There’s a lady being fucked from behind. The lady is white and the cock is big and black. She’s made up with those Amy-Winehouse style cat eyes that everybody seems to like these days, and her silicone tits are huge, defying gravity. The man with the penis is hardly visible. Really, he’s just a cock.
This is a picture from a pornographic magazine. It’s been neatly cut out, pasted onto a piece of cardboard, and now, a smiling gentleman is holding it up to my face.
I’m still not entirely sure how we got into this mess. We were walking across Hooglie Park – a vast and dirty scrubland in the centre of Kolkata. Bodies lay everywhere, stretched out in the dusty heat. Aga and I had been playing a guessing game: ‘Dead or Sleeping?’
Somewhere along the way a polite young Indian guy had joined us. His English was pretty good and he seemed to want to practice. So far he’d been filling us in on interesting facts about India’s economy – potentially quite useful for a budding journalist such as myself. But a while ago he’d decided to shift the conversation:
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If you’ve ever watched The Jungle Book, you might be able to form yourself up a fairly good image of my first view of Kolkata. The ground emerged from beneath misty aeroplane haze. I saw luscious, jungly clusters of palm trees and odd, irregular-shaped houses. Deep jewels glistened and shimmered in the ground, eventually revealing themselves to be dark pools of water. But as we came to land I noticed that the rivers were filthy and strewn with litter.
This is a city of constant paradox. Rich vibrant colours scream out for attention, but are numbed and mattified by the relentless dust. Bejewelled, beautiful women sit barefoot in the dirt next to filthy, swollen nippled bitch-dogs. The rich/poor divide reaches out constantly to slap you in the face.
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This Tuesday, I’ll be jumping on a plane and flying out to Kolkata, India. Why? Because Child In Need Institute (CINI) have asked me to write an article on the work they do to support malnourished families. I’ll be finding out what it’s like to be a mother in a country where a child dies every fifteen seconds. Hell, I don’t even know what it’s like to be a mother back here. Am I nervous? Terribly.
But I’m also intrigued. Lonely Planet describes Kolkata as ‘Simultaneously noble and squalid, cultured and desperate…a festival of human existence.’ That sounds like a night at Poetry Unplugged. From the preliminary research I’ve managed to establish that whilst Westerners find the poverty immensely shocking, it seems that many of the families who live those lives don’t actually realise that things could be different. Several of the local doctors point-blank refused to believe that there are countries out there where malnourishment isn’t a major issue.
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