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.
Copyright © Tom Mcmurray | Year Posted 2011
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