exodus

It's hard for me to write about the Gach. I don't want to further exploit the women in Kolkata's largest red light district. They are more than just stories, and I cannot do them justice. Yet I know the power of words, and just as I came here to learn and to share a bit of their lives, I also want to share what I see so that their realities will no longer be cloaked in silence. I've written about the women I meet and the time I spend in personal spaces, but I have yet to be able to put it here. I won't use the women's real names. I've used instead the translated meanings of their names. So here goes somethin'.

When you come upon the main lane, you find what you expect to. Girls standing in a row facing the road, like a fence on both sides. This is why they call it "working the line." Women are seated inside doorways in small clusters talking or waiting. The girls are wearing saris, salwars, or sequined mini skirts. They have beautiful eyes and painted red mouths, the likes of which you would only see at a classic car show. Some covered lips are lined with black, and it looks a bit like costume makeup. Or an ink drawing. They stare, of course, because I am white and wandering there. The ones who know us call out our Bengali names. We stop and shake hands, which actually turns into holding hands for the remainder of the conversation. How are you? What did you have for breakfast? Has marriage happened to you? No? Why not?! This is how our greetings go. Marriage here is not something you do. It is something that happens to you.

We stop into different brothels to visit friends. One of the numbered buildings is a mint green, and we go into this one first today. It has a cement staircase winding up the back. I'm afraid I'll trip because my eyes haven't adjusted to the pitch black. After the dark steps there's a mashi cooking fish in mustard oil on a coal stove in the hall. A man is smoking a bidi against the rail. He moves only slightly to let us past. Some doors are closed and locked. The inhabitants might be in or out. At the end of the hall four girls about my age, some a little younger, are sitting on the bed playing a game. In the gach your house is a room, and in the room life is lived on the bed. You sit and chat there. Dance to a Hindi song there. Sleep there. And of course, work there. Freedom is there today. We've been working on her English each Friday. She looks beautiful, as always. She has high cheekbones, not as round as the usual Bengali woman. And a mole on her cheek that makes you think not of a witch, but a movie star. She's still open, alive. She's been here only four months. Her friend is there also, she's been working in this brothel for a year now. She supports a father and four younger sisters in the village. She will work until the sisters are well married, she says. Then she will be able to look after her own future. We talk about dancing. Sometimes we dance for the customers, they tell me. They dance as a group of girls for a group of men. Or they dance until they are naked for one man. They grab us here, and here. She points. I'm sure my sadness is apparent in my eyes. They're really breaking my heart today, Sarah says to me. I'm relieved when the subject changes.

They take great joy in critiquing my appearance. I've passed today. The bari-walla's son asked why you don't live here, Sun asks me. You should come and work with us. You would take all the customers. How do I tell her no man can buy me, without suggesting she herself has a price tag? The girls in this brothel don't work the line, as they are for higher paying clients. Bottled up here, they make around 150 rupees a trick. About 4 dollars. They have an owner with whom the money is divided. Last week a man came in while we were painting each others' nails. He chose me. The girls laughed and told him I wasn't available. Wait for me, my friend said, as she got up to serve her "client," the one who had beckoned to me. For a brief minute I understood. And yet I understand nothing. I am a bideshi. A foreigner. I will get up and walk out untouched. I am free to go when I please. There's a bank account with my name to it, and my family supports me, rather than the other way around. Poverty is not my lover. Nor desperation my customer. Here in the sunny streets and dark staircases of this district 10,000 women live and work. It is one of 17 sex districts in the city. The women here are victims, many of them, and prostituted. But they have new identities in my mind, those of sister and friend. Slowly I watch an exodus. Some days it feels too slow. And the Egypt of money and circumstance and gender seems binding and unshakeable. It's a wild hope I cling to as I hold their brown and graceful hands.

rainy days and mondays

The rain came quickly, sneakily.
"It's going to be hot today," Mhalo said just a few hours ago during out morning toast ritual.
Here it is now, falling like wet marbles to pock mark the dirt on the soccer field. The crows have found leafy umbrellas, and protest with a cry when their trust is betrayed, and their oil slick feathers turn slimy. An abandoned kite swings like a possum dripping, dripping. A man fleeing unashamedly gets a bucket worth of water from the dokan tarp. They dump down sometimes. One tiny drop fills it too full and it releases its liquid load on some poor person's head. I've been in his wet shoes before, but still I laugh at him. Bits of the bamboo walls and tower forehead are the last bits of the Pandel caught in the rain, drunk from the festivites and all that's left of Durga Puja. The thunder shakes me. I can hear it inside of me and out, even before the lightning fizzles out. I imagine being shocked by, maybe through osmosis, and now my hair is on end mad scientist style. An arm in a flannel crimson shirt slid out from between two wooden cha stall frames. With a stick he pokes and prods the garbage and leaves from the drain, which looks like a small cattle guard when it isn't covered by the trash and water that flooded our street last month. As the man digs at the metal, the water and offending plastic start to whirlpool away. Satisfied, the red arm retreats, and the man watches, content with his act of goodwill. His victory is short-lived, though. After a minute, the draining puddles grow still, like a lake after a rock has been thrown in. With a sigh that's visible, if not audible, he plunges his arm in up to the main muscle and starts to feel around. He emerges pleased and disgusted with his findings, and with that the movement begins again.
Still the water falls faster than it goes away.
I watch and remember until I'm dried up like the rain and soggy as the dirt.

cold weather and a cyclone

It's been much too long since I've given a legitimate life update (not that poetry isn't legitimate,) it's just a bit... small. I have been writing, some of it particularly with home in mind, and I will share it all very soon. I just haven't taken the time to get it online yet.The weather here is cooling down, and it is my idea of perfect. There is a bit of sun, but it isn't too warm, mixed up with some days of rain, which aren't too cold. I sound like a weather man turned Goldilocks. This perfect temperature isn't fully true, I guess. The other night I wore my green moo moo nighty (given me upon arrival by Beth,) some knitted socks, and a shawl to bed! It was freezing. It must have been about sixty five degrees. I made fun of the bike rickshaw driver who had a red and white scarf wound around his head, only to go home and shiver all night long. Oregon winter, here I come?! There's been a breeze lately, but I can't fully enjoy it when I remember it's actually the last bits of the cyclone that just smashed along the coast of Bangladesh. An entire area is left devasted. Death tolls (according to BBC) are at least two thousand and tens of thousands of homes have been demolished. Send them strength when you think of it. To rebuild while you grieve is no easy task.

come on home

"I'll be home for Christmas... you can count on me... please have snow and mistletoe... and something about presents under the tree?") Apparentely I should look that up. Anyway. It's true. I'm coming home. Soon. December 15th actually. Let me tell you why.

Some time last Spring, in what could best be termed traveller's greed (and in typical Hannah fashion) I decided that if I have a plane ticket to India, I might as well see as much as I can while I'm there. I decided to wander. I wanted to go to Nepal. To Thailand. And all over India. (Not to mention to Cambodia and Myanmar... but one has to be realistic.) So I decided to stay on after my four months of living in Kolkata with Word Made Flesh, and this became and remained the plan. Although it began to shift. When I got to Kolkata I began to understand something. That this trip was for me a living, breathing kind of faithfulness. I decided to give up most of my travelling. Now I would be living almost the whole time in Kolkata, with some weeks in Thailand.
Until recently when I began to realize how unsettled my heart felt. I wrote it off as homesickness and ignored it. Yet it was enough to keep me from actively working on the details of the trip, or feeling peaceful and expectant. This is when "the understanding" came. I believe God speaks clearly to some people. And perhaps even does to me. Although I also think we throw "God told me" around a dangerous lot in our faith culture. I've come to call it "the understanding" for lack of a better term. For me it means some combination of intuition and wisdom and I like to think... God. The understanding was that come Christmas, it was time for me to leave Kolkata. When the understanding comes, it usually comes quickly and crazily and leads me to do such things as drop out of college and move to India. For this reason it is something I both love and loathe. I find that as a person often guided by intuition and some intrinsic understanding, that there is always the danger of emotions interceding. I began to spend time listening and waiting. And sometimes speaking. Reminding God that on the deepest level I was not afraid to stay. That I was finding more of the depth of relationship by which I tend to measure the value of experiences. That I came here and fell apart even as I was put back together again. That Humpty Dumpty was scared to say goodbye. The longer I waited the more I knew that I needed to go home.

Many things have come from my time here. One of those things (and this has many parts) is that I can never seperate myself from the poor. I've seen and learned too much to walk away. Sometimes I curse these eyes and this knowledge, because I can never forget. But in this knowing there is also something that can only be described, as St. Francis did, as "perfect joy." In the meantime, there are people at home that soon will be moving apart to new cities, jobs, and husbands. I want to end with them what we started together. There are certain things that are as of now... unfinished. And would remain incomplete if I did not return. Whereas things here are reaching a stage of feeling settled as my time with Word Made Flesh draws to a close. I'm of course so very excited to be home to eat candy cane cookies and sit by the fire with my beautiful family. I'm looking forward to living with dear friends and joining Wild Hope on the streets again. I'm looking forward to Stumptown and sweaters. And of course listening to my Elvis Christmas tape in my Oldsmobile. I'm also grieving the loss of several months of teaching the children I've come to know at Shanti Dan. And leaving the women at Sari Bari who show incredible patience with my slowly developing Bengali skills. I wish I could learn more of what it means to be present in the Gach. To go in week after week and earn the right to call the women there 'my sister.' All of this I am still processing...

Through this I'm learning a few things about myself. Such is the nature of struggle. I'm seeing that sometimes I would seek adventure over constancy, even when this constancy is what I need (or what others need.) That sometimes I don't know the difference between everything and enough. And that sometimes, even gypsies have to stop their wandering and come on home.

words of another

But, my friend,
why do men with crippled legs,
lifeless eyes,
wooden legs, empty stomachs
wander about the streets
of this civilized world?

Teach me, my friend, the trick,
so that my eyes may not
see those whose houses have no walls
but emptiness all around;
show me the wax you use
to seal your ears
to stop hearing the cry of the hungry;

Teach me the new wisdom
which tells men
to talk about money and not love,
when they meet women;

Tell your God to convert
me to the faith of the indifferent,
the faith of those
who will never listen
until they are shaken with blows.

I speak for the bush:
You speak for the civilized-
Will you hear me?

- Everett Standa, I Speak for the Bush
(Standa is president of Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya)