We loved Sri Lanka but after having traveled all over the country we ran out of things to do and places to go so we headed back to India via the ferry. We were in no rush. We went to see the temples with the explicit sexual carving. I thought I had tried most positions until I saw all of these new and interesting ones to try in the future. I found out that hippies were not the first group to discover free love. These temples were around 9 hundred to a thousand years old. Khajuraho, India was the name of the place. We spent a couple of days checking out all the carvings before we left again for Calcutta. We decided to take a train to Calcutta because it was really hot and the hitch hiking wasn't going so well in this part of India for some reason.
Trains in India are a real trip. There are multiple classes from deluxe first class down to jammed cattle cars with people packed in and hanging out the doors and window and sitting on top of the cars. We chose the deluxe but not the super deluxe class. We should have gone super deluxe. The train car was crowded. More passengers than seats. Large families were sitting together eating and cooking the whole ride. It was a mad house. If deluxe was this crowded then the cattle cars were just inhuman torture chambers of packed in humanity. We had a good time but it was so busy and noisy that we did not get any sleep. We chatted with a lot of the other people on the train and ate with them as we drank glass after glass of tea that they were making right on the floor of the train.
We passed through a lot of arid countryside with agriculture everywhere despite the dry conditions. It was hotter than hell in the train car and stinky from all the people crowded in but we managed to survive all the way to Calcutta. The Indians seemed to use the train stations as some kind of do anything you want to zone. People were urinating openly and dropping loads off to the side in a rather unhealthy display of casualness. They would think nothing of bathing in public at the train station. Modesty was pretty much nonexistent in the stations. It really had to be like that because it was so crowded that there was no space to be modest about basic human functions.
We were delayed for a while because there was a train accident on the tracks ahead of us. It was a head on collision of two trains I heard later. Lots of people were killed. They cleaned up the mess quickly and we rolled past it into Calcutta in the late afternoon. We were exhausted from the ride. We had thought that we would get a good nights sleep on the train and arrive in Calcutta in the morning rested and ready to check out the city. It did not work out as planned.
The train station in Calcutta was absolutely jammed with people. There were literally human pedestrian traffic jams. There were pathetic beggars all over the station begging. I know some of the bodies I stepped over were no longer breathing. It was rank. People were wailing and screaming and crying and laughing and talking and politicians were giving soapbox speeches and there were police and military men, people cooking, people sleeping, people waiting, people rushing, people and then more people on more people doing everything under the sun or moon. We slowly extricated ourselves from the station only to find ourselves on the streets out front in even more pedestrian traffic jams. Some of the Indian men took these opportunities to fondle the women or other men sometimes too. Kirsten did not like getting mauled like this and we got out of there as quickly as we could.
We checked into a hotel that we had heard about and went out to get some food. Calcutta was was more poverty stricken than any other place we had been to as of yet. The strange part about that is we hardly noticed. After almost a year in India we had just become accustomed to abject poverty and we accepted it matter of factly. We stepped over the dead and dying people wormed our way through the crowds, ignored the pathetic beggars and found our way through the city. We ordered more food than we could eat to share with the street people as we usually did but the restaurant would not allow us to give them the leftovers. I got a bit angry at the restaurant and we got into a fight over it. They finally agreed that if I waited until I was a long way away from the restaurant before I passed out any of the food it would be ok for me to do it. They were just afraid that giving some food away would attract more beggars and scare away their paying customers. I could understand that to some extent.
We stopped over at Mother Teresa's place to see if we could volunteer and she kind of briskly rejected our offer to help. I asked around as to why she was like that and people told us that she is too busy and that too many foreign volunteers interfered with her ability to serve her people. I didn't really buy that explanation but we gave up with the volunteering to help the poor.
We spent the next couple of weeks planning our departure to Burma. My dream of going trekking in Nepal was delayed due to my poor health still and the fact that we missed the best time of year to go there. In the rainy season the streets of Nepal become almost impassable from the depth of the mud. We planned on coming back during the beginning of the next dry season for trekking. We bought a flight to Rangoon, Burma and said goodbye to the horrors of poverty in India.
When we got on the plane and flew over the sprawling slums of Calcutta as we climbed up to cruising altitude, I started to reflect on India and I found myself shocked at my callous attitude to all the poverty and suffering we witnessed there in India, especially in Calcutta. The dead bodies on the streets and the mutilated beggars started to haunt me thinking back on it. I got really upset. I did not want to be as callous as we ended up being after a year of daily exposure to all the suffering of the people. What had happened to my empathy? I know I could not single handedly change India or even really help one person for that matter. I could have tried to ease more of the suffering of some of the people if even for only a few minutes. My weak offerings of food every time I ate were about the only help I offered and I felt guilty about my selfishness. It was over for now and I had to look forward. Moving on to Asia with the war going on and all the unknown dangers finally grabbed by attention away from my remorseful guilt I felt leaving India. I did not know what to expect ahead of us or how I might respond to the living conditions in Asia. I just moved on. What will happen will happen. That is just the way life goes or doesn't go.
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