Calcutta

Calcutta. Hot and unberable in the searing summer heat and unberarable for more reasons than the heat. In a popular tourist cafe an American widow obsesses on her dead husband: she has a bundle of photos, letters and other mementos to show as she tells stories, ad-nauseum, about his now stiff prowess as a prolific and technically perfect lover. She moves from table to table with her bundle of banality disturbing patrons at random with her loneliness. This happens in the Calcutta stink of Indian cardamon, paprika, cinnamon, sour sewer and rotted garbage. All this aromatic decay combines with the overpowering scent of jasmine. Mother Theresa's favorite intoxicants. But other smells and stenches permeate and nasuate your senses. Certain streets are dedicated to the putrid permanence of sensory corruption. But only the uninitiated visitor seems to suffer insult to their olfactory awareness. The indigenous poor are scattered on the streets and walks in somnambulist slumber, like fatalistic, hashish soaked, discarded rags. Children with sunken, obsidian eyes and belly-swell of abandoned malnourishment reach out toward passing lost-eyed foreigners, their palms-up; "Rupee please, sir, I am hungry, sir, coins please sir, I am hungry, sir." The widow from the cafe slaps a child's reaching hand with her bundle of deceased memories then trips over a sleeping, legless beggar and splashes face first into the fetid stream of seminal waste flowing from under his two exposed stumps. No one, including me, offers to help the child-slapping widow onto her two intact feet. Calcutta.