Sunday: Heading homeward, plus a savage crop

Name and shame - Howrah Station rogues gallery

I sleep fitfully and wake with the alarm to hurry out for a tuk-tuk to the station. Mine is a second class "AC chair car" ticket. It looks a bit down-at-heel. but is comfortable enough. It's also a bargain. For less than a fiver, I travel 507 kms. (distance always shown on Indian rail tickets), with bottled water, newspaper, breakfast and lunch included. Serving 1200 warmish IR meals to passengers from the confines of a railway carriage kitchen is an impresive organisational feat. The landscape slips by: more long viaducts over estuaries, more flat and fertile fields, no oxen. This must be the mechanised grain basket of the Bay of Bengal. The gent in the next seat does not speak; he's reading a Bengali book, and I suspect that he doesn't speak English. However, about half an hour before we hit Howrah, he suddenly opens up, says he is a manager with State Bank of India, and engages me in an earnest discussion on Keynsian economics, the Imperial antecedents of Sino-Indian conflict, the self-deception of America, industrialisation in the developing world, and how fortunate we are in Britain to have so much uncrowded space.

My horoscope (Taurus) in the Calcutta Sunday Telegraph magazine says of the week ahead, "It will be a great opportunity to catch up with paperwork and other tedious chores." I'm not sure it will be so great. The front page is given over to colour adverts for up -market apartments in Calcutta's new satellite towns. So the rich will lock themselves in gated developments (with pool, fitness clinic, play facilities and nearby shopping mall) while the rest go rot. Haven't we seen that somewhere before?

Boarding the ferry - space for one more? (yes)

I arrive back in Calcutta with time to kill, so seek out the ferry pontoons opposite Howrah Station and take a boat trip to the furthest ferry point upriver. I'd assumed that the Ganges/Hooghly always flowed "downhill", but of course it's tidal here, and the tide is coming in fast, so it's a speedy trip under the bridgeand beyond. The bathing and (gas-powered) burning ghats are busy; as we pass by, a huddle of mourners gently place someone's ashen remains in the river to float off to eternity (with a brief detour upstream.) At my disembarcation point I stop to watch people bathing and scrubbing laundry on the steps, though the colour of the water, like weak mock turtle soup,  may explain why poorer Calcuttans' shirts are rarely Persil white. 

Washing in the Hooghly

From the ghat, I venture up a suburban street, dragging my little trolley case behind me, but I am hounded by taxi drivers who want to know where I want to go. They have no English, and call in an interpreter, but even he cannot seem to comprehend that I just want to take a walk for its own sake. Walking is what you do to get somewhere, not for pleasure or curiosity. I insist, and continue, photographing people asleep and snoring on a temple floor, in a handcart and at home under a makeshift shelter. It is Sunday afternoon, after all. 

Temple sleepers, Sunday afternoon

But some shops are open for business, and I decide to get my hair cut. The "holiday souvenir haircut" is a tradition of my travels (like buying local toothpaste), a must-have for the return trip. The barber is a suave-looking fellow, bearing some resemblance to Sweeney Todd in the film. He orders me rather abruptly to sit and wait while he finishes shaving himself in front of the mirror. This is a time-consuming process involving twice lathering his face then scraping it off with a steel cutthroat razor. I decide to stick to a simple cut at Rs. 30  (35p.) and not go for the shave (Rs. 20) or other extras on offer like face/head/arm massage, creamed face or scented hair oil. As I have found to my cost before  (see 2 November 2011), engage a barber who has no English at your peril. I hold out some of my longer locks and make scissor actions with my fingers to suggest what length he should cut off, but become more and more anxious as the operation proceeds and the heap of white hair on the floor grows deeper. At one point I gesticulate and call out "No more!", but he shows no mercy, says "No, no!" and knocks my head sideways (his manner is somewhat rough and unsympathetic) to continue the trim. When finished (I give him a big thumbs up to dissuade him from further depredations), he tries to persuade me to let him trim the beard, oil the hair and massage my face with some yellow ointment. Enough. Some 24 hours later, I arrive home in Wymondham. Almost Sara's first words are, "Ooh, I like the haircut!"

I return home via Kuwait and Gatwick. To paraphrase Amitav Ghosh, places don't merely exist, they have to be invented in your imagination. Indians often ask "Do you like my India?" Thus what you've been reading, if you have been, is "my" India. I hope you like it too.

Saturday - The Sun Temple, Konark

Sanctuary (on stone wheels) to left. Building on right was a platform for dance, once roofed.

My final day before starting the trek home. Breakfast late, write yesterday's blog post, check out the little shops down the road and wander on the beach. The hotel manager gives me a complimentary ticket for the first night of the annual Konark Dance Festival, so I book an auto rickshaw for 1.30 to get me there with plenty of time to see the celebrated Sun Temple. It's surprising how long it takes to cover 35 kms., even in a shiny new yellow tuk-tuk, but the road is smooth, following the coastline through a wildlife park ("Deers may cross") and on bridges over a series of pristine estuaries. It reminds me of a well-loved road in Tanzania, lush with tall palms, banana groves and villages with palm thatched mud brick homes.

The Sun Temple is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, voted one of the Seven Wonders of India in a TV poll (!). It's Saturday, and the  heritage lovers are out in force, as busy as a stately home on an Antiques Roadshow day. Inevitably I get roped into several family photos but have stopped reciprocating - my computer has a strict limit on the number of images it can store of me with mama, mama-in-law, baba, babu, uncleji, auntiji and precocious little brats-ji. But I guess I look a bit of a buffoon as I wear my check shorts to feel the breeze on my knobbly knees in the tuk-tuk.

Note giraffe, far right. They must have traded with Africa.

The temple all but defies description. It was conceived by the Eastern Ganga King in about 1250 as a thank offering to Suriya the Sun God who cured him of leprosy. Sadly, it was sacked by Muslims in the 1550s, then buried under mounds of blown sand awaiting rediscovery in 1902. But what remains is spectacular - a 200 ft. central shrine in the form of a giant carriage drawn by stone horses (now lost). The 24 huge stone wheels and axles remain, each serving as a sophisticated sundial at different times of the day and year.  The real genius of the place is in its carvings. Every square inch is covered with delicate carvings ranging in size from miniature to massive. These depict hunting scenes, animals - literally thousands of elephants process round the base, scenes of domestic life, gods and mythological beasts. But mainly human forms - musicians, dancers, lovers - which are at the same time both delicate and decidedly indelicate. The celebrated scenes of eye-popping erotica are surely the largest collection anywhere of medieval stone porn, no holes barred. Look at the next post - if you dare! Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali writer, said something like "when words fail, the poetry of stone takes over". One theory is that the monument respresents a state of ultimate bliss - witness the rapture the faces of the less worn figures!

For such an ace place, it's disappointing that no guidebook is available (should I offer my services?), though before entering I am hassled by "government approved" guides offering to show me round, which I resist. Despite the crush of visitors, the site is immaculately kept (no litter) and is devoid of the usual plethora of notices, though I rather like "Do not ascend the embankment" on a grassy slope. Shades of "No picnicking on the greensward" at Frinton-on Sea.

From the temple I amble, Calcutta-style, towards the open-air arena erected for the Konark Dance Festival. I stop at a dhaba en route for a meal of onion bahjies, delicious round doughy things and a couple of sauces, all prepared in a giant wok over a blazing wood fire. Cost र40 (45p). I'm often surprised how rarely local people try to overcharge when they could so easily get away with it. That is the privilege of taxi drivers. The trees along the road to the festival are hung with fairy lights and hundreds of ornate Chinese lanterns, and expectancy is in the air. I show my (free) ticket and go in the V I P entrance but nobody cares, though I later notice that there is also a "V V I P Entrance". I don my long trousers, but feel distictly underdressed in the presence of so many immaculately turned-out Indian dance-lovers.

I have never before seen classical Indian dance, and do not fully understand the gestures and postures. The costumes are very like the 13th. century figures at the temple - the ones who haven't got there kit off, that is - and the movements are graceful and highly stylised, danced to complex twangy music performed live on stage. There are two groups of professional dancers and - nice touch, this - an artist has set up an easel at the side of the stage and works on a painting during the performance. For me, the crowning magnificence is the great floodlit temple in the background, its layers enhanced by light and shadow so it looks like a giant dalek radiating light against the black sky. There are, I estimate, about 2000 people present - not bad for a "high art" show in a one horse town beside the seaside.

I omitted to bring any warm clothing with me and it is decidedly cold on the way back in the rickshaw. I thread my arms through the legs of my check shorts and wear my (dry) bathing shorts on my head so I look like a Howrah Station porter.

Parental advisory: Medieval Porn

One of many variations on this theme

The Joy of Sex set in stone

Roll over, Dr Alex Comfort! What a good job that Calcutta university vice-chancellor (see Friday) didn't live in the 13th century! He would have been horrified by such excesses of nongrami "frozen in luxuriant detail for posterity". It makes a stark contrast to the very buttoned-up attitudes in modern Indian society towards such matters. 

Konark's sculptors favoured a hands-on approach

I wonder what today's family visitors to Konark make of it? Or are they using it as a sort of visual aid for their kids, sanitized by an 800 year time gap? For once, I'm too discreet to ask.

Strong arms & a good sense of balance required

A trifle exaggerated, one assumes

One commentator describes Konark as "The ultimate wet dream of the architectural fraternity."