Baltimore meets Bengal

I expected sensory overload. I expected culture shock. I expected the unexpected. What I got instead was the rather uncanny sensation that all that was unfamiliar was somehow familiar too.  

In driving from the airport to my Kolkata hotel, I was inundated by sights of tropical greenery, men and women in bare feet, construction projects left unfinished and stray animals roaming the streets. It was Costa Rica, it was Armenia, it was even Baltimore; it was so many of the landscapes that I had inhabited over the course of my life. It was familiar and it was reassuring. If I could happily negotiate the first few minutes of my trip, I knew that I would undoubtedly be able to negotiate the next few weeks. Or that’s what I thought. As we got closer to the hotel, I started to lose sense of the familiar as I saw images of men and women both playing and bathing in water the color of the dusty streets. It was then that I knew that this experience would be different. Maybe it wasn’t Costa Rica or Armenia. Maybe it wasn’t even Baltimore. Maybe it was something new, something that would take me five weeks, five months, and perhaps even five years to begin to understand.