I was going to have audio commentary with this piece but decided that I didn’t want my voice getting in the way of the images. Instead, you can click the "captions" button to read more information about the images and these men.

I’ve slept in some difficult spots. There was the night in Boy Scouts, lying alone and on the ground in the middle of the woods wrapped in a blue tarp like a burrito while the rain pounded down for hours. I slept once in a bathtub in the Cayman Islands when we didn’t have quite enough beds in my friend’s time share. And then there was that night sleeping on the display playground equipment in a Lowe’s parking lot in Louisville. And let’s not forget the dozens of horrible, grotty hotel rooms I’ve gotten intimate with all over south Asia, with the fan-less power cuts and the cockroaches and walls stained almost as much as the sheets. Sound like difficult places to grab a few Zs? They were.

But they were nothing like last night. It wasn’t the hotel room though, because while small it was actually quite nice, with a great view from above the Ganges River. It wasn’t bugs or dirty sheets or sticky, fan-less tossing about that made last night hard. Last night, it was the explosions. They had started earlier in the day as I was walking through the narrow alleyways of Old Varanasi, India’s holy city. I had just rounded a corner when a boy came at me full speed, his little, finely-combed black head meeting my stomach with a "thud." He shouted something I couldn’t understand before grabbing my hand and running in the direction from which I had come. In my confusion I turned back towards where he had been just as a clay pot set in the middle of the alley exploded with the force of more M80s than we ever used to tie together when I was in high school. That’s one thing I learned quickly about Indian fireworks; they’re not so much concerned with the lights or the pretty colors that shoot off in streams and swirls. They could do without the sparks or the little bit of screaming that a quality bottle rocket will give you before it pops. No, in India they care about one thing: the raw, chest cavity thumping power of the boom.

Walking around last night I pointed at a firework going off in the sky and asked a young man standing next to me what the Hindi name for it was. And fittingly, he replied, with the long "o" sound of the Indian accent, "Bomb." "Well, at least they’re honest about it," I thought to myself. The longer I spent meandering the street on this festival night, however, the less and less safe I felt. I shouldn’t have been surprised, in a country where safety is very much a secondary concern, where the driving is lunatic, drinking the water is just as dangerous, and one of my favorite pastimes is standing in the open door of the moving train because no one tells me not to. Dewali is a lot like the Fourth of July if you just took the Fourth of July and removed all the safety precautions used in making fireworks, jack up the power to an unreasonably dangerous level, and then while you’re at it, take away people like police and parents who are there to protect their children or tell them "no" when they’re about to light a hodge-podged pile of explosives in the middle of a busy intersection.

And there’s no governmental fireworks display here, either, like one might go downtown to see back home. Here people buy what they can afford, and the more well-to-do families end up in a sort of competition, seeing whether the Sings or the Guptas can set off a better show from the open roofs of their villas in the heart of this old, claustrophobic city. I was standing in an alley just beside one such family’s house as they set of their grand finale last night, snapping a few photos of some of the only whites and greens and reds I had seen. It wasn’t until a burning cinder landed on my shoulder that I jumped under a tin roof with two other Indian men who chuckled as the burning embers came plinking down all over the street like some sort of plague they forgot to mention in Exodus. I gave them an added boost in their laughter when they saw my frightened eyes and the paranoid, twitchy brushing of my shoulders whenever I felt fiery phantom particles making their way through my cotton shirt.

On the way home I passed some men standing around, looking up at a tarp that had a wide, burning hole in it, the black plastic melting and dripping down onto the concrete, smelling exactly like the styrofoam cups we used to toss into the campfire before these newfangled terms like "greenhouse gases" or "global warming" popped into the media. I snapped a few photos, trying not to breath the fumes too deeply, until they started pouring water on the blaze from above. I walked over to a nearby ledge where some men were sitting and put my camera back in my bag.

"Happy Diwali!" they said to me with their silly, alcohol-induced smiles.

"Yeah, happy Diwali," I replied, right before flinching my way through another heart-stopping blast.

The guys thought it was hilarious.

I notice the old man approaching out of the corner of my eye. I’ve been sitting against a wall, reading a book while waiting for the next in an endless series of trains that has carried me dutifully around this country. I glance up and have to squint into the sun as I take the man in: his long, oily grey hair, his rich yet weathered dark skin. If you began at his torso, his garments seemed to get more and more dirty the further your eyes traveled out his once-white sleeves and down his pant legs that ended in cheap, blue plastic sandals. He is carrying an equally stained bag stitched with some sort of burlap that looks as if it has been purposely impregnated with the dust of a wanderer’s comings and goings.

He motions towards my book and says something in Hindi that I don’t understand. I look down to where it sits in my lap and then back at him with a confused expression. He has wide eyes that make it seem as if everything he is trying to communicate holds a certain importance. When he motions towards my book again, I give it to him. He takes the paperback from my hand and before looking at it makes an almost startling few seconds of eye contact with me and says "You have no fear?" posed as a question, it seems. Not knowing how or if I should answer, I simply give a slight smile and begin wondering what this odd character would do with my reading material.

He begins with the back cover and recites "An extra-ordinary novel … a work of obses-nal org-nal-ty." He flips the book over and reads the cover: "One hundred years of …" and trails off on the word "solitude." As he begins flipping pages, endearingly attempting to impress me with his acquired English skills by pontificating lines from the author’s dedication and publishing information page, a small crowd has begun to gather. They’re all young Indian men, wearing their modern tight, flared jeans with slick dress shirts and shoulder bags. They begin talking with each other in smiles, gesturing at the man and laughing without concealment or constraint, not more than a couple feet from where the man stands, clearly agitated and a bit embarrassed. He answers this mockery with what seems to me like words of displeasure at their presence and even puts his hand on one young man’s chest, shoving him backwards as best his meager old frame can manage. This has no effect except to increase the volume at which they laugh and the hostility with which they jeer.

"Do you need something?" I question the crowd in general, at least 15 of them at this point.

"No, we need nothing," one of them answers with a smile that isn’t quite sure if it wants to be a smile.

"Why are you all crowding around like this then?" I ask. "Why are you all standing here?" They don’t seem to understand or react at first. One of them, seemingly the most popular in the group with uncommonly blue eyes and arms slung around the shoulders of two of his companions, asks me what I’m talking about. Searching for a way to express what I feel in a way they will understand the lack of appreciation their presence is generating, I say, in none too gentle a tone, "This is my matter, not yours."

This they understand and most of them turn, still laughing — though now at the strange foreigner — to leave. It’s the first time I’ve spoken crossly to an Indian person, much less a whole group of them, since I arrived here almost three months ago. I’ve always been cautious and quiet, never wanting to hurt the image held of foreigners. I’m not sure what it is about this day, but today I couldn’t take the crowd, couldn’t take the lack of privacy or swallow the staring that is oh-so-common. But most of all, I couldn’t take the public jeering of this sad old man without a single person stepping forward in vocal opposition.

Likely a bit flushed and with the tunnel vision that overcomes my eyes when I get angry, I turn back to the man who, suddenly, no longer has the wide, slightly eccentric eyes he had moments before, but rather a collected and wise look of contentment. He then repeats the same words he had said before, but this time it’s different. "You have no fear," he says, this time as a statement, as a truth not to be questioned, even by myself. And with that he hands back my book with a smile that makes his eyes twinkle and walks away, the stares from the crowd on the platform burning holes in the back of his dirty, tattered shirt.

This entry is an audio piece that talks about the last week or so I spent alone in Delhi. You should see the player displayed below. It’s about 16 minutes long, so enjoy!

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Live in Bloomington, Indiana? Catch this piece on WIUX 99.1 FM Tuesday, October 23rd at 7:30 p.m. during WIUX Talk. Or … just listen to it here.

The police officer wore khaki on khaki and toted a World War Two era automatic rifle. He had the fat cheeks of a child and a continuously unaware smile to match. He approached me, uninvited as always, as I sat on a bench outside the Taj Mahal.

"Which place you from," he asked with that goofy smile. A question that I should have by then been used to, it was one that still irked me. I couldn’t imagine those being the first words that came out of my mouth upon approaching a stranger back home.

"The United States," I told him, looking back into his blank yet smiling face.

"Eh?" he replied, uncertain, as always what my answer had meant.

"America," I said, knowing this would clear up the confusion, though I always felt bad claiming the name "America" for my homeland when, technically, America comprises over 20 countries on its northern and southern continents.

"Oh, America … Woorshington D.C." he proudly pontificated.

"Yeah," I said, hoping he would go away.

"Capitol of America."

"Yeah."

"Very power country. Most power."

"Sure."

"In world is much powerful."

"I suppose."

"Osama Bin Laden."

That I could only answer with a look of confusion.

"World Trade Center," he said, with a sly half smile on his face, for what reason I’m still unsure. I looked away, wishing he wouldn’t have brought it up. He eventually went back over to the neighboring bench, rejoining the rest of his four-strong khakified posse in their ongoing quest to do as little work as possible.
• • •
After the Taj we told a rickshaw driver that we wanted to go to McDonalds. We were then driven out into a weird, wind-blown district not more than four or five kilometers from the Taj, yet a place that felt like another world. Shooting up out of the ground in this fantasy land were two huge, modern buildings - multiplex malls with five levels and everything from a four screen cinema to a Nike store. The bicycle making up the rickshaw’s front end creaked mournfully to a halt in front of the golden arches that separate the two mall buildings. The silence of this place was weird and so much different from what we were used to in any city, much less in a city as fabled and populated as Agra.

Pushing open the glass doors we were met with a lively atmosphere of upper-class families dining on this bright Sunday afternoon. I made my order for two filet o’ fish sandwiches and fries (which I may have regretted later but were oh so glorious in the moment) and took a seat at a table near the back where the restaurant connects to the mall. I was glancing around at the advertisements, somewhat creepy representations of Indian folk exercising while eating their dripping chicken and fish sandwiches (no Big Macs in Agra) when I about jumped out of my chair as a little Indian boy flew past the separating glass door in a Big Wheel type car built for kids. For me, this was the ultimate representation of wealth and class, a plastic car built with a motor for children to drive. It was the item I longed after as a child, yet never achieved. And now here it was, being driven by an Indian boy in the middle of an upscale shopping mall in a five thousand year-old city in a "third-world" or "developing" country.

I began wondering if this restaurant, with its squeaky clean tables and flat screen televisions, was simply a product of its proximity to the Taj Mahal. Did this entire shopping mall run off of the spend-hungry appetites of tourists? As I looked out the window I felt like I got my answer, for in the parking lot there were men with rags, shining the automobiles they were paid daily to drive. They were the drivers for rich Indian families, assigned to wait in the parking lot while their hired family spent an afternoon indulging in Western delight … so close and yet so far removed from the place in which they were actually existing. This wind-swept district was quiet and removed because that’s the way people like it. They don’t want to have to be reminded of the hustle and bustle of the city streets with their beggars and their cows and their stink.

This bothered me somehow. It bothered me for about as long as it took for the food to arrive and for me to sink my teeth into the fried, tarter-sauce-enhanced goodness of the easy life. Some things make it easy to forget.

A few days ago I saw a fully grown man get beaten on a public street. He was a grizzly looking guy, the kind you could tell had been sleeping on the street for a while with long, matted hair and a black two week beard speckled with spots of grey. He was walking down the road in front of the "new market," an upscale place known as widely for its merciless hawkers and touts as for its silk. He was carrying a huge, white bag made of a stiff plastic that crackled with its starchiness as he dropped it to the ground after receiving his first blow. It came from a man who looked more like he belonged cruising the golf courses at an American country club than selling cheap children’s toys on a street in Calcutta. He wore a blue polo and nicely ironed khakis over shiny brown loafers. The reason for that first blow, whether it be because the poor man was trying to snag something off the businessman’s shelf or simply because his unbecoming appearance was bad for business, I will never be sure. What I do know is that the man sunk to his knees and cried out in pain, his moans on the verge of tears as a small crowd gathered around the situation. I glanced around at the faces in the circle, trying to get a better sense of what was happening when out of the corner of my eye I saw the switch - a piece of stiff, beige-colored bamboo cut in half lengthwise to give it a better bend and snap - move again towards the man, then meeting him across his collar bone. The man again cried out but no one in the crowd moved to do a thing. After a few more seconds of writhing in pain on his knees and a few more threatening gestures by the man in the loafers, the poor man picked up his bag and cut his losses by leaving the scene, whether justice had been served or not.

This isn’t the first instance of the poor being physically beaten here in Calcutta I’ve run across. One day I was having tea with Farita, a beggar woman who hangs out on Sudder Street, the most popular location for budget tourists to find a guest house. She told me that she is homeless, and that if she sleeps one night in the wrong place the police will come and beat her "Very hard, like this," she said, as she began taking dramatic pokes with her fist at my ribcage.

Malik had another outlook on the situation. Malik owns a book shop just off Sudder Street. He said that he always has to keep a close watch on his tiny shop because these people were always trying to take things. He said the other day he was in the process of sweeping his floor when he turned around and found that his waste basket had been swiped. "My waste basket! Can you believe that?" I asked Malik about the homeless getting beaten by the police and he acknowledged that it does happen. I asked him what these people are supposed to do, where they’re supposed to sleep so that they can be safe from the police, if no one else. "Well, the police give them new places to sleep," he said, as if this was the obvious answer to the problem.

"Really? Well that’s nice," I said. "And where is that?"

"Well, it’s outside the city."

"Outside the city, as in away from all the people and thus the only source of income they have?" I asked.

"Um, well, yes I suppose that is true," said Malik. I then asked him about what I had seen the other day with the man getting beaten by the shop owner. I asked him if this was normal and whether it was justified. I asked him why the police were not called during these apparent robbery attempts, but rather a sort of martial law seemed to have been put to use. He said the police are useless in cases like this, that they couldn’t care less. That is, however, unless their pockets had been lined a bit, then they would come running with a phone call. Corruption among the police force here is a very common subject of quiet conversation.

I met another homeless, jobless man the other day named Vernon. Vernon came hobbling up to me on a crutch, his constant companion since getting sideswiped by a car a year ago. Vernon was old, in his late fifties I guessed, so his body just hadn’t quite healed back up after the accident with no medical care given towards it. Vernon’s story behind being jobless was a bit more interesting than most. He knew a few restaurant owners, was friends with them, in fact. These were people that would love to give him jobs as a maitre d’ or as a server (he speaks great English), but to do that he would have to be able to carry a tray and walk unaided, an impossibility with his leg in such shape. He said he would love to just have a kitchen job but obviously he could not do that. When I asked why not he said that his friends wouldn’t allow him to work in the kitchen because, being an Anglo-Indian (his father was English), the job would be below him. He would be working under people who were under him caste-wise. So rather than working a job that may have been lower than what he deserved, Vernon was out on the streets, finding safe places in doorways to sleep at night while storing his clothes on top of a city electrical box during the daytime.

These are just a couple stories of the many. I have a feeling that I’ll hear many more before my time here is over.

When you make the turn from the main road onto the street that leads up to the temple, things start to change. The goods in the shops go from the average burlap bags of rice, bottles of coke and packs of cigarettes to goods like stringed flowers, miniature statues and framed photographs of the holy structure. The people change a bit, too. Suddenly I’m bombarded with uncommonly friendly men pointing me towards "Kali temple this way, sir." They’re not trying to get me into a taxi or gain a fare for their rickshaw, they’re just offering help. "Such a nice surprise," I thought to myself as I made my way through the ever-chirping metal detector at the entrance.

Once inside, I immediately was greeted by an English-speaking man who introduced himself as "Bapi, Brahmin of the temple." He even showed me his I.D. card, which began with the large heading of "Official State Brahmin," Brahmin being the highest classification or "caste" in Hindu society. Bapi told me that there are 51 Kali temples in India, but this one in Calcutta is the oldest and the biggest and that the god worshiped here, Kali, is the goddess of destruction. He was friendly, this man in his loongi (a sort of skirt/bath towel worn by men) and untucked dress shirt pushed out by his gut. Bapi also had about two inches of hair growing off the sides of his ears, a rather common if unsettling fashion trend among older men here. He seemed understanding of my being a writer, even halted his spiel each time I hurriedly scratched in my notebook.

We walked around the inside of the temple walls which were no bigger, really, than the inside of a basketball court. He showed me a small, fenced-in area with two sets of vertical poles, set up in such a way that they looked a bit like the stocks you see in movies about the Old West, the kind they would put traitors and bandits in so that they were permanently bent over with their heads stuck between the pieces of wood, in a perfect position to be jeered by the public. In fact these were not stocks, but something similar. One was used for the sacrifice of goats and the other, larger set for the sacrifice of water buffalo. I had thought they seemed stained a bit red, and now I knew why. A buffalo is only sacrificed once every year, in October, for the Durga Puja celebration. Goats, however, are sacrificed daily.

"The goats are brought in every single day by the faithful … unless they aren’t here by noon, then we just go buy one," said Bapi. He said they only sacrifice male animals because the females need to be around to give milk to the children. I said I felt glad not to be a goat and he smiled at me with the genuineness of a used car salesman. After the sacrifice block, we made our way down a small corridor between the two main buildings. Halfway down this corridor, there was a break in the fence that ran along my right side and I saw a man standing up, calling towards the patrons rather like a circus conductor to his elephants. In one hand he clutched a stack of 10 rupee bills and with the thumb of the other he was daubing orange paste dots onto people’s foreheads. Bapi said something to the man, announcing my presence, I believe, and the man quickly went to shoving the praying faithful aside, people whose eyes were closed and whose heads were rested on the marble ledges, so that I could have a view up the aisle "into the eyes of the goddess Kali," a statue with three black, teardrop-shaped eyes.

"Um, very nice?" I said as Bapi smiled at me. The man then went back to herding people through the area in front of the statue as fast as he could, calling to mind many the elementary school field trip to the museum. I saw one man there with his wife and mother in tow, getting his wallet out of his back pocket and digging through it as one Brahmin stood over him, awaiting his share while another tugged at his arm, pulling him toward the next holy display that needed donations. Now that I think about it, it really did feel like a carnival, and I could see in this man my own poor father, being tugged this way and that by my brother and I as we rushed to spend money on all the food and rides.

Next, Bapi and I visited the holy tree which, he told me, was the birthplace of Kali, making it over 300 years old. The tree was set inside a sort of cage and was cemented in about the first four feet up. Bapi pointed out the small stones that were tied with string all along the tree’s branches that came from "The Ganga," which is the Bengali name for the Ganges River, a sacred flow for the Hindus that runs from the Himalayas into the Bay of Bengal. He gave the same origin for the water he then poured on my hands. He said it was holy water, but, knowing what I do about the Ganges and its contents (they dump more than 1 billion liters of waste, including hundreds of partially cremated bodies in it every day of the year) it somehow made my hands feel a bit less purified. After my cleansing, Bapi took a small dish of the holy water and brought me along the backside of the tree. Taking a bit of the water in his fingers, he flicked it onto the tree, saying "Lord Kali, please make blessings to Andrew and his journeys." He then said "What is your family name, sir?"

"Prinsen," I replied.

"Kali I ask you would bless the family Prinsen and make long life and good things for them. And the name of your wife Andrew?"

"Nope, no wife."

"Lord Kali make wife for Andrew and bring she to him soon, for he is lonely man. And what is your job Andrew?"

"Um, no job either."

"Lord Kali find for Andrew a job and bless his labor and make him very rich and successful man."

After my apparently much-needed blessings (leave it to a temple Brahmin to point out how sad your situation is) I was brought a small book that was a guest registry where I was told to write my name, my country, and how much money I was donating to the temple. Of course the three or four entries above mine had given anywhere from 1,000 to 2,500 rupees (about $25 to $62). I told Bapi that I hadn’t really planned on making a donation and that I hoped the blessings weren’t dependant on a generous gift. He said, "People give what they can give. How much can you give?" I told him that I could probably scrape 50 rupees together.

My tour ended promptly.

In 1934, a book was written that interwove the stories of a French priest, a rickshaw driver and an American doctor, all living in one of Calcutta’s most devastating slums that was known, ironically, as Anand Nagar, or "The City of Joy." This nickname has since been appended to the city as a whole, a place that I have gotten to know over the past few weeks. So over the next several days, I’ll be doing a three-part series on this city with the title City of Joy. They will be two writing posts and a photo slideshow. Look for the first entry on Tuesday.

I just wanted to make a quick entry here to say that the posts will be infrequent over the next few weeks. Tim and I are in Calcutta (also called Kolkata) now and are taking a few weeks off of the writing travels to do some volunteer work until Tim has to leave at the beginning of October. We’re working with the charity that was founded by Mother Teresa, and it has already been a humbling experience. In the mornings we work at a place called Prem Dan, which is a long-term care home, and in the afternoons we work near Kaligat at the first and probably most widely-known house that this inspirational woman started, the Home for the Dying and the Destitute. So needless to say we’re seeing things we never have before but are so grateful to finally be able to serve some people directly. I’ll try to write a bit more about Calcutta sometime soon, but look forward to the blog picking back up with more regularity in October. Thanks, as always, for reading.