I arrived in Kolkata yesterday morning. On the train I read The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh, an exciting book about malaria, delirium and nightmares, coincidence and synchronicity. As I began my rounds of the city, I met an Italian woman, a personal disciple of Osho. She was a naturopath who gave me an interesting talk on Tantra and relationships and told me she was on her way to the Nicobar Islands to write a cookbook. Her first yoga teacher happened to be Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche. I then went to Kalighat, the place where Sati’s finger fell on the earth, and found a picture of Kamaccha Devi on the road. In the afternoon I visited the Birla Art Academy and saw a market behind it where a Bengali painter sat with his scrolls and sang the Ramayana. He was exactly the kind of storyteller I had come to find. Then, on the metro, a man came up to me and said, “This is the fourth time I have seen you today.” It was true, I had seen him in different parts of the city. Kolkata has 12 million inhabitants. In the evening I read the Telegraph, the local newspaper, which proudly announced that India had been ranked 8th in a survey asking “How often do you have sex?”. The article went on to say that India did much better than Britain in this respect. And who came first? You won’t believe it: Hungary. It’s hard to imagine when I remember the gloomy faces on the streets of Budapest. Walking down Park Street this morning, a waiter from the restaurant where I ate last night stopped me and said I should visit Mother Theresa’s house, it was not far. I walked and walked, maybe for an hour, it felt like an endless walk in the heat, but I finally found it. It turned out that Mother Theresa’s beatification ceremony was taking place in Rome on Sunday, and a Sister of Charity showed me the room where she lived. Then, completely exhausted, I sat down in the Barrista Cafe where an old Bengali man came over to my table for a chat and told me his life story and how he met the Dalai Lama in 1959 when His Holiness arrived in India. Then I met a young Bengali in the Oxford bookshop where I went to buy a book by Tagore, who took me out for a drink and told me he was a fashion designer in Japan, just back on holiday, and he would take me around on his bicycle tomorrow to see some scroll painters and collect some Bengali patterns. Then I went to the library of the Asiatic Society to look for a book, but instead I found on the shelf the Acta Orientalia, the great Hungarian academic journal, with an article by Professor Wojtilla, my favourite Sanskrit teacher from university. These are just some of the events of the last two days. I don’t know what I’m doing here, it’s too fast, too random, too much for my brain. Maybe this is just a malaria dream.
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