A Bag of Chicken, A Bag of Rice, A Girl in the Back of a Truck

The chicken bags are dripping blood juice. We’re standing in a line, me, the Fulbright teaching assistants, and about forty to fifty local volunteers, passing sticky bags of freshly butchered poultry from one of several delivery trucks to the kitchen tent at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, a makeshift flood relief center in the middle of a city turned to water. It’s been about a month now. Since the end of the rainy season, the rivers to the north have been slowly moving south, past the sandbags and retaining walls erected around the Chao Phraya River, filling Thailand’s capital. Twenty-three of the fifty districts in the city are affected, mostly the poorer areas, and today about 200 of us will prepare, package, and deliver meals to roughly 45,000 people displaced by the largest natural disaster to affect the region in over half a century. Tomorrow we’ll do 60,000. Give or take, the monks at the monastery down the street prepare food for an additional 15,000 affected residents, and there are other centers also. Small pockets of volunteers are scattered throughout Bangkok, men and women and students and children who have put their lives on hold, coming when they can, before and after work and classes. Beginning at two am in the morning the effort runs until I don’t know when. I have no idea how many of these centers there are, or how many people are in need of them, how it works as smoothly as it does. Also, we’re operating without government assistance.  The army’s here, providing tucks and muscle, but, oddly, the government, elected to operate and protect the country, is not.

“We refuse to work with them,” my adviser informs us, “they can’t be trusted. If we want to help each other, we have to do it for ourselves.” She laughs when she says this, like she’s serious but only partially. Oddly, she’s always laughing. I’m not sure what to think. Back home it seems to me we’d be in an uproar if the government didn’t rush to save us. Here, on the other hand, it seems people just dig in and work.

           

The bags of chicken pass from one set of hands to another. Rubber-banded shut, they leak. Blood-juice is on my fingers, on my forearms, on my face. There’s no way I’m not getting salmonella. This, I accept. It reminds me of killing chickens back at the farm in Wisconsin where I worked before I started grad-school, though here there’s considerably more fowl, over a ton of butchered birds in plastic bags which the cooks will eventually turn to curry. I continue moving meat. The girl ahead of me, though, an attractive and skinny vegetarian from Harvard, has had enough.

           

“Can’t do it,” she says, putting her hands up, shaking her head, and walking toward the station where a group of other Fulbrights stand at a line of tables stirring rice. The rest of us laugh—deep down, those that know her knew she wouldn’t make it—but only for a moment. The line requires a certain amount of regularity, a fast and steady pace that can’t be broken. If a person slows or pauses or gets distracted for any real duration they end up with a bag of soggy chicken to the chest and the line backs up and has to be restarted. Also, the woman on the mega-phone will yell at us, which isn’t what we want. What we want is to get the chicken from the truck and to the kitchen as quickly as we can, which takes about an hour. It’s hot, and the sun is baking down on us between the trees, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it except to grab what they’re handed and pass it on. Behind me, a chubby kid with glasses drops a bag between his fingers and chicken splashes on the floor, a pink and fleshy pile.

Today is also the first day I’ve met any of the other people in my program. Stationed in various small towns at schools and universities across the country, the heart and soul of the Fulbright program are the English Teaching Assistants, of which there’s roughly twenty. The ETA’s are young and eager and excited to be here. Most of them have just graduated college and they have that look in their eyes specifically reserved for the hopeful and the radically un-jaded, those rare and special souls for whom the world is still full of possibility, openings, doors. The rest of us, researchers with grants to pursue our own agendas and stationed primarily in Bangkok, are a little older, more weathered maybe, more rough around the edges, though we’re excited also. The ETA’s rub off on us, make us young again and ready to be of help in a place and point in time that has no need for anything but faith and effort. Our faith is that eventually the water will recede and people will be able to go back to their houses and rebuild them. Our effort is aimed at the time and place until then, the uncertain space in which so many have so little, and so we gather together at the University, the Monastery, where ever it is a center has been set up, and we stand in lines together passing bags of meat.

This, to me, is necessary. I have been in Thailand for approximately three months, living in a relatively unaffected area, holed up in my apartment. I read and write and exercise and cook. I go out sometimes, but only sometimes, to parts of the city reachable by sky train, and I have yet to see, feel, or experience the flood in any significant way. For me, it isn’t really happening, though people have died and homes have been destroyed. I have empathy but it isn’t actually empathy. I want the waters to recede and things to start again and run again, but it isn’t real, the wanting for these things to happen, because the desire, at least until today, remained, for the most part, abstract, a reaction relegated to a place which is not a place at all but an idea of how one is supposed to feel given the crises of a situation that one has only heard is real, a responsibility to respond but not the response itself, an obligation. Feeling from afar, unfortunately, is not enough, not when there is work to be done. And it is nice to have the chance, finally, to do it.

           

A couple hours later, after the chicken line is finished, after the vegetables, too, in a line, are moved into the kitchen where an army of cooks have already starting chopping and throwing things in oil, the pretty vegetarian and I are in the back of a gigantic camouflaged truck, ten pound bags of rice and miscellaneous provisions flying through the air in our direction, thrown at us by a group of young marines on the ground below. I catch them as best I can and, in a single motion, keep them flying backwards where every now and then Rachel takes a bag in the chest before she’s ready and ends up on her back against the mass of bags already piled in the back. Though I’ve only known her a day and we are obviously different people from incredibly disparate lives—I have a sense she’s likely a Republican, incredibly religious and from money—for now she’s my partner, the one person in the world who’s standing next to me, whose help I need, and I’m grateful. She’s half my size, doesn’t seem the type of person wired for hard labor, and yet here she is, working every bit as hard as I am, likely even harder.

           

When the bags stop coming, I stop for water, catch my breath. Rachel is talking up the Thai Marines in Thai, which they appreciate. They gather around her. One soldier in particular, bright eyed and smiling, an incredibly beautiful boy in a tight green shirt who laughs at everything she says. I don’t understand what they’re saying and I don’t need to. The sun is out and it will stay out. Any moment now, more rice is on the way.    

Down by the River

There are bodies sprawled in odd directions everywhere, cocooned in shades of multi-colored silk, sleeping on their shoes. Amid the masses at the train station in Varanasi, Kelli and I step out onto an overcrowded platform, smell the air and wish we hadn’t. Back in Kolkata, I almost threw up upon arrival. The bathrooms on the trains, open holes which drip down ugly on the tracks, wreck the air entirely. Also, I was terrified and terror happens, at least for me, in the stomach. If there is anything I’m afraid of, it’s the absolute indifference of chaos, a world without order and without regard for the existence of individuals. India, especially when it comes to public transportation, is exactly that. I’m doomed. Pushing my way to the restrooms, I stood for a moment above the squat toilet with my hands on my knees, which was a mistake. The air wasn’t any better there, much worse in fact, so I got out, found an isolated corner, and started taking breaths. Thankfully, in Varanasi a low breeze moves in off the Ganges, carries some of what is rancid here away. Eventually my stomach calms and in no time at all Kelli finds a driver. We throw our bags in the back of his car and head out into the center of town. Where the river is. Where the Ghats are. And where, in a matter of two short days, I’ll fall in love completely with a city half a world from home.

             

It probably shouldn’t surprise a person that any of India’s seven sacred cities turns the stomach inside out and back again. According to legend, the seven Shakti Peethas were founded in places where various bits and pieces of an immolated bride, Sati, wife of Shiva, are said to have fallen. If the legends are correct, after Sati committed suicide, Shiva took her body over his shoulder and proceeded in a rage specific to a God whose heart is broken and who carries the carcass of his bride across the universe, destroying everything, everyone. Being fond of their creation, the other Gods quickly and violently intervened. Vishnu, in particular, followed Shiva cutting Sati into seven pieces. Varanasi, I believe, is where her left hand fell, the Ganges filling up with blood.  

            

These days, the Ganges fills with feces. With fecal coliform levels hundreds of times higher than is safe for a human to encounter in good conscience, the river is one of the filthiest bodies of moving water on the planet. Literally, it should kill you. The fact that it doesn't is perhaps the only argument outside of the experience of faith that there is, in fact, something holy to her. Everything else is waste. For the most part, Kelli and I are scared of Hepatitis C, a disease we’re certain enters the current when Hindus submerge their dead in the waters of salvation and which we accuse each other of having contracted every time we step in a sludge puddle.

             

“Get away from me, you’re infected,” I say.

“Whatever,” Kelli says, shaking off her sandals. “What the hell is this anyway?” 

The “this” she’s referring to looks, remarkably, regrettably, like diarrhea. Draining slowly from a hole in the bottom of a crumbing staircase, the sludge is half liquid, half solid, pale brown. Bits of things, I don’t know what, partially floating, partially not, but in either case they’re dragged along by gravity toward the hoard of bathers who line Ganges to our right.

            

Earlier, after the sun crested the pollution line, turned into a bright pink ball on the horizon, the two of us sat together in a wooden rowboat, saying very little and watching from the river the city slowly come to life. First, noises, low and distant sounds. A dog barking. Silence. Then more dogs. From far away, the muffled clank of bells like metal pots, human chanting, clamor. The boat rocks back and forth. Silence. More bells. Silence. For whatever reason, we speak less and less these days, but it isn’t awkward, it’s nice, calming even. And in India, the experience of calm is rare, if ever, and it is best allowed to last. There is nothing to do but cherish it, the two of us side by side and rocking in our little boat, the still and sacred water, body of the Goddess Ganga, dirty as she is.

             

Every morning the men, women, and children of Varanasi flock to the Ghats to cleanse their sins and start the day from scratch, covered in sewage, Hepatitis C, and the ashes of the dead, a new slate. Watching them, especially with cameras, feels strange, so we take our pictures from far away. Up close, though, is where the magic happens. The men strip down to nearly nothing, which means we see a lot of scrotums.

             

“There we go,” I say to Kelli, “that’s your boyfriend.” Her newest boyfriend, a large and rather unattractive man with a mustache and gangly hair is touching himself without mercy in front of everyone and calling up to her from where he’s standing in the shallows of the Ganges covered in white soap.

            

“Miss, where you from? Hold on. Miss, I take you on my boat!”

            

Because she’s white and pretty and looks like she has money, though she doesn't, the men of India all call out to her. For all anyone knows, Kelli could be my girlfriend or my wife, but it doesn’t matter. The men all flock to her, nearly crash their bicycles, their cars. They come up and want their pictures taken. Usually, she obliges, but I can tell it’s beginning to annoy her. We’re constantly accosted.

            

 “Talk to the white girl,” I like to say when the kids come up to me, which Kelly absolutely loves. Recently, though, the kids specifically have ceased with even the slightest pretense of a courtesy and refer to Kelly simply, honestly, as Money.

            

“Hallo, Money,” they call in unison, “Hallo, Money. Hallo, Money.” At times they follow us for blocks.

            

 “I can’t take you anywhere,” I say.

             

Back on shore, the cars have started in, jockeying for position on the crowded streets and letting their horns go. The holy city is awake. At the moment the locals are preparing for a festival, which we’ll miss. Some 200,000 people are expected to flock to Varanasi tomorrow from all corners of the country to drink and bathe in the water together, to rub it in their gums and spit it out, to bottle it and take it home and use it at their altars and pray to it and cleanse themselves and save themselves from sin. I don’t get it, but I don’t need to. I really like it here. I can't explain it, but I do. For whatever reason, the river is a special place, even to an American who’s not a Hindu and who, furthermore, is utterly dismayed by the way the river has been treated. I could sit by her for hours and I do. Yesterday we watched a body burn, five of them, in fact, stood up in silence and walked away.

            

The morning before we leave, Kelli and I get breakfast at our favorite restaurant and walk the ghats together for a final time, stopping every now and then to take it in as best we can and hold it, hoping that it lasts. Down below us, the boatman are cleaning up their boats and painting them. Tonight they’ll fetch about a hundred times their normal prices for a single trip, which seems ridiculous, but Hindus, if anything, are devoted. They will pay to pray here. It doesn't matter how much or how far they have to travel. Come dark, the body of the Goddess Ganga will light for miles with millions of candles lined in perfect rows on the terraced concrete steps. In droves, the devoted will sing and dance and chant together as they’ve done for centuries. As a single entity, they will do these things. They will take the river. They will put the river in them. 

How Much for Your Picture?

In November in Kolkata the ground disintegrates and rises. Without the rains of the last few months to pack the dirt down hard, with only wind and sunlight the air becomes primarily a vehicle for sediment, a pollution made of yellow sand kicked off the road by traffic, particles of concrete, clouds of cattle excrement, exhaust. Breathing is impossible. In fact, little, if anything, is easy here. Far too much is happening. Incessantly in a state of disrepair, India’s third largest city, a population approaching 16 million if you include the suburbs, is perpetually under construction, its matrix of roads and crooked alleys lined by men and women whose hearts and lives belong to weather. Here, the heat and rain turn brick and mortar into rubble, pile it with little mercy at the feet of people who have nothing. We’ve only been here thirty minutes, my friend and I, but in thirty seconds I know immediately Kolkata is a different monster all together. New York, Chicago, Bangkok, of all the major cities I’ve spent time in, Kolkata wins, period. This is Kali country, after all, Hindu’s Goddess of destruction from which the city derives its name, famous for her necklace of demon skulls, drinker of blood, devourer of worlds. Weak people do not live here, they only visit.

 

From the open backseat window of our car, Kelli leans out quickly with her camera. To our left, a group of men gather around an open vat of mortar, mixing the water in and staring coldly back at her. It is hard to tell if they are angry with us specifically or if it’s something else. Given the utter poverty of a place and point in time which feels impossibly unforgiving, abject and surreal, the glare that finds the average tourist seems unfortunately appropriate. As a foreigner in a place where one does not naturally belong, it’s hard sometimes, really hard, to know where lines are drawn. When a person sees me watching them, I intuitively turn away, though I wish our eyes could meet and our separate lives could co-exist despite our differences, even if only for a moment. One girl in particular, a sori wrapped around her the electric color of the ocean, the color of the electric sky. Surrounded by taxi cabs, tuk-tuks, she catches me with my camera directly on her. In the shot I get, she turns away from me, which for whatever reason breaks my heart. I want terribly to know her name.

Regrettably, the observation of a people and of a place too often appear in the same fast action as their exploitation, in the click of a camera, for instance, when all the object of the photograph desires is to cross the street in private and in peace, or the drop of the jaw when confronted by a man decapitating chickens on the sidewalk, as the case may be. Either way, the exotic, the subjectively unreal. 

“I can’t believe this,” one of us will say.                            
“Where the hell are we?” the other one will say.                     

And it goes on like this, the two of us, our eyes propped wide as they can get because India both is and isn’t actual. Nothing here makes sense, which “is what it is” as Kelli is fond of saying, though I wish at times there was a way for it to be something else, something, I don’t know, less intrusive.       

The problem is our being here changes the place entirely, causes people to see tourists as potential income, which isn't human no matter how you look at it, not on either end. Kelli and I complain a lot about being accosted for money we don't have, but we both know in some sense its our own fault for being here, a context we ourselves and people like us  create around ourselves by stepping off the plane. We leave our homes in the west, flee east, and leave a little of ourselves behind us in our wake, a process that in India has been happening en mass since the East Indian Company set up camp in 1612, mining spices for the crown and eventually colonizing the sub-continent entirely, an era of racial oppression and financial exploitation spanning just short of a pair of centuries. The residue of the British Empire is still apparent here, for better and for worse. Even though I’m American and brown and don’t think much of Europeans as a silent rule, I feel implicated, and I am.

When experiencing for the first time a way of being in the world of which I am completely ignorant, inadvertently, through no fault of my own except that I myself decided to arrive here, I risk the work of Empire, which isn’t what I want. As a tourist “trying to see the world,” there is a way in which one mines the daily lives and actions of the local population for their own abstract and often selfish reasons. Of course, the fact that I’m aware of this softens my guilt, but only to a degree. To the person on the other end of the camera going about their day, who has no knowledge of the extent to which I’m aware of what I’ve doing, I’m still a foreigner, a person from a richer place who wants to take their picture and show his friends back home how poor they really are, how hard it is India, how crazy, how beautiful, how other.

 

“You’d never believe it,” I’ll say.                                                 
“O my god!” they’ll say. “How do they even live like that?”

Furthermore, if I’m aware I’m doing it, doesn’t that make it worse? Furthermore, I’m doing it right now. My mouth in my hands, I breathe in and out between my fingers, filtering the dust, but only barely. Sunlight splinters through the spotted windshield, the sound of car horns, cattle. Poor people do things in the street, eating, talking. I look at them. I take their picture. I write about it, them, me. This, for now, is India. I don’t know what else to do.