Painting Abstract Realities

A few days ago I saw a silver-black crow eating the eyes out of a dead rat that lay in a pile of garbage swept up next to the curb. A second crow was scavenging through the refuse looking for food. Today I saw it again – a crow feasting on a rat that lay dead on the sidewalk. I thought of the conversation that I heard the other day, about the issue of the “bird-flu” and the mysterious deaths of 70-80 crows.

Every few meters on the boulevard are signs fastened to metal poles and scores of bigger-than-life billboards featuring glamorous women highly decorated in jewels and gold. Their alluring smiles and ecstatic countenance as if to display a sense of happiness, fulfillment, makes me wonder what would happen if those signs were replaced with ones that speak of female feoticide and infanticide, of the dowry murders that plague India. Would it prompt women to long for the life, freedom, and power of themselves over the ephemeral pleasure that their jewels bring? How is it, I ask myself, that what a woman decorates herself with is more important than her safety, her liberty, her life?

The late March heat has become much too oppressive to wear a scarf to conceal the fact that I have breasts. But since I’ve stopped doing so my chest draws the predatory stares of men I pass on the street. So I’ve devised a way to walk so that my arms effectively shield my breasts. With my bag slung across my torso, I keep one hand on the strap which covers my left breast. I bring the other hand up to meet it, resting my forearm on my right breast. As I walk in this protective posture I feel a sense of humiliation as a woman who must go to such lengths to obscure a part of her body used in the nourishment of life. How much is it to ask that men just deal with the fact that women have breasts.

A scrawny white cat with shades of orange and gray stands buddha-erect in front of the Dhaba restaurant where I’ve sometimes taken dinner. It too hungry for food. Close by lays a black and white dog not much bigger than the cat, always sleeping soundly amongst the boisterousness of the city street. Food gets stuck in my throat when thinking of their hunger, which leftover scraps can only assuage temporarily.

I still find it awkward, despite how many times I’ve seen it, when I pass men in the street while they are openly urinating. Without hesitation they stop mid-step, pivot with their back to the street, and pee on the spot. Don’t they feel some sense of embarrassment, I wonder, especially upon seeing me seeing them? With the heat now in full force, the most heavily urinated areas necessitate a quick step whilst holding one’s breath.

The piles of human excrement in the narrow alley that I walked through a few mornings ago were in peculiar contrast to the pistachio green colored toilet showcased in the window of a bathroom facilities shop immediately around the corner.

Public restrooms are seldom to be found in India, and when they are, there is a two-rupee charge. Some places provide open-air urinals for the male population, but nothing for the females. The lack of toilets in several public schools has driven some girl students to dropout.

Overcrowded city buses, some dented and damaged, travel through the streets at breakneck speeds. I learned that this is because the driver, the conductor, and the hawker who calls people aboard, are paid commission. They rush from stop to stop, recklessly racing in vicious competition with other buses. Naturally, accidents are not uncommon. While crossing the street with two Indian women, a bus heading our direction purposefully sped up upon seeing us. It’s like a game for them. Playing with people’s lives.

The heat of the sun coupled with the high humidity keeps me off the streets and sequestered indoors most of the day. When I am out, I am in dismay at how those who work directly in it are able to manage. Being a recipient of the weather in Calcutta gives me pause to consider the growing problem of global warming. There is no argument that weather patterns are changing the world over; there is a bizarre quality to them which heretofore did not exist.

In South Calcutta where I am staying, residents of the city tell me that it is typical that once the sun surrenders to the night, breezes cool things down. But this year, the breeze, if it comes at all, has been a scant one. It’s partly being blamed on the “concrete jungle” the name that the owner of my guesthouse calls the new Calcutta that is growing skyward. Due to the rapid growth of the city, with no more room to sprawl outward, old buildings are being razed and replaced with ones that climb several stories high.

According to reports that I’ve been reading in the newspaper, West Bengal, the state to which Calcutta belongs, will become home to millions of neighboring Bangladeshis in the future when the temperatures increase and cause the sea levels to rise. India’s media has been sounding the alert on the alarming trends that the scientific world predicts will displace millions through massive droughts, floods, and unbearable temperatures in an economically burgeoning country. Such talk of (un)natural disasters falls on deaf ears of those who prefer to hear only the sound of a pocketful of rupees clanging together.

An outstretched hand begging for rupees to be dropped into it appeared from out of the shadows as my friend and I strolled together in the night. The way that he came alive in the streetlight, his slightly stooped figure, emerged like an apparition. It’s one of the thousand-some extraordinary photos that are only recorded in the lens of my perception.

I thought about this man – and millions more like him – with no concept of the economic development of the 21st century India that boasts of material advancements, shiny, sporty cars, cosmetic surgery – and wondered what India can do for them. To lift them out of their destitution, to ease the burden of their incessant suffering. The answer came quickly. Nothing. India will do nothing. It is their karma, after all, and the only possible consolation in that is in the hopes that their next lifetime will have propelled them to a higher rung on the hierarchal ladder. Struggle and suffering are their fate. How convenient this excuse that effectively removes the need to take any responsibility for the lives of millions of suffering human beings whose only crime was being born of the wrong caste.

While walking through the streets today, before the sun had risen too high, I watched and photographed the morning rituals of the neighborhood. Children playing hopscotch and cricket. Men sleeping under the shade of trees and shadows while women carrying sand-filled containers atop their heads dripped with sweat. Butchers cutting goats into pieces of meat, the severed black head of one, tongue protruding, displayed on the ledge of the shop window. The pleading bloodshot eyes of a man with a grungy gray beard and a deformed foot. Chickens awaiting their fate in a net-covered basket next to their executioner, a man with tufts of downy white hair protruding from the side of his shiny bald head, his image a curious likeness of his prey. In front of him lay a pile of bloodied feathers, a scene that I viewed as if it were a painting so as to remove myself (a resolute ahimsa vegetarian) from the repulsive reality of it.

But it’s what I am compelled to photograph. Those things that we find abhorrent, uncomfortable, inexcusable. What we often turn our heads, close our eyes to avoid. Countless situations we pretend not to see, and in doing so, think perhaps will cease to exist. At least in our minds. But they will remain, and to some degree, on some level, they affect each one of us, even if we choose to view reality as abstract paintings with no inherent life of their own beyond the strokes of the brushes we paint them with.