The last Chinese Indians of Kolkata
The last Chinese Indians of Kolkata
On slow reporting from the City of Joy, diaspora and belonging, and memorable encounters with language.
Circling back to Kolkata
When I received confirmation in November last year that I would be participating in a journalism workshop in Kolkata, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and led by Paul Salopek of Out of Eden Walk—an estimated ten-year journey on foot to retrace our human ancestors’ migration out of Africa during the Stone Age, through stories—it felt like coming a tiny full circle.
Back in 2012, I was supposed to have spent six months in Kolkata to report on criminal justice in the West Bengal region for a global charity. I remember how excited I had been to be paired with an American photographer a few years older, who I’d just thought was so cool because she had photographed bears in the wild. I’d also made contact with the criminal lawyer I was supposed to shadow and was excited to get to work, to throw myself into the deep end. I poured over travel guides and blogs, fantasised about making a temporary home of a hostel room I’d found—from pictures, it looked a little worse for wear, but I chose to imagine it as poetically ascetic. I imagined hanging out with other aspiring journalists on the dingy rooftop of the faded building under the night sky, made warm with the camaraderie of like-minded people. It would have been my first real experience of international reporting, but it didn’t happen.
About a month before I was supposed to leave for Kolkata, I fell ill. I had a recurring high fever, and the lymph nodes on my neck swelled up. I did some tests and biopsies. The doctor woke me up one morning with a phone call and told me bluntly that I might have lymphoma, that I would have to do more tests. It was a particularly bad time to hear that, as my cousin’s wife, only in her thirties, had died recently of the same cancer. The doctor said it was best I didn’t go to India, and the NGO couldn’t wait; the American photographer needed a reporting partner. So another journalist took my place, and I, with much difficulty, put Kolkata behind me.
Thankfully, whatever I had turned out not to be lymphoma, and it wasn’t something a short course of steroids couldn’t fix. (My hunch is that I had reacted badly to the rabies vaccine I had gotten just before that.) But I’ve always wondered, in passing, how the trajectory of my life might have been different, in even the smallest way, had I spent those six months in Kolkata then. Would I have ended up living a life that revolved around India? Would I have ended up committing to foreign correspondence earlier? Who knows?
Still, it felt right that the next time—the first time—I went to India, it was to Kolkata, and on a reporting trip. I wanted really badly to apply for the Out of Eden Walk workshop, having followed Paul Salopek’s journey since he started, even though I only found out about it a few days before the deadline and hadn’t yet secured a story commission that was the prerequisite for acceptance.
But luckily, everything fell into place in the end. And then I was there. And I found another rooftop for breezy, albeit polluted, afternoons.
