I had planned a month-long trip to India, leaving from JFK Airport on Sunday 20 January and leaving from Indira Gandhi Airport the morning of Saturday 6 February. Nadya had asked me about doing a documentary in India and I told her many things, and she settled on Arun Pathak. She had been talking to him for about six months so I planned to meet her a few days there. Besides that I wanted to visit Nandan, Bunti, and the family. I also wanted to visit Wikipedians.
I was sorry that Tanvir was unable to get a visa to come to last summer’s Wikimania in DC and I wanted to visit him in Dhaka. I booked my flight to India before I planned an itinerary, and as it turned out, it seemed best for me to visit Dhaka immediately after arrival. I flew to Delhi, stayed a night, then took my connection to Varanasi, and said hello to everyone. I met with Jeremy and the other tour guides of VaranasiWalks and then went home to rest a bit before going to the train station my first night in town to connect a direct train from Varanasi to Kolkata. From there I would take a bus to Dhaka, and just call Tanvir whenever I arrived.
That night I started following up on some emails to people I knew in India telling them I arrived. I messaged Sherwin to tell him that later I would be in Mumbai, but he told me that he was in Kolkata. I thought that was fortunate and he said that he would receive me. I was to arrive early morning and that evening we would go to a wedding, and I was keen to see what Bengali style was.
Nandan and Mark took me to the train station. There was a notice that the train would be an hour late, and then when that notice changed to two hours, Mark went home. Nandan stayed with me and we talked as the announcement changed hourly to add an another hour or two to the expected time. It finally came 12 hours late. I had hardly slept on the plan, or in Delhi, and not at all in Varanasi, so I was on my third or fourth weird day of travel when I got on this train and went to sleep.
I arrived in Kolkata rather late. Sherwin was at the wedding and I was to meet him there. He texted me an address and I bought a pre-paid taxi ride, and the driver dropped me off somewhere. I got out and asked people about the address. No one spoke English and no one recognized the place. Some people sent me walking in a certain direction. In hindsight, I now know that I was about a ten-minute walk from where I wanted to be. There were two weddings nearby. At each of them I asked for directions, and one of them was the correct place, but the person I asked did not understand me and it had a sign calling it by a different name than the place I expected, so I moved on. I asked a lot more people – they all gave me answers, mostly to continue walking in the direction in which I was already going. Sherwin called me regularly and at 30 minutes, 60, 90 minutes I was still lost. He could not comprehend what I was doing or how this happens.
He was expecting that people would know the place and that I would be able to find English speakers. Neither of these things happened. I got into other taxis and let him talk to the driver, and I found a police station which sent me along with a police escort and let him talk to that person as well. It took me over 2 hours of wandering to at last find him in that time he continually called and texted me and I was helpless to get anywhere, and he was angry. It upset me that he has a temper and I never respect that in a person. He was instantly much nicer to me when I arrived. The wedding was mostly over and the people who remained were the family engaged in doing rituals. He was on the street, and as I approached him some other boys were walking by. We were going to get a taxi but the hour was late and taxis were fewer, and the boys stopped to get involved in our business as happens so often here. One of the boys, seemingly straight and certainly with his friends, was quite taken with Sherwin and wanted to help, wanted to give him a tour of the neighborhood, and asked twice for his phone number. I was not surprised that Sherwin could have this effect on others but it was interesting to me to see how it played out in this foreign context; my guess was that the boy did not know why he wanted to be with Sherwin or even that he was attracted to him, and there was no particular reason that his friends should be conscious of what was happening either. It made me think about how homosexual attraction could express itself in a culture with no mass consciousness of the phenomenon, which is what I think was happening. Sherwin explained to me later that he knows this behavior.
We went to his place and I said hello to his mother. We went to the roof and talked from after midnight until just before daylight. Perhaps an hour before daylight Sherwin gave me a hug, and I hugged him, and we held each other. I needed Sherwin as a friend more than I wished for his physical affection, although he is definitely exactly what I want physically. He has as much choice in love interest as a person can have without celebrity status, or maybe he is somewhat of a celebrity as a journalist, and I was flattered and entirely receptive to his advances. We went to his bedroom and talked more still. I slept with him and felt out of control of my body; he gave me the sensation that he understood me entirely and that my body was involuntarily reacting to his movements. This was the first real time I had spent with him despite being in touch with him since 2009 and seeing him in 2011 also, but I felt deeply connected. That night on the roof was really something – the air felt humid and cold to me, but I was not uncomfortable, and it had been a long time since I had seen the stars like I was able to see them from there. We could see so much of his neighborhood, but no one else was around, and I felt so together with him out in this open space. When I was near him I felt the heat of his body.
We woke up late the next day and did nothing except talk until night. He took me to meet a travel agent he knows and she explained the process for getting to Dhaka. She was able to get much less expensive flights to Kolkata than I was able to find online – I am not sure how that works, but it seemed legitimate. She also said there was a bus, and I thought why not take the bus and save money. I was to take the bus the next morning. Sherwin and I went to see Inkaar, a Hindi-language movie portraying sexual harassment in the workplace. I was completely baffled by the foreign cultural presentation of the topic but Sherwin wanted to interpret the movie as a story and not social commentary. We walked back to his place after the movie and I was scared of the dark streets. He insisted that they were safe and we both held hands, but he would pull away when cars would drive by or we passed by people who were sitting and staring from the darkness as just seems to happen in such cities. Wild dogs prowled the streets, angry and festering with their wounds and broken parts, and Sherwin told me that one had to be careful because they were dangerous to the unwary. We went back to his room and spent our time peacefully. I felt that I could fall in love with him easily, or that I had.
I worried about him being angry with me on the phone because I dislike being around anyone with a temper, but I was wondering if he was angry at all. I suspected that he was acting out some behavior unfamiliar to me or playing some social game to see how I would respond. He was upset about something else – I had told him several times that I would look into a website problem he had, but after some time, I realized that I could not solve it myself and I told him so. By that time, the matter had been pending for some weeks. It was not a big problem, but something I could not sort, and I told him that in America to pay someone to sort the issue would cost maybe $250. He told me he found someone to do it for $100, but was upset that I committed and left him waiting. From my perspective, I get asked to do a lot of things and too often I say that I will do something when I do not have time. I resolved while hearing his perspective that I cannot do this any more, and I should never have gotten in the habit of overcommitting myself, but at some point I must have gotten more useful than I was when I was developing my habits and I never subsequently updated them. He also criticized my work in India in ways that other Indians had also. Lots of Indian people resent anyone foreign who has any interest in development of low-income communities in India, but Sherwin was more emphatic than most. The line of thought is that people who talk about India should talk about strengths first, and not look at weaknesses like social problems. Furthermore, social problems are the concerns of the communities who have them – I may be describing this incorrectly, but there is some cultural difference in the Indian concept of social responsibility and my own and I have heard such things many times from Indians, but never understood them. Sherwin talked about this in the context of poverty, lack of education, and high birthrate in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, all of which are interests of mine. My perspective is that problems in UP and Bihar are international problems because poverty in such a large population (about 300 million, the same as the US population) affects global development, and this region is especially receptive to development so if people like to see then they should be able to do so. I also think it is an Indian concern because people from this region migrate throughout India and are resented by all for taking service jobs, and even Sherwin complained of this while blaming only the states themselves for having people who do this. In short, we have different political perspectives, and something about my perspectives personally agitated him. Part of his complaint was my very race and nationality.
We stayed awake and then it was morning and then I had to go. Sherwin instinctively sorts a lot of business when he is doing his routine affairs; the efficiency and carelessness with which he accomplishes things is striking and continual. He got me to the bus station later than I was supposed to be there and put me on just in time to leave, completely nonplussed about coming late but I had no idea how scheduling would work. He told me goodbye and said that he would meet me in Benares. I wanted very much to meet Tanvir and others in Dhaka but I was having a lot of second thoughts about whether I should stay with him, and I only settled my thoughts by thinking that I should have time to collect them and then meet him again in Benares in two weeks.