduate student in Washington, DC, I wrote a country report on India’s human trafficking situation for an anti-trafficking organization. Doing that research gave me an understanding about sex trafficking and prostitution in India from 30,000 feet. I learned that there are three million prostitutes in India, up to 40% of whom are below the age of eighteen. That’s over a million child prostitutes. The scale is staggering for a statistic in which even one is too many.

Though knowing statistics like this one, while useful, can provide a false sense of knowing the problem. The perspective from 30,000 feet needs focusing through firsthand observation. To go deeper, I needed to visit. 

This trip to Sonagachi was to be a step in that direction. My goals were to make initial observations and get more comfortable moving around in the seedy milieu. 

In the Kalighat red light district where New Light is located, the prostitutes are almost all over 25, many of them past their “prime” (as pimps and patrons derisively say in that line of work).  They are not the fresh trafficking victims arriving daily into Kolkata from other parts of India and Nepal.

To see this, I would have to go to Sonagachi, where brothels so vast and windy you can get lost in them hide recent trafficking victims from nobody who is looking for them. 

You know when you arrive in Sonagachi. Prostitutes are everywhere. Many were dressed in sarees. Others wore miniskirts or tight western clothes in outrageous colors.

I immediately clung to a seasoned paan wallah to ask the lay of the land and gain my composure. After swigging dark rum I carried to help keep up my nerve, I started walking past the prostitutes lining the road, going deeper into Sonagachi. I busied myself with keeping a mental count of prostitutes I passed. When I counted a hundred—in less than a minute—I abandoned the effort.

At the doors to crumbling buildings, groups of five or six prostitutes scanned the road for customers. They threw lustful glances, called out “you fucking me”, and even grabbed me by the clothes. One wouldn’t let go of my left sleeve and the bracelet of cloth thread on my right hand. 

I thought back to the group of 16 and 17 year-old students from America with whom I tied this bracelet in July as a pact to work together during our month-long trip in Ladakh. The sex worker that wouldn’t let me go is a year or two older than those students. “Asho”, come, her grip tightening even more. I repeatedly told her “didi, ami chai na” (sister, I don’t want), but this was not convincing her to let me go.

Using physical force to free myself might have caused a scene. I called out to her madam who was standing in a nearby doorway. The old woman, probably herself once a prostitute, arrived on the scene to admonish “her” girl. The young lady’s grip loosened on my bracelet.

In Sonagachi, there are prostitutes that stand on the street and find their own customers, and there are prostitutes that are kept in brothels. Pimps bring customers inside the brothel to choose from prostitutes that are lined up or to browse inside rooms where prostitutes are waiting. 

One pimp standing at the door of the brothel used his “girls from Himalaya” as his selling point. “You fucking, one thousand rupees” (about 20 dollars). He gave me his word that he would not pressure me into buying sex, and I entered the brothel. 

Groups of three and four girls in their mid to late teens were relaxing on big beds in a row of four pink rooms. They were listening to earphones, fixing each other’s hair, and chatting. You could mistake them for teenage girls anywhere else—if not for their sordid surroundings in Sonagachi.  

Outside, groups of giddy guys, not past college-age, prowled the lanes. Older men, who in India were almost surely married with children, passed alone. A teenage son struggled to carry the weight of his father who was slumped over his shoulder, drunk and mumbling nonsense. Packs of men loitered, leaning on bikes, spitting paan, and smoking.  

The stench of piss mingled with smoke from cheap tobacco. A sex-worker lewdly called out to a middle-aged guy, embarrassing him so that he quickened his pace. 

Another guy came from the other direction, grabbed the butt cheek of another sex worker, and nonchalantly waived off the abuses she showered on him without missing a stride 

Focusing my eyes on the lane’s periphery, at least once a minute I saw sex workers lead men to tiny rooms tucked away in dark alleys. 

When I left Sonagachi and passed the last prostitute hanging on the periphery, I text messaged my girlfriend, Melati, who is currently working in Indonesia. “OK, I am out of there.  It’s a piss hole where I am sure angels have died.”

Estimates for the number of sex workers in Sonagachi are all above 10,000. But this number may soon fall. Innovation in one of the oldest professions has caused areas like Sonagachi to struggle.

Wider access to mobile phones has directly connected customers with sex workers who make house calls. The newspapers here are filled with advertisements for “massage” services listed next to mobile phone numbers. 

This has granted sex workers a greater share in their earnings and given them greater authority over customer selection and practicing “safe” sex. 

But it has also made AIDs prevention work more difficult, as Gardiner Harris recently reported in the New York Times. The rise in sex work arranged by mobile phone has dampened demand in brothel areas like Sonagachi and its equivalents in Bombay and New Delhi. With sex workers now dispersed throughout the city, public health workers no longer have a concentrated area in which to distribute condoms and increase awareness of AIDs and other sexually transmitted infections. 

It’s painful to justify the existence of neighborhoods like Sonagachi. It’s a horrible place. But burning it down won’t incinerate the demand for paid sex, and it’s true that AIDs awareness campaigns focused on Sonagachi and other areas have been effective in curbing an impending epidemic.

The morning after my visit to Sonagachi I took five boys from New Light to Calcutta’s Botanical Gardens on the banks of the Hooghly River. We gawked at the world’s largest banyan tree, laughed at the swooning couples hiding under bushes, and picnicked on masala chips, chicken, and winter oranges beside the Hooghly.  Their energy and antics preoccupied me from thinking about what I had seen in Sonagachi the night before. 

After dropping off the boys at the shelter, I saw one of the sex workers who I had chatted with at the New Light celebration. She was scanning the road for early evening customers, and we passed in silence. Our eyes connected, and we greeted each other with a quick tilt of the head. 

I was walking home past the Kalighat metro station just beyond the stretch of sidewalk where I saw the baby crying. Hoping to confirm the baby’s well-being, I walked slowly past the cluster of families cooking and relaxing on the walkway. A toddler serenely approached me with a stick in his hand. On the end of the stick was a docile sparrow. When I bent down for closer inspection, the boy brought the sparrow to his chest, caressed it, and held it out to me with a soft smile. 

The evening tutoring sessions at New Light--a shelter for the kids of sex workers in the Kalighat red light district--kicks off with five minutes of meditation. The students sit in sukasana—their backs straight and eyelids closed. Their forefingers and thumbs form a point towards the sky in chin mudra. It’s a daily repose, from the students’ often chaotic lives in which they face tough challenges at home and in overcrowded schools.

Some days, they transition into their evening study with a yoga session. From the three year olds to the eighteen year olds, students stretch to the sky, lunge, and twist. Tree pose is an unbalancing act that sends toddlers careening into one another and giggles around the room. But now standing upright, with eighty pairs of hands in prayer position, there is—just for a moment—stillness in the New Light world. 

In a crude Styrofoam raft, Ganesh paddles around a giant clay arm sticking out of the river. The arm is the remains of a Kali idol that was immersed a week ago during Kali Puja. Ganesh is a 24 year-old with sharp eyes and a sad, goat-teed face looking for plastic bottles and other recyclables that he can sell. 

He lives in the community of super untouchables between the Kalighat cremation grounds and the stinky Adi Ganga river that feeds into the Hooghly. Members of this community tend to the cremation ground. In caste hierarchy they are the dirtiest of the dirty--lower in the untouchable social strata than even the trash collectors and latrine cleaners. 

Ganesh swivels his Styrofoam raft to sift through another pile of debris, and I catch sight of the words on the back of his shirt: “Attitude comes in little packages.”

Beside the river along a cement buttress for the bridge to Alipore, three young ladies from Ganesh’s community slosh buckets of water. Puja, 15, is shampooing her hair. Sopna, Puja’s older sister, is rinsing the clothes she just scrubbed, and 13 year old Jamuna is cleaning plates from lunch. Every now and then their cleansing activities devolve into splash fights.  

Their water source is a big leaky pipe that runs overhead along the bottom of the bridge to Alipore. A tarp is jerry-rigged to catch some of the leakage and channel it into a steady stream to the ladies’ below.