my first trip to Kolkata

When I first arrived in Kolkata, I was not warned that my five senses would be assaulted.

The heat and the humidity when you first walk out of the airport makes you want to strip down, then a man hands me a plastic cup the size of a thimble filled with sweet hot milky tea.

I accept thinking what a kind gesture but when he asks for money after I gulped down the tea, I am embarassed but luckily I have some Indian rupees, the smallest being a 100 note which he cannot change as the tea only costs a couple of rupees.

The taxi ride to the hotel starts with a constant horn blasting in the congested traffic so the earplugs the airline offered would have come in handy.

You are constantly on edge as your car is sandwiched inches away from other vehicles. You feel that any minute your car will be hit so you try to take your mind off it and watch the scenery only to be shocked by the poverty and the slum areas.

I don’t like air conditioning so I wind down the window but the pollution from the car fumes & the heat is so strong that your throat starts to hurt and your eyes sting and I reluctantly appreciate the air conditioning and wind up the window.

Your car stops at the traffic light and you jump out of your skin when you hear a knock on your window. You turn your head and your heart beats furiously as you see a deformed beggar or a child carrying a baby motioning for food to eat.

I thought I was prepared for this but obviously I was not. I didn’t know what to do and the driver didn’t speak English. Do I wind down the window and give money?

But these people look so dirty and frightening I turn the other way and the knocking continues until the car drives away. I feel guilty and ashamed.

The hotel is sheer luxury, the other extreme of what I have just witnessed. Clean, cool and the staff are SO friendly.

You actually feel their sincerity when they welcome you but once again, that guilt was waiting to surface inside me, how can I stay in a place like this when the cost of one night must be more than a month’s salary for a taxi driver?

After a hot shower, good food and feeling clean and refreshed we meet our guide Suvendu, who we previously arranged to spend the week with us.

Naturally I was full of questions, the first being, what should I have done with those beggars knocking on the car window? Would they be aggressive? Could I catch any disease from them if I touched them?

He was adamant that you DO NOT GIVE them money.

This only encourages children not to attend school. He gave an example of how a tourist gave $200 to a child. This generous kind hearted tourist did not realise that word quickly spread to the villages outside of the city as well as within the city.

Kolkata was inundated with children running away from home, dropping out of schools and parents sending their children in to beg, all in search of this tourist, in the hope that there would be plenty more of these generous tourists.

As to the other question, no, they are not aggressive and just don’t touch the lepers who may still have blood on their bandages!!