Kolkata: the train headed two directions.

I began turning restlessly in my bed this morning at 5 am, still unadjusted to Kolkata time. Reverberating Bengali music intermingled with noisy bird chatter, traffic horns, and the woman across the street washing her tin cups in a shallow basin. The strangeness of being back in India—and feeling a stranger in this place— has not subsided. It likely never will. Yet, there have been little touches of familiarity that also make this place feel like home again. This morning, it was the taste of Chai. Chai that is so different than anything available in the states. A taste that is sweet and spicy and redolent. Chai that makes the tin cup it’s in sweat. Chai that grows a thick layer of milk skin if you leave it for a moment, separating only when you blow the surface to cool it off. Drinking chai early this morning I sighed. I am blessed to be back here.

Of course, just because India is beginning to feel like a home again, doesn’t mean it presents the comforts often associated with “home”. This time in Kolkata has already proven to be anything but comfortable. I’m not referring to the discomforts often assumed with travel to a foreign place—the heat, the insects, the digestive issues. I am more uncomfortable with the personal style of living that seems so drastically opposite of the Indians that surround me. It is far different than the way I lived in Rameswaram three years ago (which seemed much more homogenized with the Indian way of life—more authentic). Currently, I am sitting two stories above the streets of Kolkata below me. If I look out the window, I can see smoke rising from an Indian man earning his living selling corn grilled over a small fire for just a few rupees a piece. Next to him is a young girl, maybe seven, carrying her half-dressed new born baby brother—an acting mother in a family that is probably too big to have adequate food or clothing. And here I sit, in an air conditioned room with clean running water enough square footage to comfortably fit five or ten more people. I have wireless internet at my desk. There is a TV in the room adjacent to mine. This is not the India I remember. I have to remind myself that this time around I am in the city. The style of living in India is drastically changing as you get closer and closer to the cities. The space is divided between the rich and the poor living side by side. You will glance out the window to see new construction being resurrected just next to a hut with a thatched roof. You may see a man in a business suit, chatting away on his cell phone, stepping over the top of an elderly beggar lying on the side of the road. Shiny new cars are parked next to rickshaws and rusted bicycles. Striking diametrical opposites.

The most acute description I have heard so far of this blatant divide between the wealthy and the poor of India is found in Arundhati Roy’s book “Power Politics”. An Indian herself, I was memorized with the way Roy was able to pinpoint the phenomenon that’s occurring in this nation:

“India lives in several centuries at the same time. Somehow we manage to progress and regress simultaneously…we greaten like the maturing head of a hammerhead shark with eyes looking in diametrically opposite directions…

…As Indians we subsist on a regular diet of caste massacres and nuclear tests, mosque breakings and fashion shows, church burnings and expanding cell phone networks, bonded labor and the digital revolution, female infanticide and the Nasdaq crash, husbands who continue to burn their wives for dowry and our delectable stockpile of Miss Worlds…in lane behind my house, every night I walk past road gangs of emaciated laborers digging a trench to lay fiber-optic cables to speed up our digital revolution. In the bitter winter cold, they work by the light of a few candles…

…It’s as though the people of India have been rounded and loaded up onto two convoys of trucks (a huge big one and a tiny little one) that have set off resolutely in opposite directions. The tiny convoy is on it’s way to a glittering destination somewhere near the top of the world. The other convoy just melts into the darkness and disappears…For some of us, life in India is like being suspended between the two trucks, one in each convoy, and being neatly dismembered as they move apart, not bodily, but emotionally and intellectually.”

After I read Arundhati Roy’s visceral description of the state of India, I suddenly had an image to digest. The picture of the two trains traveling in opposite ways couldn’t be more accurate. The irony sinks in as I sit here at my laptop while listening to a baby cry outside. Earlier this afternoon I threw my clothing in to the washing machine in my room, then walked to the front window to see an elderly woman dripping in sweat as she scrubbed and rinsed her saris by hand, hanging them to dry just outside her miniscule living space. The daily sights are hard to swallow. I am sure I will never stop thinking about what I am seeing—even after returning home. The more I ponder, the more I can’t help but yearn for the Kingdom of God to one day be established in place of this way of life humanity has set up. I am putting my stock in the promise that, “Not always will the poor one be forgotten, nor will the hope of the meek ones ever perish” (Psalm 9: 18). With Jesus Christ as ruler, he will “have mercy on the lowly one and the poor one, and the souls of the poor ones he will save. From oppression and from violence he will redeem their soul, and their blood will be precious in his eyes” (Psalm 72:13,14). Ofcourse, this promise of a new Kingdom is not yet fulfilled, but it is alive and well even now if we ask the Lord, “your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

God’s Kingdom is accessible even now. I lean in to that promise as I prepare to walk outside. “Nor will the hope of the meek ones ever perish.” Hope is enduring. Even in a place like this.