The Week Before Puja

I put off posting this so that my last blog post would not be lost in the mix. The Sunday before that happened, a friend’s friend came from Dhaka to visit Kolkata, so I met up with her and her mom to check out the city a little bit. First we walked around Robindra Sadan a little bit, visiting the art gallery in the Academy, and then visited the Victoria Memorial. I hadn’t been to the Victoria Memorial before; it’s a giant Raj-era building near Robindra Sadan. There’s a museum inside, but it was closing just as we got there. After that, we caught a taxi to take us to the other tourist attractions that my new friend wanted to see. We drove over the two bridges (this was my first time on the other side of the river), past Howrah station, and, after waiting for traffic while getting over the bridge, went to Princep Ghat, which is right near the base of the new bridge. After that, we had the taxi driver drop us off near Park Street metro station, drank some tea, and then I went home.

On Wednesday I took Aniket around the neighborhood, showing him where the market and stores are. On Thursday (as I wrote in my last post), I went to Rabindro Sadan to see a Bengali-language production of Hamlet. The play was quite well done. The biggest question I had before seeing it was how the “to be or not to be” line was translated, as there is no “to be” verb in Bangla that works that way. It was translated as “to survive or to die,” which, while getting the point across, doesn’t quite have the poetic sense that the English version does. When I came out of the theatre I failed at getting transportation for the first time in Kolkata. After waiting through three completely packed trains I gave up going on the metro, and decided to get a taxi. And then I hunted for a taxi for about an hour. I had just about given up and started to go back to try the metro again, when I met an older woman who was also trying to find a cab. She was nice enough to give me a ride when she finally found one.

On Friday in class we had a guest speaker who was my favorite so far. He was a mat weaver – one of the people who weaves a special type of reed into mats and other products. We talked about everything from cultivating the reeds to marketing the product to where he gets inspiration for new designs. He brought in a lot of samples to demonstrate his work; I bought a folding mat that can be used for pretty much anything. That night, Bennett and I went to see a play by Tagore called Acholoyoton. It was extremely well done, and I think that I will see it again later.