Leaving

I cannot get my head around leaving India. In fact its not just my head that I cannot bring around to the reality, but the reality itself. Returning to Kolkata has been strange. The faces of the travellers and long term volunteers who I worked with six months ago have changed. Some have returned to the places they call 'home', while others are on 'holiday', making the most of the influx of the Catholic volunteers over Christmas time in order to take a break. I have not even had time to think about these experiences, but rather they are floating through my mind, randomly recreating images so incredible they could be dreams. Since returning to Kolkata I have been so busy finding old friends and laughing with Gita, that my head has been fully occupied with the present. No room for future thoughts...

I have had a crazy busy two weeks: Every morning with Gita, lunchtimes at Sealdah train station and then afternoons visiting Wonder Woman and little Pineapple Girl among a hundred others at New Light and the Soma Home. The Life that his City contains is incredible. Just a five minute walk along a familiar street flashes a hundred images and prompts a thousand thoughts. Interactions, observations, conversations. I feel as if I have lived in Kolkata; as if this has been one of my many 'homes'. The feeling of belonging is comforting and a necessary facilitator for my travlling these past three years around a strange and hybrid World. Finding 'homes' in alien places is a necessity for someone like me who dislikes the feeling of being a 'visitor' rather than part of a social community, even if for only a short period.

In the past few weeks I have paced around Kolkata, surprised at my own familiarity with the mirage of streets and feeling disconcertenly at ease. The diversity of this city seems more apparent now that I have travelled away and then returned. The photo exhibitions, the colonial architecture, the activist book shops, the smart city shops a stones throw away from the wooden shacks of the traditional craftsmen and the plastic roofs of the slum dwellers. Diversity is reflected though the triad community of Muslim, Hindus and Sikhs and is intermingled with a formidable amount of Christian tourists; the continuation of tradition, culture, history and religion played out through the daily routine of occupational castes and family fortune. Rickshaw wallahs run bare foot alongside yellow Ambassador taxi's which race chauffeur driven imported jeeps. The daily newspapers, which are published in Urdu and Bengali, plaster the billboards while the old men share spectacles inorder to read them. Around the corner young business women drink Italian cappuccinos, subconsciously slipping into English and using phrases remeniscent of Victorian England as they excitedly discuss the forthcoming weekend's party.

It is because of this diversity that Kolkata is an easy place for a foreigner to live. That is until you open your eyes; and here it is much easier for an 'insider' to stay blinded than an outsider. The destitution framing daily life is shocking and with a city that has a population larger than most European countries the combination of poverty and numerology reduces a slum dwelling, street living individual to a body – anybody, somebody, no-body. Here Poor People die unnoticed as just as their life has been invisible, they leave behind a shadow of a child, woman or man ready to fill their space squatting at the side of the road, 'living' in the limbo of the Hungry and Homeless.

The power of globalisation lifts the educated and privileged into a parallel world while simultaneously transporting the poverty tourists into a vacuum of sickness, disease and deformity which they visit each day and which exists each night but which they leave after a few months, or perhaps days. A vacation of altruism; a lesson of life; a Mission completed?

These past eight months have had a profound effect on me. Indeed my eyes have been opened. I have met a little Buddha; an incredible child who I have learned so much from, who I now feel a responsibility for and yet Helpless to Help. I have worked along side Indians and foreigners whose compassion for humanity has held a mirror up to my own inadequacies. I have dealt with the guilt of the privileged, and the depth of my powerlessness. I have spoken in anger, written in sadness and tried to pacify a mind which is continuously provoked to thoughts of frustration. I have heard My Self.

And so yes, it is hard to imagine that I need to leave this place that continues to teach me so much. That is so full of Life and all of its imperfections. Every morning I laugh with Gita I cannot even think about saying Good bye, telling myself that perhaps its for the best as she cannot understand my words, and anyway my guiding hands with be replaced by another's.

My justifications for leaving are that I need to work. I will go and teach yoga to rich people on a paradise Island in Thailand. I will live in the nature again, and smell the salt of the sea. I will live in a bubble of tranquility. Of course I plan to return at the end of the season with enough money to work with Gita again, but my connection to Now nullifies plans for Then, inspite of the most rational of thoughts.

I was meant to leave on Sunday, but the airline cancelled my ticket. I was meant to leave on Tuesday but I contracted dysentery, I was meant to leave on Thursday but again the airline intervened and shut down its website. I was meant to leave on Saturday but my knee objected and I had to have an MRI scan. If I was supersitutious perhaps I would think the Universe was trying I tell me something. Unfortuantely, 'we' humans keep thinking that we have the power of the gods we personify. So I am leaving tomorrow.