The title of this post is taken from the name of a restaurant in Calcutta, where I spent nine long, rich, noisy days this December.
Picture the scene -- a grey street buildings leaning in from each side... a mosque... a small boy with walnut skin hugging a monkey... the rasping sound from a wooden clarinet... a ragged old man with pain in his eyes ringing a bell, over and over. A small girl, the height of my waist, asks for money for milk for her baby brother... the smell of hot, dirty oil frying in a wok at the side of the road.
Words can't describe this city, but if I had to try I'd start with one word: chaos. This is a city where life and death converge on the street. People live, eat, wash, sleep, love, marry, bear children, work, play and die on the edge of roads thick with years of grime. Every day a cahophony of activity - rickshaws, onions frying, children dancing, women crying, life unfolding - yet the activity affects little change in the situation of these broken ones. The darkness shrouds the collective sense of shame I feel -- shame that I live in luxury unimaginable to these beautiful souls, whose sole possession may be a blanket or a small piece of cloth. It's easy to become overwhelmed, to be paralysed by emotion, but the question remains: how then should I live?
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