A City Tour of Kolkata

Early on the morning of my motorbike tour of Kolkata, I headed to Rajesh's office. There was a group of people going on the Sunderban trip that morning as well and they were also waiting at the office at 8 o'clock. But no Rajesh. There were five young Indian men who were going on the trip together and they decided to call and find out what was up. The second to last night of the Durga Puja festival was the night before and Rajesh and family had been out until very late partying it up. So it was a bit of a late start for everyone. But Rajesh showed up and the group left on their trip. Shortly thereafter Rajesh's nephew or cousin showed up and I was off on my bike tour. My “guide” (Rajesh didn't like to refer to the motorbike guys as guides since they were just people driving visitors around. And I presume it also took the heat off the “guides” in case they didn't provide enough explanation.) was named Om. He was quite young, but quite friendly. We headed off to the first spot of interest, Mother House. Mother Teresa did her thing in Calcutta. Her mission houses are there. The one that we visited was not the original, but it is the last one where she did her work and it's where she is buried. There is a little museum there as well, but it's closed on Thursdays and, yup, it was Thursday. But it was still a nice place.

The second stop on the tour was to one of the oldest cemeteries in Calcutta. It is also from the colonial period and is home to many of the British dead. And the tombs are ridiculously opulent, as far as I was concerned. Why take up so much space, in a city where not enough people even have four walls and a roof, and make virtual palaces in death? I have never understood that. But then I've never been rich either, and maybe that warps your mind a bit.

We passed through Chinatown and then through some fairly regular streets with regular-looking people doing their regular sorts of things.

Our next actual stop was the garbage mountain. Now I suppose to some this might seem to have been a distasteful sort of stop. It might show how much waste is generated by a city and its people and how much degradation to the environment goes on because of human activity. And I suppose that is true to some extent. But then Om started telling me about other things about this particular garbage mountain. Fifty thousand people work around this thing. And on it, and in it and over it. There are those who do the spreading of the garbage and all of that, naturally. But there are also many people who are combing through the garbage as it comes and is dumped. They search for things of value, from recyclables that can be turned in for money to broken things that can be restored and used or sold. All the people who do that are allowed to come and go freely. They don't have to buy permits. They don't risk jail for trespassing or thievery or anything like that. And they are employed. And the bits of the garbage mountain that would be staying around for thousands and thousands of years are being taken out of the garbage, so that what's left is biodegradable. Then as that stuff breaks down, the city collects the methane and uses it. It's a very eco-friendly seeming operation. On the way to the active mountain, we passed another one that had been finished off. And what struck me was how much vegetation was growing all over it. Nature was reclaiming the garbage and using it and breaking it down.

This is in contrast to a place like Calgary who employs people to do all that sort of stuff and then keeping the money that is made. Anyone who tries to take anything from the city landfills is charged with trespassing and theft and all manner of things to keep them from helping the environment. It's interesting that in the enlightened western world we have governments that block the environmental initiative of citizens, and in this “second-world” country the government actively encourages people to help greenify the earth, and gives people an avenue to make money when other avenues may be closed to them.

From the garbage mountain we made a quick stop at Birla Temple. It is named after one of India's wealthiest families. This family has built a temple in each province of the country, all of them named Birla Temple. I guess it's a form of philanthropy. I thought it looked a lot like Angkor Wat.

From Birla Temple we went to visit the temple that gave Calcutta its name. Another important Hindu god, at least in northern India is Kali. The most important temple in the area is a temple dedicated to the goddess Kali. It is called Kalighat, and from that came the eventual pronunciation of Calcutta. Photos of the goddess are not allowed, so once inside, I was not allowed to use my camera. But because of the festival, there were gazillions of people. And we arrived just after a goat was apparently sacrificed to the goddess. I guess that happens every day. It was bit gruesome looking at the altar, seeing the blood and knowing what happened there. But that's the way it works here.

Outside the temple of Kali, is the first hospital that Mother Teresa operated. It is currently being renovated for new use as a hospital of some sort.

A quick drive by the Victoria Monument and we were off across the river over the new Howrah Bridge. This is not the one that forbids photography.

On the other side of the river was the botanical garden. I wish we had had more time to just wander around the garden. It was quite peaceful. However, our reason for going was to see the world's largest banyan tree. Although its age can't be precisely determined, it is at least 250 years old. And it covers an area of some 1.5 hectares. The way it works is that the central trunk put out shoots that grow out horizontally through the air and then, when the branch becomes too heavy, the shoots go to ground and put down more roots. This new trunk sends out more shoot branches and the process repeats. This has the effect of spreading the banyan tree out in area. Banyan trees that I have seen in the past are all very dense in the central trunk area, but this one is very spread out. And then I found out why. The Kolkata government, in an effort to have this world record tree, is helping it. They are holding up the shoot branches with bamboo poles. This allows the shoots to go farther out and make the area covered by the tree grow that much faster. And it also makes the trunks of the banyan more spread out and sparse. In essence, they are cheating, but Om didn't understand when I told him that. He probably wouldn't have appreciated it either, so it's just as well. But cheating or not, it's still an impressive tree. It took about ten minutes to walk around it.

Suitably impressed, it was time to continue on to the old Howrah Bridge, where photos are forbidden. Along the way we passed the end of one of the Durga idols. At the end of the festival, all the idols, which are made of mud, are taken to the river and then set afloat. As they float away, the mud melts and the idol slowly melts away.

We crossed the old Howrah Bridge and then Om took me down below and showed me why photos are forbidden. From beneath it is a strange sight. As you may note, there are no pylons that hold the bridge up from below. It is apparently an engineering marvel erected by the British. One day, for one of the Durga Puja festivals, one enterprising sort made a shrine that was a replica of the bridge. And the government apparently realized that if one person could do it, then somebody else could make a model of the bridge as well. Or some other country could make a bridge just like the old Howrah Bridge. It would cease to be unique and special and Calcutta would lose some prestige. So the government banned photos on the bridge so that nobody would be able to duplicate the bridge for some other country. I don't know how it helps since you can freely take photos when not on the bridge. What I do think is that that's just a ridiculous reason.

This day, I also got to see the flower market below the bridge up close. We wandered through it and Om showed me which flowers were for which purpose. It was quite the operation going on down there, and I was amazed.

Just down the street from the flower market were a couple of crematoriums. In Hindu ritual, the body is reduced to ashes and then is buried. If there is a holy river nearby, like the Ganges, then the ashes are spread in the river. Other locales have different sites. We didn't go into the first crematorium. It is an electrically powered crematorium and reduces the body to ashes in about 45 minutes. It is government sponsored and costs about 500 rupees, I was told. The second crematorium is wood powered. A pit holds the wood and the body and takes several hours to do its work. The cost is borne by the family with no help from the government and so it costs a lot more as it requires 50 or 60 kilograms of wood. When I took my photo, I angered someone in the place, who cussed me out. I guess there was a body being cremated nearby and he thought it was inappropriate.

As I have noted, I had arrived in Kolkata at the start of a festival for a goddess called Durga. This day was the last day of the festival and the mud idols in the shrines all around the city were to be taken to the river and reduced back to the mud from which they were made.

Om next took me to the area where the idols are made. In an area approximately of 4 to 6 blocks, there is shop after shop of artisan shops where mud idols are made. A few days following the end of the Durga festival another festival will begin. It is for a goddess called Lackay (but that may be a bad spelling), and there will be a need for many idols for the shrines for her. So the shops were producing many mud idols of this new goddess. She was recognizable by her companion, an owl that conveys her from place to place when she needs to travel. There were also a bunch of mud idols for Kali, who stands atop a sleeping Shiva. It was a very interesting area to walk around in and look at all the shops and all the mud idols in the process of manufacture. What surprised me was how uniform they all were, despite being all made by hand and not machine.

Just outside the mud idol area there was a shrine to Durga that I took the time to go and visit. It was really elaborate. There is actually a contest for the best shrine every year. I suspect this one must have been in the running.

Our final stop of the day was a drive through the narrow and winding streets of Kolkata's red light district. It was all rather sordid and sad, not like the ones you would see in Bangkok or the fabled Amsterdam. But Om wouldn't let me take any photos in there, so you will have to imagine it for yourself.

Then it was back to the office, but we were forced to wait a moment as we encountered a goat jam. It had been a very nice day and I enjoyed it a lot.

But my day wasn't quite complete. Rajesh told me how to find the spot where many of the Durga idols would be put into the river. So when the sun had set, I set out to find the spot. It was a media event with news crews all over the place. But there were also fences and police keeping people from getting too close, so I wasn't able to get close enough to see the idols being placed in the water. It was nevertheless a festive atmosphere with people making lots of noise and parading the idols around and dancing and making a great fuss over the end of the Durga festival for this year.

In the end I headed back to the hotel and got ready for my trip to Sundarban Tiger Reserve the next morning. It had been a successful day, in my opinion.