monday Nov 7 12:15p

I just picked up a volume of Rabindranath Tagore's short stories to read during my 24-hour train ride coming up this afternoon. Supposedly he's the Shakespeare of India. I'm also traveling sleeper class, which is one class lower than I intended to travel (3-tier AC was full) so I'm in for a lot of jostling. Yesterday I took a long walk from Connaught Place to somewhere across the Yamuna river. On the way, I passed a whole community of people who appear to make their living disposing of the city's garbage. There are no garbage cans anywhere, and quite honestly I don't know what the residences do. Many of the businesses and tenants in the part of town I'm in use as much as they can, and throw the rest on the street, where it gets intermittently cleaned up by various people. These people seem to live by the river under and around two giant conduits (that presumably carry power, phone, fiber optic cabling, etc). The conduits provide the structural backbone for hundreds and hundreds of tarp/plastic lean-tos and shacks constructed with bits of the garbage that the whole place swims in. The flies are terrible because there's so much cow dung and human dung in places. On one side of the camp, there's a crew that sifts through the city's garbage, using what they can, and bundling the rest into large sacks. The funny thing is that the kids really don't know how substandard their living conditions are. We were smiling and waving at each other the whole time I walked through. One of the kids had even fashioned a raft out of a garbage sack, and made an oar as well, and tied a bunch of saris together to climb down from the bridge. There is a very good reason that no one sees tourist photos of these neighborhoods; how can you pull out a camera in front of someone who knows very well that it's worth their whole year's salary? I also came across a fifty story building, gutted, that had been claimed by the government while it was being built. It's still in litigation (many years, said the caretaker). The crew installing the new subway line was really cool, though. So far, it's much easier to ask forgiveness than ask permission when it comes to places you're not supposed to be--people keep assuming that confidence equals a right to be there! I'd like to keep writing but the waiting line for these computers is getting a little long. See you in Calcutta.