The veiw from above

Brittany and I had a fabulous final night in Bangkok. We donned dresses, hopped a cab and an elevator to a rooftop restaurant overlooking the city, talked about future adventures and uncertanties over cocktails and cuisine. Capped by a jar of Nutella, it was an evening of indulgence.

Then we went to Kolkata.

Kolkata, formerly "Calcutta", fits my preconceived notions of India, almost as if its inhabitants are trying to prove that the assumptions are correct. The intensity of the city is overwhelming. The honking is incessant, the traffic erratic. Rickshaws are a legitimate form of transportation. Plump, peaceful cows share space with with gaunt, grimy men. Exotic and toxic scents rise with the sun. Sidewalks are showers and stoves, bedrooms and barbershops, playgrounds and pastures.The meat displayed by roadside butchers is enough to make Ronald McDonald go vegetarian. Blowtorches blaze and shopkeepers shout. This place is just raw. And exploding with people. People unlike Thais. Here, I think, you learn to trample so as not to be trampled. Women wear beautiful saris, elaborate gold jewelry, and expressions hardened by years of hardship. Men bathe in communal bathes and relieve themselves in exposed urinals, the waste flowing out to the street beside the curb. I saw a man laying along one of these filthy streams, motionless, eyes open and glazed, blood trickling from somewhere beneath his head. While traveling, I love to hear people's "stories", in a romantic sort of way - where they come from, how they got here, where they dream to go next. But I didn't want to know this man's story - where he came from, how he got there, if he dared to dream. I didn't know if I could bear the weight of his story. The remnants of colonialism - crumbling classic architecture, retro rusty taxis, chipping hand-painted signs - hint at what the city once was, and expose the helplessness that must have been felt by those who watched it fade. It's like nowhere I've ever seen, nowhere I could have imagined.

Fresh off a year in a Buddhist country, I watched men erect monuments to the Hindu goddess Durga as Islamic prayers echoed through loudspeakers on my way to the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa. Heading to Mass at five something in the morning, two volunteers walked ahead of me, chatting. They approached a man sleeping on the sidewalk, only a small gap between his heels and the curb. Without a break in conversation, the girls passed over him, one slipping through the gap, the other stepping over the man's shins. A young Indian man reached the man at the same time but from the opposite direction. He paused for a moment as the girls passed over, then rounded the man's heels in their wake. There are limits to the stretch of human dignity and in Kolkata, it seems, casually stepping over a man who struggles each day to see the next is one of them.

Minutes later we walked silently into a chapel full of Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity, wrapped in those characteristic blue-trimmed saris. They are emmissaries of love in this chaotic city. Their work feels like purifying the Ganges one cup at a time, pouring the cleansed back into the contaminated and watching it dissipate. It is selfless and often thankless. They carry on Mother Teresa's legacy, but without the notoriety and recognition. They do small things with great love. Things like laundry.

Each morning after Mass and a breakfast of bananas, bread and chai, Brit and I boarded a bus to Daya Dan, a Missionaries of Charity home for dozens of children with mental and physical disabilities. We arrived, climbed the stairs to a rooftop quite unlike the one in Bangkok, and began sorting laundry under the blue Kolkata sky. Surprisingly, it became our haven. Above the noise and disorder, we got to be productive and we got to be together. We spoke profoundly and chatted light-heartedly, touching on social issues to be inherited by our generation and reminiscing about the glory days of college. We laughed remembering how we'd griped about laundry at school. "I want to go to Swem, but I have so much laundry to do." Oh, the agony! But I never really had laundry to do. I had clothes to put in a machine and a button to push. It wasn't until this week, atop a roof, stomping sheets in a bucketful of soapy water and disinfectant, that I had ever really done laundry. Sheets that would be rinsed, wrung, hung, and folded, then soiled again and returned to the roof. This was real laundry. This was endless laundry.

We leave Kolkata in the morning. This place has chewed me up and spit me out, challenging me in ways that felt unwelcome at first, but essential with time. The world is wild and endlessly interesting, but not always in a fascinating or beautiful way. There are places sliding backwards as the world progresses around them, places that have tasted development then deteriorated to squalor, places that are tough to see and important to see. Places like Kolkata.

Those who've come before

A sea of rice fields sprawl out before us. A man works diligently, repeatedly thrashing a bundle of stalks into the ground, each impact releasing more of the kernels that hold Asia's wheat. He's a provider in the purest sense of the word. The rice that he's harvesting is not for sale. It's for his family. Ideally it will last them through the first eight months of the upcoming year. He labors in a valley cradled by mountains that emerge like natural skyscrapers, shards of earth so steep that they don't seem passable from below. But they are and we make our way toward them. I'm flanked by Brittany Lane and Anna Kayes. Dense trees replace the open valley air, butterflies flit gracefully around our ankles, mocking our impending struggle in the kindest of ways, and we begin to climb. The path is rocky and steep, but also lush, and beautiful in the way only nature can be. Our guide falls back, curiously allowing me to take the lead. I follow the beaten track up the mountainside. A clay-colored trail pressed into the ancient rocks, it's a path used many times by those who came before me. And those who came before me were remarkable examples of the human spirit. They were Lao farmers. The same people I'd seen toiling in the valley below. They came barefoot with bags of rice on their backs. Forty kilograms for the women, sixty for the men. An unthinkable feat. Young, healthy and unburdened, we walked for almost an hour, up and over, and it felt more like rock climbing than hiking. The thought of their efforts consumed my mind, trying to grasp the mental fortitude it would take to make that trek four times in a single day. I followed their footsteps down the backside of the mountain to the primary school at its base, past a gaggle of single-shoes boys launching their sandals toward a pile of rubber bands. I smiled at their resourcefulness and imagination, but continued onward, nipping at the heels of those elusive human spirits. There are days, moments, like these, that seem impossible to forget. The sheer magnitude of my fortune seems too grand to ever lose sight of. But the vision of those farmers from that mountainside perspective inevitably fades, as does the sense of marvel as those who have come before me. But for now, I'm hot on their trail, following those spirits out of their homeland, back to Thailand and on to India, inspired by their strength, drive to provide and will to survive.