Lightning Storm Over Calcutta
IT'S ALMOST MIDNIGHT and like most visitors we are already in bed, asleep and trying to sleep. In my drift I hear the storm building, catch spinal flashes and sheets of brightness in the window. Rain begins to fall as the lightning and thunder increase, but I close my eyes again and keep drowsing. Only as it hits the window, harder and harder in thin waves, do I begin to wake and see the fingery rain on the glass, the delicate slow patterns at odds with the torrential source.
It's raging steadily now, and the lightning is permanent and rickety in the sky.
A dripping a running sound.
And I realize the storm is coming inside our hotel room.
I move to my desk in the darkness, fumble for a lamp, try to be silent for my sleeping girlfriend. Flick the switch and get nothing. Look out into the backstreet and see nothing nothing but blackness broken by lightning glimpses of dead streetlamps and a madness of wires and cables tangled along the outside of the buildings. India's way with electricity reminds me of pasta thrown against a wall. Like I should be surprised by what's happening now? It's a power failure.
In the dark I feel for our torch and shine it towards the running sound. I see the leaking roof by the window join, streaming down to a neatly placed, large vase of flowers on the table. The leaves are bouncing water all over the place, so I quickly move everything off the table onto a chair, with the exception of a red makeup bag, a silver ring, a black camera cover and a sealed deck of playing cards, each object under the torchlight wet and waterproof, somehow holy looking.
I think about the reverence we sometimes have for objects. How even the most mundane things can become magical. And I decide to make this accidental night time arrangement my little offering to the gods of India.
By now the storm is enticing me outside as it thunders and flashes and trickles through into the room. I search for other leaks, move our books and clothes into piles that can be more easily protected by an old coat and the day's newspaper, with its headlines promoting an upcoming atomic test. They're calling the bomb Agni” after the Hindu goddess of fire, planning to hand out sweets to thousands of children on the streets of Delhi, Varanasi, all the big cities. Beating Pakistan in the cricket and nuking them on the borders of Kashmir are the current leap this country is hoping to make into the divine. I scan the ravings with my torch for common sense, but there is none.
A rumble of light bursts over me. At the back of my mind are thoughts of Calcutta's vulnerability. Is it the monsoon season? How wild does it get here? It is easy to imagine the city swamped, pounded by nature.
I shift the bolt away and open one of the two swinging doors, then the other some five minutes later. I'm surprised by the coolness of the air outside. Calcutta's humidity, its continuous heat, is finally gone. This could be a fresh night at home in Sydney.
The rain is sweet sounding on the guttering, running and breaking onto the concrete directly below our first floor room. The smell of it on the warm stone is clean, almost scented in a city I more usually associate with spices and shit and sweat.
The lightning has moved off now and I can see Calcutta being outlined like a jumpy photographic negative. Despite the flashing in the sky there is no thunder anymore, even as the rooftops are continuously lit up for miles around. As the rain also eases, the sky turns a rosy, smoky colour with each pale splash of light.
I want to go out into the streets and see Calcutta in a storm. Put on a raincoat and shrug down the streets, yet another watcher of the city.
Just how many watchers has this city seen? I wonder.
But Calcutta is bigger than any definition or journey, beyond containing by any writer or photographer, any tourist, any saint for that matter. Let alone me.
I'm frightened of what might be out there too. The deformed beggar who stands perpetually at the hotel gate, with a crooked arm and a nub for a hand and a mouth like a half-broken dinner plate. The leprous fingers grabbing from doorways, the forms beneath sodden blankets, even a common beseeching for rupees given new night energy. A deserted street with me. A dog without eyes...
My dark visions run on without me. I don't want to leave my girlfriend either. What if she worries? Wonders where I have slipped to?
I begin to use her as an anchor, a blaming point for my own fears, and yearn for the chaos of the lonely world, the free world, to just do as I please.
I click pointlessly at the dead fan. Completely open both doors to let the rainwashed air in and the heat of the room escape. My girlfriend sleeps on, her back still visible and pure in the shadows.
A pang of sadness shoots through me, a longing to kiss the base of her spine and whisper, I'm sorry.”
It's then I hear some sickly meowing. Walk barefoot out onto the balcony with only a towel pulled to my waist. Look down the stairwell.
In the darkness a white cat is calling. One kitten comes out complaining, then another, then another. Still she calls, stalking her babies, licking each of them, counting them in with her tongue. It feels like a secret shared between us: a cat, her kittens and me.
I start listening for other sounds. A rowdy car horn-probably a black-and-yellow taxi, the automotive thugs of Calcutta's roads-blares long and repeatedly down Sudder Street with typical out-of-the-way!” indifference. Out-of-the-way sleepers, fearers, cat mothers, beggars, half-awoken dreamers... out of the way, there's work to be done, fares to be collected.
Dogs are barking. Voices cheer or moan. I feel guilty for hearing the city's sounds as animal and in unison. As if my ears are degrading the individual souls of the street, canine and human alike, into a great bestial shaking off of water from the skin.
More car horns. More shouts. More dogs. Rain is still falling, but Calcutta is starting to move again.
Then, for just a minute, I hear the crows. The perennial black crows of Calcutta, a bird for every soul, it is said. As if they have woken up at the wrong time or come to lie to us about a dawn that is still some way off. There's a wave of their cries, cawing at space, then they fall away.
Servants are moving below. Cranking up the generator. A sewery smell begins to rise as if something foul has been stirred. And as the noise of the generator roars, I move back inside and close the doors, trying to slide the great bolt back in as quietly as I had slid it out.
Within seconds there's a flutter of light on the balcony and the overhead fan begins to turn. Power is restored to the hotel. Outside our window the alley is still dead black, hard to see into.
I check for more leaks when I feel some water at my feet, but it all seems okay. Throw the day's newspaper over the flooded section of floor; let its A-bomb dreams die in a puddle.
My bedside lamp is now burning low beneath its green shade. So I open my diary to try to remember what I did. In Calcutta. In a lightning storm. Before I fell asleep. When my eyes were heavy. And the world recalled the sky.