dogster

While I'm in the mood; here's the beginning of my trip report.

Go here for details on the cruise:
www.assambengalnavigation.com

Who knows where we'll all end up.

dogster

‘Take me to the Pink Temple,’ I said, ‘that one over there.’

I was pointing from the top deck of the R.V. Sukapha, anchored mid-Hoogli River, somewhere deep in West Bengal. Without purpose, plan or design, Dogster had arrived in Jangipur - a city he’d never heard of until this particular moment, a city of no particular note, no great attraction; a splodge of a place half-way up West Bengal, spread out either side of the Hoogli, both sides connected by a large concrete bridge. By a quirk of my schedule I was to spend three nights here, a fact that I hadn’t really given much thought to – until now.

Young Mr. Udit blinked in that keen Indian way. He was a trainee tour guide on his first cruise, full of enthusiasm, intense, highly-educated and anxious to please. He had drawn the short straw; freshly appointed personal guide and assistant to Mr. Dogster. I was his first solo encounter with ‘a foreigner’ in an illustrious career in tourism that extended back all of six days. Udit was like an excited puppy – but I tamed him very fast. Before the morning was out I had him sitting under a tree, head sunk deep in his hands, all the colour drained from his eager face. It was to be, quite literally, a baptism of fire.

The Pink Temple was just back down the river, camouflaged by trees. I had no idea what it was but it was big, pointy and pink - that was good enough for me. Getting there from our anchorage in the middle of that river involved a clamber into the country boat, a whoosh, a quick zoom to the bank, a jump out and a chat to the locals, a short walk, a negotiation, a trishaw - and a few stops on the way.

‘First, one shave!’

Udit blinked again. Why would a rich tourist want to do such a thing? We inspected the barber shops en route, found one that just passed muster, I submitted myself to the shave, the massage, the slap and bash of a brutish Jangipur barber, paid too much and left, neither better nor worse for the experience. Udit went with the flow - he had little alternative. I was in full discovery mode, a man on a mission. Quite what the mission was, I had no idea, but a good mission always began with a shave.

dogster

After all that shaving I was exhausted and demanded chai. We’d made it about two blocks from the boat. Udit’s eager brow furrowed. Why would a rich tourist want to sit in a grubby chai shop and chat with low-life scum? Why would he shake their hand?

He wasn’t the only one thinking this - Jangipur would not be high on the list of must-see’s for the casual visitor to India. Even the good citizens of Jangipur couldn’t, for the life of them, imagine why this great boat was anchored mid-stream for three nights, and why indeed, anybody would want to get off it to go see their horrible town. So the solitary white tourist sitting in a doorway sipping chai attracted attention.

Now the celebrated Mr. Dogster has done a lotta chai. For the uninitiated, this involves the rapid selection of some street-side hovel, a plonk on a grubby bench and one raised finger. ‘Chai,’ is all you have to say. By then every pair of eyes in the place will be upon you. From then on in it’s up to you - there’s always a conversation to be had in India. Sometimes you don’t need words. From somewhere truly disgusting a tiny, steaming cup of chai arrives. Think very sweet, very milky tea. You drink it – pay - then go.

Yet within this simple ceremony lies a whole world of subtlety, a delicate ballet of tiny interaction; a look, a smile, the merest of head wiggles – two creatures observing each other, across space and time. Men drinking chai in Jangipur are just like men drinking chai anywhere. Some are young and want to talk about cricket, some are old and couldn’t care less. Some are in-between. They are the best conversation.

dogster

Post-chai, with Udit the mandatory ten feet behind me, keeping watch for destructive forces, I ploughed along the line of shops cunningly built under a gigantic overpass that led to the bridge. All of Indian retail life was here, the usual hoi-polloi of plastic ornaments, bundles of thongs, clothes for little children, brooms, coloured flowers, plastic buckets and tea shops – and, to my astonished eye, a row of stalls selling the most ferocious porn I had seen outside Amsterdam.

Was I in India? Here the film stars don’t even kiss each other on screen. Now, in broad daylight I’m faced with a splay of legs akimbo, a wiggle of willies dangling down against the wall. I had the feeling my guide may have seen such things before. He had once spent two years at sea.

‘Udit!’ I said, ‘what is this, Udit?

I just wanted to see the expression on his face.

He peered in to the wall of willies, the heaving breasts and pouting lips.

‘Pornography, Mr. Dogster,’ he said brightly.

‘What is that for?’ I asked with a perfectly blank look. In Udit’s world it was quite possible for an elderly foreigner to know nothing about such things.

‘Hand practice, Mr. Dogster.’

Bless him. I had trouble keeping that straight face.

dogster

‘There’s a cinema today,’ Udit added proudly, then consulted in rapid Hindi with the trishaw driver, ‘just over there.’ He pointed with one thumb at a canvas covered opening between two stalls. I made him take me over. A man sat at a desk selling tickets from a roll, behind him another reprobate stood waiting with a torch. Both were very friendly, in a lurid kind of way. I shook their hands and winked.

‘Men are men,’ I shrugged, ‘all over the world...’

Stuck to a flap on one wall was a hand-written sign and a picture of a lady with breasts. That was apparently enough to draw a late-morning crowd in Jangipur. This was a fly-by-nighter, kamikaze porn dive, a theatre rented for a day, gone tomorrow – all they needed was a ticket, a torch, word-of-mouth and a sign.

Tickets were ten rupees. On an impulse I slapped down my cash on the desk, took my sunglasses off with a flourish and headed inside. I’d forgotten all about poor Udit. I stopped in my tracks and turned around.

‘You coming?’

Udit trembled on the brink. I don’t think escorting his clients – in fact his only client, ever – into pornographic movie theatres was on his job description. I left him dangling there for a juicy moment, stranded between a rock and hard place - then did what I was always going to do and decided for him.

‘You stay here and watch for policemen, Udit.’

He seemed relieved.

‘You are an innocent young man,’ I laughed over my shoulder, ‘I’m not going to corrupt you.’

With that I turned and followed a man with a torch into the dark.

dogster

Heh. More later.

Craig

Oh my, Dogster - you are full of surprises...

and, of course you have left me on the edge of my seat waiting for the next installment.

Femi

Can't wait to see how this all plays out. A cruise on the Hoogli is on my list.

twotravel

tap, tap, waiting for next instalment, are you busy opening another bottle Dogster, it's gripping stuff, poor Udit...

travelduo

Hand practice!!!! That's awesome!

Today I have to interpret for the very boring US government, and during a break in the non stop action here I started to read your TR on my phone, and busted out laughing! All the suits looked at me like I was crazy!

Your fluid writing style is a very welcome break from all of this mumbo jumbo crap I have to interpret today!

Thanks dogster!

Kathie

LOL, wonderful!

dogster

Thanks guys for coming for the ride. I'll just push this on a little further. I cut this next bit back somewhat - for good reason... sometimes there really is TOO much information. Too late, I realised I had written myself into a situation that I couldn't POSSIBLY describe. Not in these hallowed halls, anyway. Lol.

That caveat established, here's the next installment, while I'm on a roll.

dogster

I’d better confess and tell you right now - I’d never heard of the Hoogli.

As it turns out, it’s a great fat brown river that diverts from the Ganges, cuts through the middle of West Bengal about half-way up and rolls right down past Kolkata into the Sunderbans. The Portuguese, the Dutch, the British East India Company, the French and god-only knows who else had apparently been up the Hoogli for centuries, fighting wars, building forts and little empires, leaving crumbling bits of Europe behind them – not that I knew.

It might have helped if I had researched my trip – but I didn’t. A guide book might have been an appropriate purchase but, alas, an attack of stupidity prevented that. All I saw were some very attractive last-minute rates and a river I suddenly decided I had to go up – and down. Fourteen days on the Hoogli; Barrackpore, Chandernagore, Kalna, Plassey, Murshidabad; half-remembered names from half-forgotten places – wherever they were, whatever they are, whatever they had to show me - I was going.

I didn’t know where I was and you’ve probably never heard of it either - so I won’t bore you with a list of the temples, the ‘sites’ and sounds of the trip. The muddy waters of the Hoogli churned behind us as we pushed further and further upstream, lost in a strange architectural kaleidoscope, but all out of sequence, all out of time – I soon abandoned any attempt at understanding the meaning of any of it, choosing to glide through the adventure with a secret smile and an empty head. We went to see things I didn’t know existed in places I’d never heard of, walked the streets of towns I never knew. Lots of lovely little empty-headed things happened, lots of little frozen moments of empty-headed joy; we were all on a sweet guided collision of cultures – but always, we were watching, we were watched - we were safe, we were secure.

dogster

Good fortune smiled upon me on the way up to Jangipur; my eight fellow cruisers, our guides, the crew, the timing and the adventure all combined in an agreeable bubble of companionship that chugged up the river, stopped at interesting places, ambled around, ate and chatted happily, interacting when we felt like it, left alone when we didn’t. It was lush riverbanks and rural scenes, waving children and distant temples - pleasant company on a pleasant boat with leisurely stops at very odd places - delicious. All my companions were great fun, each had a story to tell, each revealed themselves at their own pace, all had skills; conversation was free-flowing and entertaining - really, I couldn’t have asked for more.

It was exactly what we had bought – a ‘soft adventure’ - and that was fine by me. The soft adventure had a lovely double bed in a roomy, light cabin, perfectly acceptable, sometimes even good food, amiable companions, comfortable chairs and great service. It was a great trip. A great deal of the time we were the tourist attraction. We observed the river life and the river life observed us. But here’s the point. We observed. We took a lot of photographs. We had a bit of a wander, occasionally interacting with a local or two, but mostly we looked and didn’t touch. We stood and watched as it rolled right by, waved regally from the deck at the wide-eyed children on shore - but we weren’t quite there. Not in the true Dogster sense.

By a process of elimination, at the end of the first seven days, I found myself the last man standing, lost in the gap between one group leaving and the next tour arriving, hovering on the brink of day and night – in this instance poised in the doorway of an illegal porno den in deepest West Bengal with no definite plan in mind.

Just grabbing a brief Dogster moment – in the interests of research, you understand.

dogster

The back door to the porn theatre was covered in sheets of dark plastic. I entered through a fold and suddenly plunged into darkness. A torch flickered on and pointed to an empty seat in the back row. I slipped in unnoticed; nobody was watching my grand entrance. Their eyes were glued to the screen.

I walked into a soft curtain of musky testosterone; two hundred men sat in rows that disappeared into the darkness, lounging on each other, growling, soft murmurs of appreciation rippling through the crowd at the events on the screen. The video froze, juddered, fast-forwarded, stopped, flew backwards then started again. Shouts and jeers from the mob. A few more minutes of bouncing flesh then the whole stop-start process began all over. I was far more fascinated by the audience than the screen.

I knew it was white, I knew it was moving – but I couldn’t see quite what it was. Not anticipating a visit to the porn cinema that morning I didn’t have my glasses with me – eventually I had to put my prescription sunnies back on to see just what was happening up there. I looked completely stupid, like Stevie Wonder at the movies, but like I say, nobody was looking at me. It took a while to focus and realise what I was actually seeing. Then my jaw dropped. Whoa.

This was not just porn. This was not just your usual bounce and fumble, moan and gasp - this was much, much worse than that. This was violent and bloody and degrading to the max – and then some more. This was either a snuff movie – or a very faithful recreation of one. I’ve never seen a snuff movie so I really couldn’t be sure, but it was snuff enough for me. Those grunts and groans were screams. That blurry splodge on her body was blood. This was the whole carnivorous horror; rough, extreme explicit pornography, sex, blood, violence, death – all wrapped up in one. Trust me, right here, right now, you don’t need detailed reportage. Don’t even try to imagine it. Something very nasty was being set loose that morning in Jangipur and right then and there, I wanted out.

dogster

Now, I quite pride myself on my ability to roll with the punches, to sit and not judge, to be invisible in a foreign space – but the ferocious pornography of down-town Jangipur quite took my breath away. In fact, it was as genuine a moment of Indian travel as any other – as intense, it its own murky way, as foreign, as abnormal a moment as you could ever hope for, a perfect ‘Dogster Moment’ - but for once I tumbled over my threshold, took one step too far into the darkness and saw a little more of India than I bargained for – which, of course, in India just means you see a little more of yourself than you bargained for. This was the growl of the monster, the great killer-bull inside us all.

I eased up and out of my seat, squeezed in front of the hand-practicing youths along the row, pushed open the door, slid through the plastic curtain and into the daylight. Even the polluted streets of Jangipure looked sweet to me. I gulped in the murky air. Udit looked startled. I hadn’t been inside very long. I don’t know what he thought I’d been doing but sensed that had I settled back in the trishaw for a calming post-masturbatory cigarette he wouldn’t have been at all surprised.

He smiled a manly smile. I didn’t tell him what I had just seen.

‘Very horrible,’ I said, ‘very horrible, indeed.’

I pulled a face.

‘Don’t ever go in there, Udit. You’ll go blind.’

The ferocity of his wiggling head, the wideness of his rolling eyes was a wonder to behold.

‘It’s time for the Pink Temple, my friend,’ I gasped. ‘Quick! I need salvation...’

dogster

Imagine a huge fluted ice-cream cone, paint it lolly pink and stick it upside down on an orange building - garnish with stripes of yellow and green. Cover the interior, floor to ceiling, with pink bathroom tiles and fill with women at prayer, a bobbing sea of multi-coloured saris - I’m sure Lord Shiva would be very happy with the result. This was the Pink Temple of Jangipur.

I hovered outside, watching respectfully from a distance. It was apparently Ladies Day at the temple and this old white man wasn’t going to blunder in. I sat on a ledge listening to the prayers, watching that undulating floor of women, drinking it up. Soon I was deep in conversation with an advocate. Such things occur all the time in India. He introduced me to a number of his friends, all sitting around outside the temple, chewing the fat. Everybody seemed very relaxed.

The women dispersed, the temple emptied out, my new friends wandered away. I sat for a while, went for a walk and came back, still not ready to leave. A priest began closing the green steel shutters around the entrance. He smiled. I saluted him, bowed slightly and moved off, down towards the water. There was a break in the clouds; a shaft of sunlight poured through and for just a moment the lolly-pink cone glowed electric against a pure blue sky. A goat crossed the road. Suddenly I was at the river bank.

The naked body of an old man lay stretched out on the ground. He was about two metres away and very, very dead. The first things I noticed were the bright red soles of his feet. They had been recently painted. My eyes travelled upwards, past thin, bony legs to the pile of white cotton thrown carelessly over his vitals. I watched while his arms were placed across his chest, his hair smoothed back, his beard straightened. He appeared to be wearing green eye-shadow, liberally applied. In the background a thin young man wandered aimlessly about.

Udit went pale. The introduction of dead men with red feet was perhaps one step too far. He was stricken, rooted to the spot. His mouth opened and closed. His eyes never left the corpse. Poor Udit was twenty-six, he had seen his share of life – but, right at this moment, I realised he hadn’t yet seen his share of death. In a fatherly fashion I shoo-ooed him away to sit outside the temple and recover himself.

dogster

Sprawled under a tree were half-a-dozen men, friends of the advocate I had met before.

‘Sit, sit,’ they said and patted the stone bench.

I joined them. We watched the dead man on the ground in front of us. There was a long silence then a commotion as a young doctor appeared, brandishing a piece of paper.

‘Certificate,’ one said, helpfully.

‘No ceremony, no certificate,’ another said and, as I watched, the vital signature was attached, laid on the bench next to me with a stone holding it in place and the young doctor vanished. Those two red feet hadn’t moved. The dead man’s son changed into loose white clothes.

‘Will he shave his head?’ I asked my companions.

‘Not for thirteen days.’

Another man chimed in. ‘Low,’ he whispered, ‘low in caste. Very poor.’

The son was led around his father’s body three times then gently pushed away.

One turned to me.

‘Are you a Christian?’ he said lazily.

I took a breath, knowing that a simple question required a simple answer. I swung slowly round to face him, took my sunglasses off and looked him in the eye.

‘I think there is one God, my friend, and he has many different faces.’

He twitched his head and pointed at the corpse.

‘This was my friend,’ he said.

‘I think this was your good friend,’ I said.

He wiggled his head. I wiggled mine. We smiled a little sad smile. There was no other flicker of emotion on his face, nor on the faces of the other old friends sitting with me watching. They might as well have all been having a chai outside the local tea-house.

‘That is you - and that is me,’ I said gravely, glancing over at the corpse. Four pairs of sad eyes looked in my direction.

‘We are all men – same blood, same body - we all die just the same.’

‘Mmmmm...’ said one.

‘Mmmmm...’ said another.

Everybody wiggled their head at me. I seem to have passed muster. We returned to our silent observation of the body. There’s always something to see with a corpse.

dogster

Off to my right, about four metres from where I was sitting, a group of young men had piled logs for the funeral pyre. It was about a metre high. They moved over to the old man, then, one on each limb, lifted him up without any ceremony at all, carried him across to the pyre and dumped him on the logs.

But this was a poor man for a lowly caste - his pile of logs was just half-size. They placed the top half of his body, his torso and head on the pyre. From his groin the rest of him hung out over the edge, two scrawny legs slightly splayed out, dangling limply. He looked rather like a dead brown frog. The white cotton had long since fallen off. His genitals hung there, useless and forgotten, mute testament to a life once lived. One man placed a small board over them as a last gesture - then stood back.

I don’t know who lit the pyre. I’m just grabbing at shards of memory here - somehow, I didn’t think it was a Kodak moment. Everything was just getting imprinted on the memory board, hard-wired and locked in as it occurred. Let’s not pretend that this is something that happens to me every day. I was acutely aware that this was an extraordinary moment. I watched as the flames spread up, tickling the old man’s backbone, burning his long grey hair. Wisps of white smoke turned black, then red - then burst into flame. Soon he was all wreathing smoke, snakes of fire. I saw his scrotum catch alight.

‘Chai?’ said a voice beside me. It was the advocate.

‘What a good idea,’ I said and stood up.

Frankly, I was glad of the diversion. I’ve perfected the art of extremity, the impassive face of a man who has seen much life, can glide and smile my way through filth and destruction as easily as through joy and laughter – but the events of my morning in Jangipur had quite wiped me out.

‘Very extreme,’ I said to nobody in particular, ‘very extreme.’

Everybody turned away without a second glance as their dead friend lay curling in the fire. As we walked toward the temple the wind changed and blew the smoke from his body behind us, kissing us all with a last gritty whiff of burnt pork.

I passed poor Udit on the way, sitting on his haunches, hunched over holding his nose, his pale face staring up at me.

‘Too much, Udit?’ I asked.

‘Too much...’ he said and sighed.

‘Let’s go,’ I said and helped him up, ‘we need chai.’’

Jaya

Thanks for writing again Dogster. For a few blessed minutes I was not sitting at my desk looking at a computer, but was tranfixed by how your words bring instant familiarity to unfamiliar places.