by Linda Neil
The actual scene where Garbo laughs! was pure slapstick. Her would-be lover is determined to charm her out of her seriousness and into his bed. I imagine many others had tried and failed throughout Greta’s cinematic life to arouse her in a similar way, to carry her down into the earth, to make her ‘normal’, grounded, one of us. Her lover accidentally falls out of a chair. Humiliated, he prepares to lift himself back up, but then looks across and sees Garbo laughing and laughing. It is like ice thawing.
The warmth of summer took a long time to arrive in Paris that year, but when I walked outside the cinema after Ninotchka ended, Les Halles was shining in golden light. The cold had finally passed and for me, and for many in the city, there was a reason to smile again. As I walked back to my studio, I thought once more of the young girl I had been in the summer between my eleventh and twelfth birthdays, kicking and gasping across Tallebudgera Creek to get from one side to the other, so that at the end of the long struggle I could look back across the dark expanse of water and time to see that the place where I had started out was just a shimmering speck on the horizon. After months of bitter cold, I felt a tide of warmth, love and hope overwhelm me in the balmy air of Paris. I wondered whether all of us marvel at times about how we get here, as I had that evening in the cinema, while on a black-and-white screen a thin, dour Swedish woman laughed and laughed.
On Kindness in Kolkata
The airline official at Kolkata’s Dum Dum airport hardly glanced at me, even though he appeared to be smiling, as he told me my backpack had been left on the Danish Air plane from which I had disembarked just after midnight.
I’m afraid it is on its way to Copenhagen, miss.
Copenhagen? I repeated incredulously.
Yes, miss, I believe it is in Denmark.
I was too flabbergasted to reply that I knew where Copenhagen was. I was more concerned with how I was going to get my things back to the subcontinent and, more immediately, how I was going to survive in Kolkata with only two books of travellers’ cheques, a toothbrush and a passport secreted in my bum bag. In my giddy excitement at embarking on my first overseas solo adventure, I’d imagined skipping out of the airport into the steamy Kolkata night with my bum bag around my hips, my pack on my back, and a subcontinental siren’s song in my heart.
Instead, I was deflated as I slumped into the nearest available chair and looked around for someone to commiserate with. There was one other friendly-looking westerner in the building, a middle-aged priest who was sitting in the departure area, reading what I assumed was a prayer book. I introduced myself and discovered his name was Father Maurice; after volunteering for a year in India he was heading home to his parish in Malta. Father Maurice invited me to join him while I waited to fill in my lost-luggage papers. It might take a while, he winked knowingly.
It did. At around 6 am, officials from the airline arrived to take my report and assure me the luggage would be returned ASAP, and that in the meantime reparations would be made to help clothe me.
Meeting Father Maurice was fortuitous for more than just the gift of his company. As I walked with him to his departure gate, he suggested I take a rickshaw straight to the YWCA, in the heart of the city – it would be the safest place for a young woman travelling alone.
I took Father Maurice’s advice and, after a hair-raising trip by rickshaw through the early-morning mists, arrived at the YWCA. So I have Danish Air, Father Maurice and my delayed lost luggage to thank for my subsequent encounter with the women of the Y and the various hospitals run by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, at which many of these women volunteered while they lived in the city.
It’s said people go to India for a number of reasons: they come to climb the mountains, to simmer in the deserts, to embrace hedonism on the southern beaches; they come for the ancient mysteries, for the colour and sound, for the buildings and monuments; they come for the gurus, yogis and sadhus, to find spirituality in the ashrams.
I’d come for none of those reasons.
I’d headed to Kolkata to satisfy my sense of adventure and curiosity about the world. I intended to travel around India for six months before going to Europe, and Kolkata was my first port of call: there seemed no more adventurous place to begin than the so-called city of joy. At first it seemed impossible to find joy in this place of beggars and corpulent billionaires. But it was there, I found, waiting in the most unexpected places.
I had come without plans or maps, meaning to stay a few days or a week at the most. But I lived in the city for nearly two months as I waited for my luggage to be returned. Meanwhile, I dressed myself in Indian clothes from the market bazaar across the road from the Y, where I got to know its assortment of guests.
They were a diverse bunch: there was Gloria, the Texan millionaire, roughing it at the YWCA while answering God’s call as a volunteer at Mother Teresa’s hospital, helping babies with tuberculosis. She used to take photos of the shower faucets to send back home to her millionaire buddies, to prove, I suppose, that she really was ‘roughing it’. There was the lovely, lithe Amy from Dorchester, who’d arrived in Kolkata after volunteering for six months at an Israeli kibbutz. She spent her days working at one of the hospitals and her evenings fraternising with US marines at the local army base. There was middle-aged Hilary from Sussex, with her carefully coiffed hair and peaches-and-cream complexion, a follower of the notorious Sai Baba. She was staying at the Y for mysterious reasons, as far as I knew.
Most intriguing were Helga and Gretchen, the spoiled cousins from Berlin, whose industrialist fathers had sent them to Kolkata for an all-expenses-paid reality check. After their mandatory work with the Missionaries each morning, they would spend the afternoon getting manicures and pedicures by the pool in a five-star hotel.
Prior to my landing in Kolkata, all my travel had been with orchestras. I was used to the security of friends, and it was not hard for me to make connections. In Kolkata, it started with the simple act of sharing food in the sparse dining room of the YWCA. At first the ladies found it amusing to watch me navigate my way around all the chillies and spices, and I played along genially, happy to begin our communications with the shared laugh over my inability to comfortably consume even the relatively mild Bengali food. Amy spoke to me first. She was curious as to why I had turned up on the first evening wearing traditional Punjabi Indian clothes, a long tunic over billowing pants. I told her the story of my luggage, which was, I assumed, now safely in Copenhagen. She regaled the others with the story of my new Indian wardrobe and soon we were all chortling at the surprises of travel.
I shared the next few evening meals with the group as I slowly acclimatised to the startling stimulation of Kolkata and its smoggy chaos. Gradually I found out the stories of Gloria, Gretchen and Helga, Hilary and Amy, and by the fourth evening I had been invited to accompany them the next morning on their way to the hospital where they were all volunteering.
We started the day early with breakfast in the dining room. Amy spooned chilli jam out of a jar. I was aghast but impressed by her fortitude, but she had been in India for six months, she explained, and she was determined to have the full Indian experience. And if that meant re-educating her Anglo-Saxon digestive system, so be it. The others ate porridge as I did. I had two bowls, sensing I would need extra nourishment for the day ahead. Hilary left us then; she was going to take a rickshaw to the hospital that morning.
After breakfast we all gathered outside the YWCA, where we were surrounded by child beggars, some of them on makeshift skateboards. It was not the first time I had witnessed such things. Usually as I walked down the streets of Kolkata, I was followed by several beggars. But our small group attracted a crowd of them, multiplying the shock. Amy, who seemed to be the natural leader of the group, spoke cheerfully to the children and gave each of them a small cake she had secreted in her pockets. She treated them as equals, as children just like any other children. I could see how the o
ther women looked to Amy, and the way she interacted with the beggars, as an example of how to overcome their own discomfort.
When she stepped out ahead of the group and began to lead us all down the street, it seemed appropriate that we all fell in behind her. Gloria chatted in her broad American accent. Helga and Gretchen studiously picked their way around the more obvious piles of dirt and refuse that were strewn across the footpath. Amy seemed to know where she was going, so I happily joined in the group as we made our way to the hospital. We came to a corner where we all stopped. An old woman wrapped in plastic lay propped up against a street light. Amy kneeled down beside her and kissed her on the cheek. The woman beamed and spoke what I assumed was rapid Bengali. This is Priyanka, Amy called out to me. Priyanka, this is Linda. She’s lost all her luggage but she’s not lost now that we’ve found her. Gloria went to buy some curd for Priyanka as I kneeled down beside Amy and took the old woman’s hand. She’s lived here for years, Amy told me, on this corner. The plastic helps keep her warm in winter. She has nothing but somehow she’s survived because of the kindness of passers-by. Gloria kneeled down with us and began to spoon-feed the curd to Priyanka out of a pottery bowl. It felt strangely intimate to be part of the group around this old woman, who lived on a street corner in a third-world city.
After a few more minutes we started off along the road again. As Amy called out to Priyanka that she would see her again the next morning, I looked back to see the old woman talking to others around her. Some paid attention, others didn’t. Around the next corner, we passed a line of up to a hundred women holding babies on their hips or children by the hand. They were waiting for the food donations given out twice a day by the Missionaries of Charity. Amy explained all this to me as we made our way to the entrance. Despite the activities around us, there was a distinctive sense of calm and peace in the building. Mother Teresa wasn’t there that day, nor any of the other days I worked at the hospital. She was in Bangladesh at the time, setting up an aid program for the poor.
Mother Teresa prompted ambivalence in India. Some educated Bengalis I met opposed her stance on contraception, and were incensed by her Christianity in this Hindu-majority country. Others thought she was a saint.
The work I saw and participated in was sincere and worthwhile. I held tiny babies in my hand who had been rescued from rubbish bins, watched nuns and volunteers nurse sick infants back to health, and witnessed some children die. Despite the distress I saw many inspiring things in the Kolkata hospitals.
I wasn’t as committed as the others, and didn’t go every day. Sometimes I attended the Bible reading group at the YWCA. Other times, I consulted my ‘other bible’, the Lonely Planet Travel Guide to India, which I had studied before I left Australia. I learned from the Lonely Planet Guide that Kolkata had a coterie of India’s top writers, filmmakers and artists, and that Bengal was the home of India’s great poet Tagore. I also learned place names like the Hooghly district and Howrah station. I visited both. I caught the train to Darjeeling and attended poetry readings. But mainly I hung around the Y with my new friends, who were truly committed to their volunteer work.
On one of the days I accompanied them to the hospital, I met a Bengali social worker, Sonja, who introduced me to her family of teachers and intellectuals, with whom I shared several home-cooked meals. Sonja’s family taught me many things, including how to eat dinner with my hands, how to dress in a sari and how to pray for miracles. They were devout Christians and counted Mother Teresa as a close family friend. They credited her with a miracle they told me to believe in: their youngest son dying from cancer had fully recovered after months of prayer directed towards his healing.
I told Amy of this miracle. She shrugged. I thought she was unimpressed. We see miracles every day, she told me, each equal to the other. I sensed in her demeanour that she would go on to live a magnificent life, so open was she to the everyday opportunities to help, to laugh, to share and to love.
The nuns at the hospital were also open to such things. They weren’t overly effusive, but they were tender when they needed to be. I witnessed such tenderness one day when I watched a tiny nun wrapped in the white robes of the Missionaries of Charity hold in her small hand a premature baby no bigger than the size of her outstretched fingers. With her other hand, she stroked the baby’s cheek and stomach. Back home in Australia, such a fragile infant would live for months in intensive care, supported by tubes and oxygen, and myriad hospital staff. But in Kolkata, there was only human touch to keep the baby alive. Amy understood this too, and she spent hours with the nun and the infant, gently laying her hand on the baby, giving through touch the hope of life.
After my luggage finally arrived, I headed south to what I hoped would be an unforgettable adventure. But I felt I had left a part of my heart back in the fumes and chaos of West Bengal’s capital.
I circumnavigated the subcontinent, stopping first in Chennai, and moving south to the temple town of Madurai, ending up in the coastal town of Kollam, in Kerala – the Indian state with the highest literacy rate. From there I embarked on a three-day train trip back up to New Delhi, where I swam in a pool at the Raj Club, went to the Red Fort, and met a tall Sikh man who asked me to smuggle diamonds into Pakistan. I declined. I then flew to London and would go on to spend the summer in Europe, but first I was marooned for a week in an isolation ward in an infectious-diseases hospital. It was dysentery: I didn’t write home about this adventure, not wanting to worry my parents, but when I finally got over the bug, I celebrated by eating double meals for a fortnight.
By the end of the year I had returned to Brisbane. I re-established myself far too easily, as if the previous year had hardly happened at all. I taught violin and worked freelance as an orchestral musician. But my grandmother could tell I was restless. She’s caught the travel bug, she said to my mother, as if it were a disease from which I would take many years to recover.
I made secret plans to travel again. High on my list of places to revisit was Kolkata, even though I could hardly find the words to describe my experiences to the people I knew in Brisbane. My vocabulary had not expanded enough to express what was still then the inexpressible. I missed the city, I missed the crowds, the animals, the endless stimulation – even the dirt and the proximity of life to death. I had seen how the kindness of strangers could keep hope alive, longer than you thought possible.
Despite many plans, I did not return to the city. My memory of it is still intense, however – perhaps because I never went back. The city is embedded in my skin, in my ears, my nose, my eyes and my heart.
I will, for instance, never forget an afternoon I spent at Kalighat, where incurably ill people were cared for as long as they needed. After a morning spent sunning myself by the pool with Helga and Gretchen, I visited the hospice, where I stayed beside the cot of an old woman recently taken off the street. Her hips had been broken and left untreated so often that her bones now jutted through the skin. As she called out in rasping Bengali, the Missionaries of Charity came to her with water, food and resolute tenderness.
In the dimming light I watched these softly smiling carers soothing the dying woman and, by doing so, allowing her to die with some dignity.
I never again travelled with the Lonely Planet Guide to anywhere and learned that travel was best unplanned. After all, it was a mishap that made me stay in the city longer than I intended. I am still grateful to Danish Air, to the smiling official at Dum Dum airport, to my lost luggage in Copenhagen, to Father Maurice and the eccentric women of the Y that I was there to witness those moments in the dusty afternoon light of Kolkata.
Notes from the Musical Frontier
In the early ’90s, I was still a classical musician, though I’d played in a band with my boyfriend in Brisbane. After we broke up I set off for Sydney to escape the drama, and to find a new kind of life, as you sometimes do in those defining moments of love or heartbreak.
Classical music h
ad already provided me a chance to see the world: as a student I’d played Shostakovich in the Roman Forum, right next door to the Colosseum; performed Peter and the Wolf in London to Peter Ustinov’s narration; and attended the Festival of Youth Orchestras in Aberdeen, where young musicians from places as diverse as Venezuela and Sweden performed concertos and symphonies near the misty Scottish forests.
I loved the classical repertoire and appreciated the technical discipline it gave me. But after a stint as a freelance violinist for opera, ballet and chamber orchestras and string quartets, I was ready for some musical adventures. I was looking for opportunities, I suppose, that would help me develop from the competent professional I was trained to be into something looser, more creative and free.
I was living on Sydney’s north shore, yet to make my move into the inner city, when I heard a song on the radio by Australian guitarist and songwriter Ed Kuepper – ‘The Way I Made You Feel’. I didn’t know much about Ed. I’d probably been going to Musica Viva concerts, listening to Beethoven string quartets and playing beginner’s Bach when he was creating The Saints, arguably one of the world’s first punk bands, in his parents’ garage in Oxley, a few suburbs further west from where I’d grown up in St Lucia. We came from two different musical worlds, but I heard something in his song that really struck me: a space in its sound – a space for a violin, perhaps.
I soon found out more about Ed: that The Saints had disbanded after a flurry of stardom in the late ’70s; that he had gone on to create and front more celebrated indie groups, including the post-punk experimental band Laughing Clowns, The Aints and The Yard Goes On Forever. ‘The Way I Made You Feel’ was from the ARIA Award–nominated album Honey Steel’s Gold, and marked a new surge in popularity for Ed and his songwriting.