WTF nights

[This post is unrelated to the sikkim travel posts. Will resume travel posts shortly]

In Ecuador I had a lot of nights that I called “what the fuck!” nights. These nights generally fall into the categories of 1) upsetting, 2) ridiculous, 3) stupid, or all three. I’ve had some here, but fewer, and of a different variety. The WTF nights in Guasmo Sur, the slum in Guayaquil where I lived, involved such activities as searching for a friend whose sister came running into an anniversary party hysterical, drunk, and looking for me and my friend to help find her suicidal brother, who she thought might have killed himself. After searching in the early morning hours, and waking up many a neighbor, we eventually returned to the home where she lived with her brother- a bamboo structure with a dirt floor- and found our friend watching t.v.

One other Guasmo WTF night that comes to mind involves the family I lived with. I arrived home late, after returning from something or other in the city center. My male friends, as usual, walked me home to a certain point, after which they let me go on my own because they said it was too dangerous for them. Something about turf wars or some similar bullshit. As an outsider I had some privilege in being turfless. I think it also helped that a respected, powerful, and possibly feared elder, wielding a huge and conspicuous shotgun, had once escorted me home in the middle of the night. Anyway, this one night I made my way home and found blasting music coming from my house. Odd, as it was late, and three kids and two working parents lived there as well. Moreover, the walls of the house did not reach the tin ceiling so any sound in the house was carried to everywhere else in the house. I knocked on the door and my friend, the mom, answered. She was singing off tune to the blasting music, and was severely drunk. I peered into the other rooms, and the kids and dad appeared to be sleeping soundly under their mosquito nets. I had never seen my friend drunk before. She hugged me in a drunken way that was too tight and too long and too clingy for me. She was slurring her speech and it was hard for me to understand her Spanish above the music. I turned the music down and asked her to tell me what was going on. She started crying and told me that her husband was having an affair with a woman he worked with (doubtful as this woman lived in the US- but I may also have gotten the tenses wrong- maybe she said “used to have” rather than “is having.”) Then she talked about how it was very hard for her to live in the slum since she didn’t grow up there, and how the place was making her kids sick (all the kids and she had scabies that would never fully go away), and how she knew that living there was making her eldest daughter cold and quiet, and how they could afford to move but that her husband woudn't do it because of his ideals, no matter how much the family suffered. She said she missed her family in Columbia and hadn’t seen them in years, and then she started talking about her younger brother, who had committed suicide a few years earlier. She said a lot of very upsetting things, much of which I was aware of from living in their home and observing and participating in their lives. At one point, her husband came out of a room to use the toilet. He ignored us and went back to sleep. I hated him for this. Later, I turned off the music and told my friend that I needed to sleep.

At some point that night or early morning my friend left the house. She didn’t return until three days later. I was pissed because some of the responsibility for the care of the kids fell to me in those days, and I had to answer questions about when their mami was coming back and where she went. All lies of course since no one knew where she was or for how long. I was also furious that she had left her kids (1, 4, and 8) in the care of her husband who was barely around. At the same time, it was also evident that my friend was in a miserable situation, and there were few options for her to change it- flight was understandable even if I didn’t think it was OK.

On the second night of my friend’s absence, I was awoken by screams of “mami, mami, mami!” by the middle child, with whom I had become closest. I knew that she and her father were sharing a bed in an adjoining room so I assumed the girl was having a nightmare. Her screams, however, became even louder and more desperate and frightful. My mind raced with thoughts that maybe her dad was dead, beside her in the bed, and that was why her screams sounded so horrifying. So I decided to go into the room and check on her. I opened the door and her dad was sleeping soundly beside her. Her screams hadn’t woken him up. I pulled out the mosquito netting from the mattress, grabbed the child, and hugged her. Her father remained asleep and I was angry at him for this. I asked her what happened and why she was so upset. She said, “Nececito usar el bano.” - I need to use the bathroom. Her comments were heartbreaking to me. She just wanted her mom to take her to the bathroom, and she couldn’t get out of bed because she didn’t know how to remove the netting. She calmed down and went to the toilet. Then she asked where her mami was. I told her that I didn’t know, and put her back in bed, next to her dad.

Enough of WTF days and nights in Guasmo. Let’s move onto my upper-crust WTF nights of Calcutta. Saturday night started off allright. I attended a performance of Shaw’s "The Millionairess", put on by the Calcutta Club- an upper crust Bengali social club that began in response to the whites-only clubs established by the Brits. The acting and venue were good. But the play was deadly boring. Eeesh. BO-ring. Afterwards, the people I went with suggested that we go out to eat (Cool) . . .at the MacDonalds that just opened in the city. (Rrrrr) Fortunately, MDs had opened that day, so the long line was prohibitive to us, as our hunger was large. Unfortunately, the group decided to eat at the new KFC instead. There was a veg menu at KFC but it all looked terrible so I survived with fries, a coke, and ice cream. Blech. [note: West Bengal just liberalized its regulations re: permitting international firms into the state, so we are about to be deluged with this sort of crap now. It will stimulate the economy, perhaps, but at a cost.]

After dinner we split up and I headed out for a drink with a friend. About two hours later another friend called and said she was with some family members, and we should meet up. The friend I was with talked to the bar manager and asked to have my friends put on the guest list (so they could get in for free). However, when my friend and her 5 people showed up, wearing the modern Indian dress of salwar kameez (women) and pants and shirt (men) the manager told them that they would have to pay. Bullshit. The unspoken rule is that foreigners in any state of dress can get in anywhere they want, as can hot Bengali women wearing modern dress. But when Indians wearing normal Indian clothing, and not looking particularly upscale, try to enter such a place the expensive entry fee apparently comes into play. Nothing is ever as it appears, however. The people they applied the fee to included 3 lawyers, 2 women working in the IT industry, and 1 hot Bengali who is about to get her masters in the US. I walked out of the bar, where my dejected friend and her crew were deciding whether they should pay the cover. We were all pissed off and it was an uncomfortable and upsetting moment (me walking out of the bar they were trying to get into). I said that I didn’t want to go back to that place, ever. We left and went to the usual bar, where we danced and talked for many hours.

At around 4am, there were 4 of us left. A friend of a friend showed up (after having gotten off the night shift at his IT employer). He wanted to go dancing at a club. I begrudgingly agreed, but said I would stay for only one more drink, and then we would leave because I was exhausted. Really, I had no other option at that point since taking a cab by myself at that hour is not recommended and my friends were ready to go dancing.

I have learned now that one should never arrive at a club at 4am. Entering the place was hilariously depressing. One severely drunk guy was being led out on the arm of a friend. I think I spotted a dab of vomit on the edge of his mouth. {gross} Three other guys were sitting with their heads down on the table- sleeping? Drunk? Who knows. Another table of men was raucously drunk- the clear “stay away” sign. And about 15 people were dancing to loud house music. Less than 15 minutes into the evening’s final crappy club experience, my friend became involved in a bar fight with some drunken asshole (DA) who was acting as intelligent as his mental capacity would allow. A bar fight! I felt like I was in middle school again, and I was pissed that my friend would get dragged into such meaningless violence. But DA said something insulting and threatening. . . Bla bla bla. Idiocy on both their parts. A group of dudes pulled the two fighting idiots away from each other, and then I grabbed my friend and dragged him away from the scene and tried to discuss the idiocy and meaninglessness of the whole thing. I really had no idea what to say so I just kept repeating/yelling “Just let assholes be assholes. You don’t need to get involved.” Brilliant, no? That reasoning was successful for about two minutes until DA tried to punch my friend’s friend and a repeat of the earlier scene ensued. It’s times like these when I’d really like to just hop on a subway and go home, but I am stuck since I must either a) wait for the friend with a car to be ready to leave or b) wait until around 5:30am when the sun comes up and I am comfortable taking a taxi home. I tried to rally the two women with me to share a cab home but that didn’t work since one of us would still be left taking a cab home alone, and we all lived in different directions. Rrrrr.

(One other note about women and cabs in Calcutta- there are certain techniques that we all use to try to enhance our safety when taking cabs home late at night. They include conspicuously writing down the cab license number infront of the cabbie, having a Bengali, or more preferably a male Bengali, “put you in” a cab and to tell the driver to get you home safely, and calling or pretending to call someone when riding home in the cab and saying loudly that you will be home in 10 minutes. I have also found that riding on the left side of the cab is preferable, since the cabbies cannot stare at you and your breasts in the rear view mirror. These are just some techniques. Hopefully, they will keep us as safe as possible. The anti-eve teasing group Blank Noise sells a shirt that says backwards “Kya Dekh Rehiho?” (in Hindi though- not written out in English characters) This means “What are You Looking At?” and it is intended for autorickshaw or cab drivers to see in their rear view mirrors as they (some of them) stare at your breasts.)

Now back to stupid testosterone-driven violence. In my attempt to ignore the stupid bar fight I turned to a friend of my friend, to whom I had just been introduced and asked where he was from. Frankfort. Then he became the type of dude I hate- he got really close to me and put his hands on my waist and shoulder to say something. He was the guy who talks to your hair in order to get as close as possible to you. Fucker. I didn’t attempt to listen to what he was saying and instead opted to communicate to my friend with WTF! eyes and with the disgusted this-guy-is-waay-too-close-and-creepy look. If you have to question whether someone is too close and creepy then they are already guilty of both. I pulled away and asked the women whether they wanted to go to the other side of the room, dance, and get away from the drunken abyss into which we had apparently fallen. Shortly thereafter we left. In fact, we got a two-man security escort to the car. What a stupid WTF night.