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.