Calcutta certainly has nice, even beautiful areas. As I am among the poor and the volunteers, though, I rarely pass through these areas. One can see some trees and perhaps better kept, cleaner streets. Out in the suburbs the houses are quite charming and the neighborhood is quieter. In the city it is congested, dirty, polluted and loud. And the beggars . . . they are everywhere. The women hold their babies and beg for milk. The children beg for chocolate, or for some rupees. The men reach out their hands or forcefully follow me calling, "Sister, Sister, rupees." The women are even more forceful and have the most pitiful, desperate looks on their faces.
The onslaught of poverty is unrelenting. I walk three blocks from my hotel to Free School Street, and I am offered a ride to Mother House by no less than four rickshaw wallahs (the drivers, the "human horses" who manually pull the rickshaws: some are wearing sandals, some are barefoot). Immediately across the street from my hotel on the street live about four to five partial families and their extended relations and friends (many relatives are back in the village waiting for these people to return with seriously needed money for food and supplies). The children run around in torn, ill-fitting clothes, and they're often smiling and entertaining themselves, waiting for a volunteer to stop by and play, which we do several times a day. There is one old woman who has made her sari from a burlap sack. People are younger, sometimes a lot younger, than they look, as living on the streets with exposure to the elements and worrying about where the next meal or medicine will come from takes a toll on a body. The heat is sweltering, the humidity is ghastly, and I understand that during monsoon season, the two-month long rains flood the streets dredging up unimaginable sludge in which people must walk . . . and the poor must live.
This is Sudder Street, Free School Street, AJC Bose Street. These are the daily beaten paths of Missionaries of Charity volunteers, comparatively rich Europeans, Americans, Australians and South Americans who are constantly approached by beggars for spare rupees, empty water bottles or a shopping trip for food. If you are a poor beggar and can get to one of these places where access to foreign volunteer visitors is abundant, then you can probably do quite well . . . this area is the motherlode. But I think about the overwhelming majority of Calcutta's destitute, that they cannot make it to these locations. They live in slums, they live at the train station, the dumps, the outskirts. The poorest of the poor are the ones you don't see every day. Some of them have six to eight mouths to feed; some of them have only one as they have no family. Some of them are literally rotting away in a pile of garbage or in a back alley. By the grace of God, we'll see the sick ones arrive at Kalighat for treatment.
