Prince Albert’s Hairy Ears

Kolkata, India

I had a few days to kill in Calcutta en route to an assignment in Bhutan. Calcutta does not figure on the list of the world’s favorite tourist destinations. Yet it was fascinating. Every turn revealed a new delight, particularly so as most were unexpected. Such happenstances add delight to the enjoyment of travel. Not on the same level as Taj Mahals or Grand Canyons, they are intensely personal, miniatures of experience that become yours alone.

Calcutta was a kaleidoscope of miniatures, some discovered by plan, others enjoyed all the more by accident. Intriguing, tiny alleys darted off left and right, like an Aladdin's cave, alluring and yet with a hint of danger. Many were just wide enough to squeeze through, dodging between flower sellers, roasted corn stalls, letter writers, shoe shine men, barbers, stereo shops, silk emporiums, reed organ makers: you name it. Even after years in Asia, Calcutta astonished me.

At first, few people seemed to return a smile or a nod, everyone bent on going about their own business with a purpose which seemed to allow little time for courtesy. If someone did approach you, invariably he was a tout, who would guide you to a shop in which few goods were displayed, but where anything and everything could be obtained at a special price just for sir. A polite smile got me out of most situations with little apparent rancour.

By the third day, those first impressions changed, or did I? People invited me to sit for a while, have a chat and share a cup of tea, or a glass of water, no strings attached.

The Muslim quarter was more in keeping with my view of Islam than Indonesia would (thankfully) ever be. Faces covered in black burqas and chadors, women, lofty and inaccessible, regally trundled through the streets in massive rickshaws, safe from contamination by infidels like me. Coffee shops overflowed with men in white robes, for all the world as if this were the Middle East.

Resigned chaos reigned on the streets. In most Asian cities, urgency overrides deference. In Calcutta, if you are caught up in a traffic jam, totally immobile, rather than flatten the battery by leaning on the horn, drivers switch off the engine, hop out and boil up a cup of tea on the engine block of their cab.

‘Join me, sir?’

Traffic jams were frequent, if not as bad as in Bangkok or Jakarta, so tea boiling was common.

Perhaps a bogey collapsed on an ancient tram, or a herd of animals was being shepherded through the streets. Maybe a cow had decided to exercise its holy right to rest undisturbed on the tramlines.

Frequent street demonstrations had a devastating impact. Waving banners and shouting slogans through megaphones, demonstrators moved like enthusiastic, predestined lemmings towards patiently waiting police vans. Both the bored police and the protesters knew what was going to happen. Déjà vu. There was also a positive side: an affirmation of India's freedom of expression. Indian media are a lesson in freedom of speech that even the Washington Post could emulate.

Most of the almost daily protests were anti central government. The cynics argued that some of the protesters were of the rent a crowd variety. No doubt there was truth in that. Calcutta had a willing supply of crowds.

Statues of Albert the good stood on every second corner. Plants and shrubs sprouted from turrets, drain pipes and even Albert's ears. Inside offices, clerks labored behind piles of dust-covered paper. Few buildings were air conditioned, most cooled by sluggish fans which did their best not to disturb the centuries of dust or the tepid air.

Was this Calcutta's contribution to decreasing the ozone layer? Would that were so! Surprisingly few beggars roamed the streets. Either that or I had developed immunity to them. Mostly, as in Jakarta, the poor offered some service or other for a few paise. Perhaps, also like Jakarta, they mysteriously disappeared into the night.

All around, all the time, millions milled. Something about it was vaguely familiar. Ah yes, ants! As a child on the farm one of my favorite pastimes was following the networks of paths worn by millions of ants as they foraged far and wide from their nests. I would spend hours observing them, fascinated by their sense of purpose and intrigued by the complex highways they created, radiating from their nests in all directions —main freeways, feeder roads and, the most interesting lesser traveled paths.

Now those hours spent watching the ants on their complex paths completed the circle. I became one with them, joining the five million who cross Howrah Bridge each day. The bridge swarmed with ant people scurrying along oblivious to all else, carried along with a tide of humanity, yet each with his own secret purpose.

The bridge over the Hooghly River was a rural lane compared to Howrah railway station, the heart of the ant nest itself! Thousands rushed to catch trains. Porters glided along, forced into a stooped run by the crushing loads balanced on their heads. Officials sauntered around surveying the scene with that air of proprietorial superiority unique to the subcontinent. They learned it from the Brits. Through the seething masses, the cars of the fortunate edged their way along, horns blaring. At night, the station became home to thousands sleeping under its massive arches.

It was a relief to cross back over the Hooghly on a ferry, overloaded, using a conservative estimate, by at least two hundred percent.

Standing near the only visible buoyancy ring seemed sensible. Any further out I would have been swimming. When the ferry rolled a couple of inches, water poured across the deck. No one seemed to mind. What were the statistical possibilities of yet another ferry disaster?

Despite the energetic chaos, the decayed elegance of the old Victorian piles of the finance district, Albert's ears sprouting straggling plants, the steel mesh enclosed trams with their ‘stuff only’ signs on the driver's cabin, the myriad roads and alluring alleys, the leaking underground with its video monitors showing Charlie Chaplin movies while you waited for the train to Tolleygunge, the heat and dust that permeates everything, it was an extraordinary city. It teemed with the urgency of survival at all costs.

Where was the horror of the poverty of Mother Theresa's world?

It was there and too much of it, but in balance, it seemed no worse than slums in many other cities in Asia. Perhaps the accessibility was the difference.

In Jakarta, freeways keep you away from the poor areas. In Calcutta, you rub shoulders with poverty even on the main streets. The poor are an integral part of the daily social fabric of the city. In Jakarta, they are kept out of sight, or forcibly persuaded to join Indonesia's transmigration programmed.

Having found the pitiful world of the poor, what could one do? Nothing. So why look for it? One doesn't. It reaches out and claims your attention. You respond? Voyeurism? No. Pity? That wasn't much use either. So why gawk? Absorb it. If we can accept what we see without feeling superior or different as a part of everyman’s experience and recognize that there is an unfair but natural imbalance in fortune, our lives become enriched if we energize that experience into our life and work as ‘understanding’.

The secret is to internalize the experience in some positive way. That must be small comfort to the beggar with his leprous stump thrust under your white face, who perceives you as a walking wallet as you scurry by showing a newly-keened interests in Albert’s ears. Surely the world should know that you are an aid worker and are paid to care.

But back to Bhutan. Aid experts should know something about the countries to which they are sent. Perhaps a book or two, a video, or some collections of fascinating government statistics; just something you can use or toss off nonchalantly to disguise your ignorance and make a good impression.

‘So Bhutan is spelt with a B’.

Aha, a fully briefed consultant. What an excellent impression. I did not even know the name of the capital city. The ADB told me it was Bumthang.

It wasn’t.

The ADB had provided me with briefing papers—one photocopied page of information —probably a summary of the entry on Bhutan in an encyclopedia written during Victoria’s reign. The time had come to read a little more. I had checked several bookshops in Jakarta and Singapore en route. They had nothing on Bhutan.

On my third day of wandering the city, I came across Newman's Bookstore. A likely place for books on Bhutan? Walking inside Tutankhamen’s tomb for the first time would have been like entering Newman’s bookstore. Several mummified characters with white turbans draped themselves listlessly over random (read haphazard) piles of books. They were called attendants. How did one breathe when the mould and dust in the air was only slightly less thick than the layers on the piles of books which seemed to have lain there undisturbed since the Raj? Perhaps they could use the place as a simulator for those wanted to experience asthma. Most of the attendants were older than the books and equally active. One blinked.

‘Do you have any books on Bhutan?’

‘I don't know, sir. Look for yourself’.

Uriah Heep lived! In India? Cautiously treading in the general direction in which he had limpidly quivered his wrist, there in a tumble of books on a table marked Biology, dusty, torn and battered, was ‘The Cultural History of Bhutan’, Volume Two, by Professor B. Chakravati.

‘Do you have Volume One?’

‘No sir’.

Never being one to take no for an answer, I fossicked in another pile (on the agriculture table) and found Volume One. It too had seen better days and was far more dilapidated than Volume Two. It had to be. It had been published earlier!

‘Do you have anything else on Bhutan?’

‘Oh no, sir. Books on Bhutan are not good sellers. We are businessmen’.

‘But I am going there. I would have thought, Bhutan being so close and so on...’.

No response. Obviously, books on Bhutan didn't bring in the big bucks.

Back at the hotel with my two torn tomes, it was time to indulge in the second shower of the day. Indulged is not the right word. Obliged. Refreshed, I visited the hotel's justifiably vaunted tearoom. The tea was tea. The waiter, Geoffrey, hovered nearby watching me, the only customer, watch my tea. I was actually watching the spoon, waiting for it to dissolve in the tea, which had the consistency of slurry in a leaching plant.

Time for a non-committal chat. Neither Geoffrey nor I had anyone else to talk to. Talk about the floodgates. I only had to express my interest in Calcutta and how pleasant a surprise it was and he let forth. He was so proud of his city and listed several must see places.

“Perhaps sir would accept my offer to tour them all?”

“Sir would be delighted.”

He promised to take me round his beloved city the following day and pointed me in the direction of bookstores.

After passing on a third cup of slurry and momentarily tinkling the ivories on an ancient and out of tune grand piano, I followed Geoffrey's directions to the New Market, to be welcomed at the entrance by a friendly official.

‘I am an official’.

‘Really. How do I know you are an official?’

‘I have a badge, sir!’

Pinned to his shirt was a ragged piece of cloth with the number 62 scrawled on it in biro. Good enough! He showed me everything he wanted me to see.

‘Was I interested in something to smoke?’ Wink wink, nudge nudge.

‘No’.

‘Some silk? My friend has an excellent shop and the best silk in India’.

Indeed, a wide range of silk was on sale, but maybe my money would be better saved for Bhutan.

‘Perhaps sir would like something else’.

‘Elephants’.

‘Elephants?’

‘Carved’.

We whisked round the corner and up a flight of stairs, to the elephant kiosk! Carved, of course. What caught my eye was an elephant carved inside another elephant inside another elephant and so on. Just what a South African acquaintance Cynthia needed to add to her collection of carved elephants.

‘How much is the elephant?’

‘Which one?’

‘The one I have in my hand’.

The assistant's eyes glazed over. His fingers twitched. His face drooled.

‘For you sir, very cheap’.

‘How cheap?’

‘Oh, a very good price sir’.

‘How good’.

‘Sir has made an excellent choice’.

‘How much?’

‘Six hundred dollars’.

There is no WWF ban covering damage to carved elephants, or carved elephant sellers, or at least none of which I was aware.

I moved away, tossing off an Oscar nominating shrug, followed all the while by a litany of rapidly decreasing prices. My ‘official’ was getting agitated. Obviously, I was not going to spend anything. Cheapskate.

‘Was sir intending to buy something?’

‘Yes. Some post cards and two Stabilo marking pens’.

He was—how shall I put it—a trifle disappointed. He changed his tack.

‘Perhaps sir would like a girl?’

‘No thanks’.

‘Aha, a boy?’

‘No thanks’.

‘What would sir like?’

I turned on him.

‘A cat!’

He and his mates followed me out of the market, meowing. Fleeing their feline ferocity, I set out for the bookseller’s street Geoffrey had recommended. This was no Dymock’s bookstore. Instead, it was an endless row of stalls crammed with books. This was more like it. Acres of books. Heaven!

‘Do you have anything on Bhutan?’

‘Not exactly, but we can get you one which has just been published’.

‘How long will it take?’

‘If sir would like to sit and have some tea and a chat, we will send for it. It will only take half an hour’.

And it did. Published in 1987, brand new, at three hundred rupees, perhaps expensive? Chakravati's two 1957 tomes were a tenth the price.

Which would be the most rewarding: Katie Hickman's glossy travel book or the dusty doctoral studies on Bhutanese history and culture? In the event, both were disappointing.

 ‘Dreams of the Peaceful Dragon’ had a disquieting feel of superiority and patronisation which did not sit well with the circumstances of the author's sponsorship as one with privileged access to Bhutan. She spoke of it as one of the last unknowns. She had been there. Ergo, that made her something special. Fortunate, maybe, but not special, unless through a process other than osmosis you absorb what is unique to a particular place.

The days of empire when European races set out to discover new worlds that actually predated the worlds of the discoverers and in the ‘discovery’, claimed vicarious achievement are long gone. Like every traveler from Adam to World Bank experts, travelers carry a multi edged sword of opportunity in the one hand and a dagger of cultural, even human destruction in the other. It makes no difference whether the traveler is in an air-conditioned limousine or carries a backpack. Both ends of the spectrum do their bit towards development and destruction.

Working in another country is only slightly less insidious than tourism. At least you stand a chance of partially blending into a culture through appreciation and understanding, depending on time, talent and the chance to learn something about a place before you get there!

Was Bhutan the last Shangri la, as Katie Hickman claimed? That was for me to discover.