It is time for me to leave India.

I haven't posted anything here for so long, even though so much has happened. There has just been so much to do I couldn't stop to write about it. I took notes offline.

Anyway, I thought I should make a last post before leaving India, so I have collected a few photographs I have shot over the past two months and included some explanations. In the last three weeks that I was here I spent time consecutively in each of India's three largest cities: Delhi (population 12 million), Kolkata (Calcutta, population 13 million), and Mumbai (Bombay, population 16 million).

This might be the last post from India, but I plan to either keep posting to this blog at this URL, or to move or change it into something or somewhere else.

Forgive me if these photos are too dark on some computers. They seem to look different on every computer.

BHOPAL

Bhopal has, of course, been my main home in India this year.



A little girl in Gupta Colony, one of the neighborhoods where the water is poison and the people suffer from its effects.




Ahmed Khan in his family's home. Ahmed is the son of Jabbar and Nafeesa, both of whom walked to Delhi with the padyatra.






Raju (holding baby), another padyatri, and his family at home in Nawab Colony, another water-contaminated area. Raju works carrying and laying bricks.



In an alleyway behind a post office in Bhopal, local Hindus are constructing, painting, and dressing mannequin representations of Krishna (seen here with no legs), other gods, and monsters to prepare for celebrations of Ganesh's birthday.




Still wearing on its neck some tinsel wreaths from Diwali or another recent celebration, this cow rummages through the piles of trash, licking out plastic bags and other tasty things. I've probably said this a thousand times, but India is getting suffocated by plastic trash. It is choking the streams and rivers, choking the sewage and drainage systems, and filling the streets. Everything you see here will eventually end up pushed together into a pile and set on fire, releasing chemicals into the air that are much worse than plastic on the ground.




The view northeast from Sambhavna Clinic towards the new mosque at sunset, when the call to prayer can be sung out from the minarets of every mosque in the city. Sunset is also the most popular time in Bhopal to burn huge amounts of plastic and other trash.




Our friend Sanjay, the little brother Sunil Kumar Verma left behind this summer. On the floor of the clinic's library, Sanjay is catching up on finding articles relevant to the Bhopal situation in the local and national newspapers. This is one job his brother used to do.




A little boy in Jai Prakash Nagar, the neighborhood directly across and downwind from the Union Carbide factory.



The wall of the abandoned Union Carbide factory. The tall structure you see behind it rises above the methyl-isocyanate tank that burst in 1984, killing most people in this neighborhood.




Inside the factory grounds, goats and water buffalo graze on grass that grows out of extremely toxic soil. They will later be milked.




From inside the factory, a closer look at the gas scrubber tower, under which the methyl isocyante tanks still lie, now empty.




AGRA



Facing the deafeningly beautiful Taj Mahal, a solitary man lies in the shade of the adjacent mosque.


PACHMARHI

Pachmarhi is a small town in the middle of thick jungles and hills in southern Madhya Pradesh.



At the top of the highest hill in sight is a Shiva temple where monkeys far outnumber human pilgrims.



Getting a clear shot in the low light of this cave was difficult. Off the range of the photo, to the right, is a circular passageway through a cave dripping with water. You have to duck way down to squeeze through. At its deepest curve, a man in orange robes sits burning incense and receiving gifts for Shiva. There is so much incense burning throughout the caves down here that from above and outside (up the stairs) you can see and smell huge clouds drifting up from the gorge.




Sanjay



DELHI

After Bhopal, Delhi has been my second home base in India. I've been there about seven times now. I tend to forget that I should be photographing it. Here are a few shots from my last two visits there.







Above three photos taken from within Jama Masjid.




Laborers collapse on their carts to sleep through the intolerable midday heat.




My dad and sister looking quite like Dorothy and Toto. Ruby slippers nowhere to be found.




Every kind of vehicle leans into the curve of Connaught Place's outermost concentric circle as the morning rush builds up just after sunrise.




Rashtrapati Bhavan (government seat of India) deep in the haze, looking down Rajpath. One thing Edwin Lutyens apparently did not consider when designing New Delhi for the British in the early 20th century was that air pollution would so conquer the city that one end of his designs might end up invisible from the other end. On this particular day, India Gate was indeed completely invisible from the driveway of Rashtrapati Bhavan. The sun "set" at least an hour before it hit the horizon, striking a deep red tone when it was still high in the sky. By the time it actually met the horizon, it was represented only as vague circle of a lighter shade of grey.


KOLKATA (a.k.a. CALCUTTA)

Kolkata is my favorite city in India. When I first got there, I felt that I should begin serious efforts to find a way to move and live there. My experience of the few days that followed compelled me to modify that goal. Regardless, I am aching to return there as soon as possible, for any amount of time.

As with the other cities depicted in this post, my small collection of photos of Kolkata is not balanced or thorough in any way. In his book about Calcutta, author Geoffrey Moorhouse wrote that "you return from Calcutta, unless you are very tough or a professional, with a camera that may be full of exposed film but which contains hardly any record of people." This is somewhat true. Moorhouse goes on to write that for the same reasons it is difficult for a feeling person to raise a camera "...comparatively few Western hippies are to be seen in the city [this is a major plus]. They are to be found in hundreds at places like Benares [Varanasi], ...but in Calcutta hippies are few and far between and they do not stay long even when they come... The reputation of the city has stopped most hippies in their tracks elsewhere in India; and on first acquaintance it is enough to destroy any romantic illusions about gentleness and brotherly love and a dominating concentration upon the beatific vision. It is a place where disagreeable statistics are translated into men and women and children without number."



On Kolkata --

Robert Clive: "The most wicked place in the Universe."
Rudyard Kipling: "The City of Dreadful Night"
Mark Twain: (on Calcutta weather) "enough to make a brass doorknob mushy."

"Imagine everything that is glorious in nature combined with all that is beautiful in architecture, and you can faintly picture ot yourself what Calcutta is." -- William Hunter, 19th century

"Find, if you can, a more uninviting spot than Calcutta ...it unites every condition of a perfectly unhealthy situation .. The place is so bad by nature that human efforts could do little to make it worse; but that little has been done faithfully and assiduously." -- Sir George Trevelyan, 1863

Speaking of travellers to Calcutta, Moorehouse writes (laments, actually) that "they go home and cry woe unto the city, take its taste out of their mouths with a gin and tonic or a Pepsi, and recall it thereafter only as an emblem of experience, to show that they now know the worst that Life has to offer."

I did not do the work of collecting the above quotations -- all these people are quoted in Moorhouse's book.



People hang out the sides of the trains because there is no room inside, but a perk of the position is relief from the heat and suffocation inside. Here, a permanent settlement of families uses the tracks as its backyard and living space every moment they are not occupied by a moving train.




Victoria Memorial, once the chief monument to British power in Calcutta, is now the best museum of the Kolkata's history and the city's role in the fight for independence.





Pigeons survey the chaos below. Kolkata traffic is the most violent and intense I've found anywhere in India.



On Chittaranjan Avenue, a poster for a new movie at a local theater.



I read that West Bengal (the state of which Kolkata is the capital) is the longest running democratically elected communist government in the world. Whatever the details, Kolkata has surely been the beating heart of revolution and revolt in India over the past century and a half. That's why the British had to turn tail and abandon it in the first few years of the 20th century and move their capital to Delhi.







The southern of the two huge bridges spanning the Hooghly River in the middle of the city.




Off Chittaranjan Avenue




Kolkata is the only city in India where you will find rickshaws pulled directly by men. Usually they are barefoot, often shirtless. This is disturbing even to people of Mumbai and Delhi. It puts before you the awkward choice of callously ignoring these men as they languish by the side of the road, desperate for your business, or being someone who is pulled through the streets by a human horse. I couldn't ever ride one of these things. I have a hard enough time with the bicycle ones.




I've never seen anything like The Park Street Cemetery in the middle of downtown Kolkata. It is completely overgrown. The graves belong players large and small of the British East India Company, their friends, wives, and lovers, and other figures in 18th, 19th, and even 20th century Calcutta. Given the visible condition of many of the graves, I half expected to step on one of their skeletal hands or feet sticking out.



The jungle inside Park Street Cemetery. It is like a museum of elaborate monuments to people, inscribed with incredibly royal compositions which often rhyme. Here is an example I jotted down, one that happens not to be in Park Street Cemetery itself, but which is nonetheless perfectly representative of what's to be found there: "Erected by the British Inhabitants of Bengal / In Testimony of Their High Sense / of the / Wisdom, Energy, and Rectitude / of his Administration". That's a short one, actually.




Some people have evidently decided that all the fancy tombs of these dead British officials should be put to some kind of practical use.




Sunday morning at BBD Bagh, the center of Kolkata's business district. People here were fishing, bathing, checking each other out.




A huge flock of sheep runs alongside traffic on Central (Chittaranjan) Avenue. This is a mystery to me, because to stand in the middle of Kolkata is to know that nothing even resembling a farm is any closer to this place than to Grand Central Station in Manhattan.


MUMBAI (a.k.a. BOMBAY)

Mumbai shocked me this time around. The city was my entry point into India and at that time it seemed to me like a completely unworkable chaos. Seeing it almost a year later, it was almost unrecognizable to me -- spacious, convenient, and, as it turns out, one of the most friendly places in India. Mumbai is a lot of things, as any city of 16 million must be. It calls loudly for deeper investigation the next time I am in India.

Most of the photos below are from a protest I was photographing, and so are not a rounded survey of what the city looks like.



Churchgate, Fort Area.




Guests at the Hyatt can enjoy a birdseye view of those slum dwellers who survived to tell of how the Mumbai authorities set their homes aflame to make room for a gang of luxury hotels near the airport.



Victims of both gas and of water contamination in Bhopal chain themselves together and prepare to lock themselves across the front gate of the Intercontinental Hotel, where the India Chem 2006 conference was taking place.



Mumbai police respond. This included a squad of female officers in identical khaki and navy blue saris like the one you see here. I may have mentioned before that male police officers aren't allowed to touch or arrest any female, so most protests attract two separate groups of police, one male, one female.




The issues are fairly obvious. You have here a convention of transnational chemical corporations clearly interested in India's fabulous combination of a huge market with almost no rules. At least one of the attendees was Dow Chemical, happily chasing more and more new projects in India while Bhopal chokes on poison. Also in attendance was India's Minister of Chemicals and Fertilizers, who Bhopalis wanted to remind that many of them are actually still alive.




It's me, at the protest. Photo by Diana.

Sunil

I came back to Bhopal two weeks ago. I will write more on that later.

When I left Bhopal at the end of May there was a man named Sunil who I would run into in the clinic's upstairs library in the afternoons and evenings, often on Sundays, when no one else was here at the clinic. He would always be sitting amidst an array of unfolded newspapers with a pair of scissors, carefully combing them for articles related to the continuing chemical disaster here. Sunil had lost almost his whole family to the methyl isocyanate gas in 1984.

Even the first time I met him he got a big smile and squeezed my hand tight. He seemed very happy simply to run into someone in the library. He gave me the same smile -- like the one in photo below -- every time I found him up there. I remember always feeling unable to muster up enough warmth to match his -- I often felt caught off guard, or happened to be in a rush for one thing or another.

In July I got a message from a friend in Bhopal that Sathyu and others had just found Sunil in his apartment, having hung himself.

I could write more, but I would rather defer to the piece below, just written this week by Indra Sinha, which has had everyone around here in tears.


'Help me, brother, I'm going to be killed.'

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A MAD BHOPALI CHILD



SUNIL KUMAR BORN 20 JULY 1971 DIED 26 JULY 2006

SUNIL, FOR MUCH OF YOUR SHORT LIFE, you believed that people were coming to murder you.

'Nonsense,' we, your friends, would try to reassure you. 'The sky's blue. We are all here. You have done no harm to a soul, why should anyone want to harm you?'

'I guess I'm mad,' you'd say, who could see nightmares in sunlight and hear voices bellowing in his head.

Mad? Maybe you were. If so it was hardly surprising.

When you are 13 years old, safely asleep in your house with your parents, three brothers and four sisters, you don't expect to be woken by screams. You don't expect your eyes to be burning and your lungs on fire, nor to discover that the screaming is coming from your mum, or that your dad's yelling 'Quick, everyone, we must get out! Union Carbide's factory has exploded!'

Nothing in your life has prepared you for what you now experience. Your family bundles out into a darkness thickened by something that blinds and burns. All around you terrified people are choking, throwing up, moaning in agony. A woman lies convulsing where yesterday you played marbles. In the panic-stricken rush to escape you are wrenched from your parents and swept away to fall into blackness. You wake on a truck piled with corpses, bundling you off to a funeral pyre because the people who found you thought you were dead.

When you learn of the awful, terrifying, unbelievable thing that has happened, you return to Bhopal to look for your family. Alone and crying, you wander the streets. There are posters up everywhere showing the faces of bodies as yet unidentified. On each brow rests a numbered scrap of paper. This is how you learn that your mum and dad and five of your brothers and sisters are dead. What of the other two? You keep searching, and by a miracle find them, your baby brother of 18 months and your sister of nine, alive. You bring them to the only home you have, the house across the road from the Union Carbide factory.

So at 13, mad Sunil, you are the man of the family, the breadwinner. You find casual jobs as a day labourer and at night wash glasses at a tea stall. You keep your little family going and somehow manage to get yourself to school often enough to pass the 10th standard.

Mad, are you? For the sake of your little brother and sister you refuse to give up or be defeated. You are kind to others and your house becomes a refuge for kids whose parents beat them. You ask, 'Is it better to have parents who beat you, or no parents at all?'



Sunil leads an anniversary procession

You learn all you can, dear crazy friend, about the disaster that took away your family, and you join with other survivors. You are young but you take the lead. When neither Union Carbide nor the authorities give medical help, it's you who lays the symbolic foundation stone at the pole-and-thatch health centre the survivors themselves start, which will soon be ripped down by the police. You march at every anniversary. Your voice is heard. Then, dear madman, you are sent to the USA to give evidence in the Indian government's case against Union Carbide. You have never flown before and don't care for the food. The government lawyers tell you to be brave and honest and just tell your story.

But neither they nor the government consult you or the other survivors before they do a deal with Union Carbide that makes its share price leap for joy. You are incensed. Off you go on another world tour against injustice, another month of telling your tale to whoever will listen in Ireland, Holland and the UK, which you tour with Bianca Jagger. You're mixing with famous people, but you, poor mad bugger, just want to be home in Bhopal. Instead you find yourself at the Union Carbide AGM in Houston. In the hotel lobby you are handing out copies of an environmental report when you're arrested. Union Carbide, whose gases entered your house and killed your family, charges you with criminal trespass. You're thrown in jail. It takes hundreds of phone calls to the mayor of Houston before you are released without charge. At last you can go home.

The voices in your head grow louder. They torment and taunt. By now you know your mind is playing tricks. You are anxious all the time about being killed, you don't want to sleep. You fall into deep depressions and begin to talk of taking your life. We, your friends, try to joke you out of it, but privately we are worried.



Sunil in pensive mood, photographed by Raghu Rai

Then, mad Sunil, you find another way to give up this cruel human world. You run off into the jungle to live like a free creature. 'I lay on my belly and drank from a ditch like a dog,' you tell us when our search parties finally find you.

You cannot find work, but when we open the free Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal you instantly volunteer. You're penniless, but refuse to be paid for your work.
We soon learn that you have a phenomenal memory. Every day you scan the papers for Bhopal gas disaster stories and years later can recall the slightest details. You go to work in the clinic's medicinal garden and for a time your voices abate. Such stories they tell of you, like how one day you pissed in a cobra's hole calling, 'Come out, ohé cobra maharaj!' And when the enraged reptile erupted from its defiled home, head raised and hood spread, you sprinted 400 yards to the tamarind tree and never pissed in a snake's hole again.



Sunil at work in the herb garden

Ah, Sunil brother, the cool and beauty of the herb garden were not enough to keep the demons from you. Again you tried to take your life. You drank rat poison and after we'd had your stomach pumped, you rang the bastard who through his tears is writing this and said, 'Hey guess what, it tasted sweet!'

Dear Sunil, we did our best to get help for you, but there was little help to be had. Although some 60,000 Bhopal survivors suffer from depression, anxiety, memory loss, panic attacks, insomnia and a host of other psychological afflictions, the government refuses to accept mental health problems as a consequence of the gas disaster. People with mental problems get no compensation or treatment, in fact they are ridiculed and dismissed. Today, in all Bhopal's hospitals, there is only one part-time psychiatric consultant.

Sunil, when you were still a child, you told a journalist that those responsible for the death and suffering in Bhopal should be hanged. Never have they even been brought to trial and in the end, the person who was hanged was you. We found you in your flat, dangling from the ceiling fan. You left a note saying that when you made the decision to end your life you were completely in your senses. You had bathed and dressed in clean clothes. You, who rarely wore t-shirts, had put one on especially for this final farewell. It said NO MORE BHOPALS.

Sunil, we take this as a message from you to the uncaring world. We think you wanted people to know how horror, illness and grief continue to ruin lives in this city, twenty-two years after the night of terror.

If you were still alive, we could tell you that on September 27, 2006 your friends all over the world will plant trees in your memory. The trees will grow and flower for you all over India, all over Asia, in Africa, in the UK, France, in USA and many other places. We are planting two trees for you : one next to the people’s museum on the disaster “Yaad – e- Haadasaa” which you inaugurated in December 2005 and one in the Sambhavna herbal garden where you volunteered, but not too near the cobra's hole.

Also we could tell you that the Sambhavna Trust Clinic will open a new mental health department with full-time counsellors and psychiatrists, so that others will never again have as little help as you had.

Sunil, you thought you were mad, but a world without justice is madder. At least you are now safe. We scattered your ashes in the flooded Narmada river, and for your funeral feast we followed your precise instructions: quarter bottle of Goa brand whisky, mutton curry from Dulare's hotel near the bus stand, betel nut, tobacco and all. Were you there with us? If not, who was it that in the darkness chuckled, 'I am no longer afraid of being killed – I am already dead and fearless.'

Please plant a tree in memory of Sunil on September 27, 2006.

If you would like to help us start and run the new mental health clinic at Sambhavna, you can make a donation by visiting http://www.bhopal.org/donations/index.html

leaving Ladakh

After several days of bus journeys, I am now back from Padum and in Leh, which itself is several days of bus and jeep travel from Delhi, which is my next destination. The rain has stopped, at least up here, and the roads have been repaired. Internet here is too expensive to relax, so I think what I am going to do is spend a few days in Delhi writing up, among other things, a long, partial account of my time up here in Ladakh. At least for myself, for my own records. Lots to say. I can't hope that people will read the whole thing, unless you print it out and take it on the subway. I will include some photos, too.

the end of the road

This must be super quick because I am at the most expensive internet station in India, I think, a small satellite connection in Padum, capital village of the Zanskar region of Jammu & Kashmir. It is perhaps the farthest away from everything else I have ever been. If you are interested you can bring up a map online. It is at the very end of a long "road" that is really just a trail of rocks with traces of wheel tracks, that stretches from Kargil about 250 km into the heart of this state. It nearly killed me to get here. Took a week and a variety of transportation methods. Now I'm about to head with a friend walking beyond the roads into the mountains to visit some remote monasteries. This will take four or five days. I will not be fully back online for quite a while, so if I don't respond to emails, that is why.

Greetings from the Line of Control

After one of the most difficult travel days I've had since coming over to India, I am now in Kargil. This is halfway between Leh and Srinagar, and a just a grenade toss away from the infamous line that divides India and Pakistan's two pieces of Kashmir. But it is not dangerous, I assure you. Here they don't blow up ordinary tourists, they just lob missiles at each other (the soldiers, that is) when they get pissy.

I don't really like it here and I am leaving as soon as I can, to go south into the Suru Valley and Zanskar. Kargil and the Suru Valley are Shiite Muslim, and once you go far enough south into the valley you go back into Buddhist territory, supposedly because that area was so remote that the 16th century Muslim invaders just couldn't deal with it.

Ladakh and the whole of Jammu and Kashmir are suffering from serious rains right now. To look around is to see what happens when it rains and storms for a week straight in a place that is neither culturally, ecologically, or architecturally prepared for more than a couple of sprinkles per annum. It's a disaster.

I spent last night in the town below the famous monastery of Likir, just to be near the road early in the morning. The main road here, by the way -- the road from Leh to Srinagar, I mean -- is about the width of a typical driveway and mostly unpaved. Anyway, I got up at sunrise and walked the couple of kilometers to the main road in the hopes of finding some bus, truck, jeep, or whatever on its way to Kargil. I got picked up immediately by a jeep with a couple of guys with the unmistakable Kashmiri accent and agreed on a cheap fare to Kargil.

After about an hour of hairpin turns through a spectacular gorge, we came to the back of a line of stopped trucks. Very familiar experience in India. Something wrong up ahead. The river is swelled to within a foot or two of the road because of these rains. Up ahead it had completely taken over the road with a violent current chest deep. A large truck was in the middle of the water, up to the door of the cab, unable to move. My jeep offered to take me back to Leh, but I couldn't do it. They said I could either wade through somehow, or climb the mountain that separated our side of the flood from the other side.

I have a heavy backpack with me. I climbed up to the first little ridge to see what I would have to deal with. It's all rocks here, with the odd little plant clinging to its existence on the cliffs. The top ridge that I could see was really scraggly, with little chutes falling down from each notch in the ridge. The idea was to choose the chute least likely to come tumbling down when you touched it. It looked impossible. Too high and too steep. Maybe if I didn't have a huge backpack and instead had a coil of rope and hooks or whatever. I thought about it, probed a little, and then decided to turn around and try my luck with the water. But as I descended, three locals came up and persuaded me to join them. The men had never gone up there but were very confident and the one woman thought they were nuts. She and I followed about 20 feet behind them.

It took all my muscle and lungs, and it was pretty terrifying at moments, but we made it. After a long walk of about a kilometer up and down over several ridges, chutes of rocks and sandy plateaus, we lowered ourselves down a chute that descended upon the mirror-image crowd of truck drivers conferring and shaking their heads at the disastrous river swallowing up the unfortunate truck that had dared to test it.

It's just nuts here. The rain and its effects are anomalous, but the nuttiness of it all is not. There is always something like this interfering with "normal" travel. After an hour of just lounging around by the side of the road eating apricots and drinking water, I finally found a ride on a bus heading up to Kargil. We had to cross several more places where the river had taken over the road, but it was never more than knee deep -- safe for a bus, not for motorcycles. Then the road shot up into the clouds. We passed the incredible monastery of Lamayaru, spread like a tarantula over the sharp rocks, then the standing Maitreya Buddha carved into the vertical rock face at Mulbekh. Then the monasteries gave way to mosques and other signs of Islam. And the military, of course. At one point we were delayed almost as much as by the floods by a line of no fewer than 20 covered trucks led by one topped by masked men holding machine guns pointed skywards. Like I said, the road is super narrow, so encounters like this forced us to drive in reverse and do all kinds cliff-edge fancy Indian bus moves that would put an Olympic ice skater to shame.

So, Kargil. I am tired. Time for some dal, rice, and sweet sleep.