My friend Zoe took me to Boston for my birthday. I live less than 2 hours away, but I’d never spent time there before. 

We parked in a garage by the Boston Common for 11 dollars, and got a kick out of circling around trying to park because a man in a golf cart appeared out of nowhere and ushered us to a spot. We walked around the Common, watched a group of dozens of women in bright sweatsuits doing Zumba, and took the Tube to Cambridge. Walked around Harvard Square and then went to Harvard, which was interesting because the atmosphere was so relaxed and so different from where I go to school. Maybe it was all the tourists - I loved listening to all the languages around me. 

There was an alum gathering in a science building, with people handing out red cloth lunch boxes, and somehow we ended up with four of those lunch boxes. We ate sandwiches and chips outside the International Law Center (I’d whined my way into visiting the law school) and then stole a bunch of free tampons from the bathroom inside. (I go to a women’s college and they don’t have free tampons in the public bathrooms. I was envious.) We demonstrated our women’s-college-ness in other ways: my friend went up to a random boy and asked if she could have a picture with him because she was determined to take one with a man.

We ate a beautiful Indian buffet lunch at a restaurant on Harvard Square, visited the bookstore (I was envious again; see picture), and went back to Boston. We were planning to go straight to Quincy Market to walk the freedom trail, but when we got out at a stop one of my friends didn’t make it out of the Tube before the doors closed, and so the rest of us walked to the next stop to meet her, accidentally ending up in the Public Garden. We looked at ducks and saw about sixty thousand couples posing for wedding pictures. Of course we had to spend some time discussing the brides’ dresses, not without going off on a tangent about the wedding industry and how evil it is (superliberal women’s college moment number three). 

We ate ice-cream and saw street performers in front of Quincy Market. Walked the freedom trail around the Italian North End, chanced on a very smelly Farmer’s Market, walked around Paul Revere’s house and ducked into some shops selling olive oil and pasta. Boston was quaint and peaceful and vibrant at the same time and it was a good birthday. The sunset we saw while driving back made it even better.

Alexandria was an interesting blend of Graeco-Roman and traditional Islamic architecture - it was founded by Alexander the Great. I saw catacombs for the first time in my life - lots of winding labyrinths and stairs. Deep down, the tombs had elaborate engravings on them that were a blend of Egyptian and Roman Gods and symbols. We saw Pompei’s pillar and a tomb of an unknown soldier in the central part of the city - both that blend. And lots of glimpses of the Mediterannean sea, although a horse got in the way once.

I didn’t bathe in the Mediterannean, though. My dad asked me if I wanted to, and I thought of, you know, sand in my shoes and all of that crap, and said no. It’s ended up being one of my biggest regrets - I was SO CLOSE TO BATHING IN THE MEDITERANNEAN. (It’s probably why I waded into the freezing Atlantic this spring break in Newport, Rhode Island, but that’s another story, and it’s formed my new life philosophy - ALWAYS BATHE IN THE MEDITERANNEAN. Metaphorically). 

Anyway, we drank Turkish coffee, which was so strong I felt like a racehorse about to race even though I was running on about two hours of sleep, and shot the breeze with our tour guide. When we went back to Cairo, we went to Walid’s home and played with his completely adorable four-year-old daughter Clara. My mom and Clara danced to music videos while I looked at wedding pictures and drank a kind of guava smoothie.

They made kebabs and rice for us and we all ate from a communal plate, with Walid’s wife sitting next to me and quite literally feeding me - poking the largest pieces of chicken into my mouth with her own fork. They took us shopping for pretty little bottles of atar perfume, in a district that no tourist goes, and also to what they said was the best ice-cream place in Cairo that tourists didn’t go to either (unfortunately for said tourists, it was implied). I got mango and it was delicious. They also treated us to kushari, rice and beans and pasta, which I didn’t like much but proceeded to praise extravagantly for the entire car ride to a mall they wanted to show off.

Clara wouldn’t let go of my hand as we walked around. She was the sunniest little kid ever, smiled a lot and recited the English alphabet every time there was a pause in the conversation. She also squealed in Arabic a lot and was astonished every time I failed to understand. We managed to communicate swimmingly, though, through pointing and pulling each other in different directions. When her family dropped us off at our hotel and they drove off, I could see her in the backseat on her mother’s lap, flailing and crying with her arms stretched out to me.

I cried when I got on the plane to New York, and not just because I was going to spend the night on a hard seat in JFK because my flight landed after the last bus to my small college town from New York had left. 

I ended up in Egypt accidentally - tourism dropped because of the political uprising, and when I was looking up cheap flights from Kolkata back to school, EgyptAir offered one for 600 dollars instead of the usual at-least-800 dollars deal (This no longer exists: it is now 1300 dollars and I am not going home for a while). This was good because I’d saved up exactly 638 dollars from working right before going home for vacation. This was bad - or so it seemed - because the layover in Cairo was two days long. So I decided to cut out of the airport and spend my layover in Egypt. After all, my friend Angela and I had been supremely excited when Mubarak stepped down, watching zillions of videos of Tahrir Square and watching an Arabic movie from a completely different part of the world to celebrate, and actually visiting Tahrir Square would be a dream come true. My parents decided I would not do this alone, and turned my little trip to Liberation Square into a huge production of this-is-the-last-three-days-with-our-daughter-before-she-goes-away-again. It was the best thing ever.

In Cairo, we went on a cruise on the Nile, along which is a gorgeous mix of old Islamic architecture and new million-dollar apartment buildings, and watched dervishes dance, the million colors of their clothing flaring and whirling.

I rode a camel around the pyramids of Giza. It was still and quiet and sunny, just me and the camel and a little kid egging on the camel and asking for 5 pounds every once in a while.

We went to Khan-el-Khalili market, straight out of the Arabian nights, where we ate kebabs and flatbread, haggled endlessly, and argued with someone who offered my dad camels for my cherry. I suspect this was a give-tourists-a-thrill-offer, but it delighted my parents.

We stayed up late inadvertently because our hotel was having loud concerts every night with beautiful Arabic music to help guests stay up till dawn to break their fast  for Ramdan. 

We saw mummies and King Tut’s elaborate jewelry in the Egyptian museum.

And I made it to Tahrir Square. We chatted with the soldiers standing around its edge, sat and ate peanuts that we bought from a street vendor, and I almost died of excitement. The tour guide, Walid, whose home we visited later (more on that soon), talked about his pride that the people had “overthrown corruption”. So did the driver, who sketched out a history of Egyptian rulers on a tissue. It was kind of strange how the words they used were similar to what you’d read in a New York Times edition covering the issue.

The next day we went to Alexandria.

It feels like years since the trip this summer, but here’s what I remember: Agra is kind of a dump. Lots of cow dung everywhere. But the first sight of the Taj Mahal, sort of floating in the clouds at dawn…it’s kind of a religious experience.

What else do I remember? The potato-stuffed paranthas I had for breakfast in Agra every morning. The woman who would walk outside our hotel singing religious songs on a loudspeaker at 4 am every day. Taking autos everywhere. Buland Darwaza, the tallest gate in South Asia, large and magnificent…and the goat droppings on every stair leading up to it. The compound inside it, with a marble white mosque and the tombs of the lesser Mughal royals sprinkled around, and a space for three different religions…and the little kids who would run around selling to tourists postcards with pictures of monuments and songs they’d made up about the fact that there isn’t a toilet in the compound. Always a strange mixture of beautymagnificencegrandeur and, well, the bizarre opposite.

Even at the Taj. There were the white people using sarees as scarves and pouting for pictures, and the plastic packets littering the ground, and…

But I remember the anticipation building as I could see different parts from different places of the city and then little glimpses through the four different gates, and then finally, it just burst into sight and it was glorious.

On a visit to the old, more chaotic-Indian-city-of-my-youth-like part of Delhi, I see the Red Fort, ruled in by the fifth great Mughal emperor Shahjahan. It looks promisingly awe-inspiring on the outside – despite the ticket stubs littering every available inch of ground – but once you get past the little alley half-heartedly selling models of the Taj Mahal at the entrance that was once a great bazaar catering to princes and nobles, it’s sort of ramshackle and dirty.  Tons of structures had been torn down by the British after they took over India, the Mughal architecture infringed everywhere by British structures that housed British soldiers, all the pretty marble inlay faded with all the stones stolen. The ruins don’t look like a palace – they could be random monuments on a road, so badly maintained that they don’t even look like they’d been grand once – and yet it’s the place of thousands of glorious stories. It’s just depressing. I’m not the only one who is a little heartbroken – my cousin declares, “Let’s tear down Buckingham Palace!”

Since I’m an emotional eater, I spend the rest of the day eating. In Chandi Chowk, the bazaar of impossibly narrow crowded filthy glittering alleys right outside the Red Fort, we hunt down an alley selling various kinds of paranthas – from novelties like paranthas stuffed with sweet rabri to the more traditional potato-stuffed or pea-stuffed – and, um, stuff ourselves.  There’s also kulfi, like ice-cream but with several spices and some noodle-like things covered in syrup that cools me down and gives me a sugar kick. Then we go to Moti Mahal, the oldest Mughlai restaurant in Delhi, where the waiters wear British-Raj-era headgear and bow deferentially upon opening the door, for the most delicious lunch I’ve ever eaten – kashmiri mutton pulao (rice, meat, spices), egg keema (minced meat and egg) and butter naan. It’s the kind of place where you order seconds even if you’re a size-zero supermodel with a show in Paris Fashion Week in an hour.

Delhi, India’s capital, where I go to visit my brother, is all red earth and shrubs from the window seat of the plane. It’s only when we go into the city that I realize it isn’t a part of the India I grew up in. It has more green than the sprawling crumbling mess that is my hometown Kolkata, despite its desert North Indian terrain to Kolkata’s wet marshes and sea and tall coconut trees. It has roads and buses and a metro station that New York or Chicago could envy. And behind the glossy urban feel of it all there’s so much history.

A very short recap: Delhi was the capital of several different dynasties of Indian kings. It was even mentioned in the Iliad of Eastern civilization, the Mahabharata. Several Muslim dynasties, Turks and Persians, whose empires I’ve studied details of for several springtime exams all my life, had their capitals there.  The most famous, of course, are the Mughals, and not just because it was the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan who built Tourism India’s biggest claim to fame, the Taj Mahal. The Mughal empire ruled over India for 300 years and is responsible for its greatest architecture. They built palaces, founded a religion, patronized artists and singers and gave the country, fought over by thousands of different dynasties, stability that helped it grow.

On my first day in Delhi, the National Museum in Delhi is the first place in which I begin to realize how amazing and far-reaching Indian history is, and just how much gorgeous stuff has been made during its course. There are artefacts from the Mohenjo-Daro and Harappan civilizations, which started near Delhi and are as old as the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations. These featured wonders of urban planning,  of which an incredibly sophisticated drainage system that I marvel at because I have a thing for clean bathrooms is not the least. I have to also marvel at the detailed finish of the seals and the statues and the coins and the utensils featured in the exhibit. The next few hours are a whirlwind of breathtaking stone statues of religious figures from later Hindu dynasties, the edicts of Ashoka the Budhhist king on a stone, currency notes from the early 1900s, miniature paintings of religious figures and kings hunting and partying and smoking huqqa and pining for their queens, a wooden  door with thousands of engravings from the Chola dynasty, a thousands-of-years old bust of Lord Shiva,  intricately-patterned handles of daggers and clothes with more delicate embroidery than I can take in in a few minutes. Why Europe is considered the bedrock of civilization or art or whatever is suddenly beyond me.

I walk around the Lodi Gardens, where tombs of Muslim rulers like Muhammad Shah are and which is mostly a lot of lush green vastness with the occasional grandly imposing palatial tomb. It’s in the heart of the city, but so peaceful inside, with birds chirping and teenage couples strolling. A pause in the sightseeing for biryani – rice, meat and potato cooked in several different spices, for philistines who’ve never tasted it – at the Islamic Cultural Centre and then the India Gate, a gigantic round arch built as a war memorial for Indian soldiers who fought for the colonizing British in the World War. My brother’s car is blocked at its entrance by an enterprising parking attendant who demands twenty rupees for an hours’ gazing.

My brother’s government-sponsored driver, who possesses the intrepidity of a true North Indian, demands brusquely, “What if we don’t take an hour?”

“You will,” says the parking attendant, enjoying a thorough nose-digging session while staring into the distance.

“You don’t know that,” says the driver, and guns the car past the metal barrier and leaving the parking attendant enjoying the contents of his nose even as he shouts, “You will!” after us.

I stare at it and think not of brave soldiers but of things that come out of a war – new societal and political structures, new states, literature, film, thousands of stories, memorials.  

“We were here for twelve minutes,” the driver says triumphantly as he brushes past the parking attendant again.

After the twelve minutes at the India Gate, I visit the second Mughal ruler Humayun’s tomb, which is described as the precursor to the Taj Mahal since it was built by his grieving widow and has the general pattern of the Taj – four gates leading to the mausoleum at the centre. We pay ten rupees for entrance while the Argentinian couple in front of us coughs up five hundred. (Note to tourists: when in India, learn how to say two tickets please with an authentic Indian accent, because masquerading as an Indian national will save you thousands in tourist-spot entrance fees.) My brother points out the blend of Hindu Rajput and Islamic architecture in the pairing of curved arches with squares, the geometric precision of the arched doorways so that through one you can see the next, the white patterns somehow carved into the red sandstone. We hear a peacock’s shrieks and walk around the gardens surrounding the tomb looking for it, but it’s nowhere to be found. Inside the grand arched room housing the tomb is a dozing dog and a couple of squatter women stretched out asleep on the raised tombstones. Welcome to the fastest growing population in the world, where any surface is good for shelter.

A break from the forty-degrees-Celcius day in the Barista coffee shop in Khan Market, a series of shops where Delhi-ites shopped before malls took over the developing world, with a horrible drink that I vehemently recommend the avoidance of called a Green Tea Mojito. And then Delhi Haat, a village-fair-like market with shops selling handicrafts and glittering bangles and henna-applying services and and bags and shirts and intricately-stitched wall hangings and notebooks and earrings and busts of gods and furniture made with mind-boggling care, some of the most beautiful and intricate and elaborate things I’ve ever seen. The bargaining goes like this:

The bargaining goes like this:

“How much?” “One-fifty.” “Bhaiyya, (brother), tell me the proper price.” “I’m telling you a good price! I’ll make it one forty-five for your sake.” “Thirty.” “Will you give me a hundred?” “Fifty.” “You must be joking.” “Fifty.” “Think of me sister, I have a wife, I have children…how about eighty?” “I will be grateful to you forever, good karma will visit you, I’ll come back again…let’s say fifty-five.” Nobody budges for a minute, and then the buyer turns away. After walking five paces… “Okay, okay!” And it’s sold for seventy.

A man turns the handle of a bioscope, a box with holes in it that one puts one’s eye to look at pictures that move in an endless loop as the handle is turned. There are also food stalls from every state in the country. Like good citizens of Kolkata, the capital of the state of Bengal, we head to the stall from Bengal and battle with stray dogs and sixty billion flies for fish rolls. I’m ready for more.

At night, stalls all over Sukhumvit, the main residential area in Bangkok, sell broomsticks, clocks and everything in between. The bargaining happens through calculators, since the vendors can’t speak English numbers and use the number keys to show prices. I made a visual list of what I saw in one street of stalls and, inexplicably, bought a set of Lilliputlian tea cups. 

Later we went to a market in Little India, which was peppered all over with election posters, passing the Parliament on the way. Since it’s not a tourist trap like Sukhumvit and only the locals shop there, it’s possible to find completely gorgeous shirts, skirts and dresses for 80 or 100 baht (about 3 dollars). One ignores the labor-wage-rate implications of this. Another great place for that is Khlong San market, by the Chao Phraya River (Khlong means canal in Thai). Packing to go back to the US without having to pay a fortune for excess baggage is now going to be an issue.

Shopping, check.

Pattaya, the Cancun/Tijuana/Goa/Myrtle Beach of Thailand.

More Bangkok.

Our tour guide’s name is Johnny. Later he says, “My real name is (insert vague hissing here), but my nickname is John because that means naked in Thai and I never wanted to wear clothes as a child. So everyone calls me Johnny.”

He is an annoying-interesting combination of chatty, as tour guides are, while driving to the temple of the Golden Buddha. “There are four things to enjoy in Thailand: praying, eating, massage and shopping.” Pointing to an ornate building in the distance: “This is where people who have no families are put in a coffin. Then their ashes are scattered wherever they want. I want mine to be scattered on a mountaintop. Like,” and he sings, “I Believe I Can Fly.”

“I was a monk for 2 years so my mother would enjoy the afterlife. It’s a hard life. No touching women – ” poking my knee to illustrate “ – no meat, vegetarian meal only once a day, and begging in the morning. Can you imagine? Only vegetarian.”

My father, who was a vegetarian for forty years, makes an astounded noise.

First we are taken to a store selling different kinds of gem jewelry. This is common practice in Bangkok: tour guides and taxi drivers are paid by these stores to take fares to them before their destination.

Next we go to see the Golden Buddha. It weighs 5 kg. In gold. We climb a series of marble stairs to look at it. Behind it is a bucket with bottles of water that have golden caps. The sign says “Holy Water”. Johnny informs us that we have to chant certain words before drinking to make sure the holy properties of the water are activated. My mother prays.  A monk gestures at me to kneel and when I do, unexpectedly douses me with a bunch of water. Then he ties a bit of cloth around my wrist, muttering what I’m sure are holiness-activating words.

Then we go to Wat Po, the oldest temple in Thailand, where the Reclining Buddha stretches on forever. Pillars divide the gleaming golden statue into segments: you take in the face first, and then several stretches of the torso, and then the large feet. The statue represents the Buddha dying, about to reach the stage of nirvana. Little jars stretch along the length of the temple – you get a bowl of coins in exchange for 20 baht and walk along the jars, dropping one coin in each as an offering. A woman pushing a wheelbarrow follows, dumping each jar upside-down in the wheelbarrow as she walks. This temple was not a part of the ruins that existed when Thailand was a part of modern-day India – it was built in 1792, Johnny informs us.

The compound of the temple has several stupas and a bunch of structures that house over 300 golden Buddhas. It is peaceful in the compound, with monks in saffron milling around doing things with flowers and incense sticks. In the distance can be glimpsed the top of the building that houses holy books. Also in the compound are diagrams of pressure points in the human body: this was where Thailand’s first massage school, started in 1850 was. There are other small temples throughout the compound, housing Buddhas in different positions – different day of the week, pray to one in a different position. There is a lot of gold and a lot of grandeur and despite my determined irreverence, there are moments when I feel a hush.

Eating, massage, praying: check.

My best friend Jinal and I do this thing where we aimlessly wander the streets of Kolkata. One day we found ourselves in the backpacker area , where all the European tourists bunk and every building is a foreign-money changer or named “VIP International Hotel”. Jinal got excited: “I was driving around once and I found out that there’s a red light area somewhere around here.”  We decided to hunt for it.

I had absolutely no idea where it could be, but overheard a European man ask a cabdriver where Sudder Street was. I’d heard the name before – there’d been an expose in the newspaper (http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070218/asp/calcutta/story_7406290.asp) about how, nicknamed “Shudder Street”, it was full of little alleys where all the drug deals happened, tourists  smoked hash in hostel rooms that smelled of pee, and people posing as guides or ganja-dealers molested tourists or killed them for money. It seemed like the right place to find a brothel. So we followed the cab containing the European a little way, promptly lost it in the crowd, and then had no idea where to go.  “Let’s ask someone where the street is,” I suggested.

We tried to be subtle about it. We went up to a rickshawallah, and asked him what the street on our left was. Then the one on our right. Neither of them turned out to be Sudder Street.

“We can’t just ask someone,” Jinal said. “We’re not tourists, they’ll wonder why we want to know.”

“It’s not like tourists have a monopoly on the street. We could pretend to be tourists.”

Jinal gave me a scathing look. “The only tourists we could pass for would be Bangladeshi. “ She paused for a second. “That would make them want our money less.”

I clutched my camera tightly. “I’d die if they stole my camera.”

Jinal flagged down a passerby and put on a fake South Indian accent as she asked for directions.  He told us to go straight, then right. When that got us to a large bright pink apartment building next to a dead end, we backtracked, this time deciding to ask a woman because that would be safer. Out came the South Indian accent again. We finally found a street that had Sudder Street on all the hotel signs. On the way we’d discovered a mysterious puddle of bright green water, a bookstore that had been “recommended by the LonelyPlanet”, a few naked children  - “obviously they’re the prostitutes’ children” said Jinal with all her one-fifths-a-lawyer-studying-at-India’s-finest-law-school wisdom, a mermaid on a rooftop that made Jinal scream on first glance, and a restaurant that sold “biryani tandoori Chinese” but no beef.

“Do you have good reflexes?” Jinal asked nervously as we walked down the street of supposed ill repute, which had colourful silk ethnic bags, guest houses and tandoori Chinese restaurants on every corner.

“No.”

“Then give me your umbrella, because I do.”

Armed with an umbrella, clutching my camera, we headed into a sufficiently suspicious-looking alley. I jumped a little every time I saw somebody, mostly because the alley was deserted apart from a dirty-shirted man with a squint sitting on a wheelchair and smoking something out of a tube that probably accounted for his vacant look in our direction who scared Jinal so much that I was made to walk on his side of the road, even though she was the one with the weapon. Oh, and a structure that looked kind of pretty with greenish marble inlay, but was basically a set of urinals with no doors or any kind of sheltering that were occupied by men relieving themselves.

“Maybe would talk loudly in Bengali so people know we’re not tourists and don’t try to knife us or take our money, and no one looks at us,” I said nervously.

“YES!” Jinal shouted in Bengali. Everyone looked at us.

The buildings at the end of the alley didn’t look like a brothel, but Jinal was convinced that the guest house at the end of the road was, because it had a picture of a Barbie on the wall – “what kind of normal guest house has a Barbie on the wall?” – a large curtain shadowing the interior – “you know what’s behind that curtain!”    – the words “Ideal for foreigners” on the front door – “YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS”.

Before we could investigate further,   someone wheeled into sight. It was the man with the pipe.

“I’M HAPPY I’M BENGALI,” I said loudly.

We walked away very fast.

I was disappointed that we hadn’t found what we’d navigated Shudder Street for, although Jinal was convinced that she had. It was only later that a guy friend said to Jinal, “It’s not like that. It’s not, like, there’s a house that’s a brothel. You have to go up to a pimp and ask for stuff.”

That was when we understood who the man with the tube was.  We looked at each other and let out loud shrieks.

I realize that there are a lot of ugly angles of this post, and it’s not just that Jinal and I are…eccentric.  There’s the whole prostitution-and-drugs thing.  There’s the whole being-a-tourist-in-our-own-country thing – how sad is it that we feel unsafe in a neighbourhood down the road from where we go to school? It’s sad that the neighbourhood exists, it’s sad that we are so sheltered and so very upper-class and separated from the poverty in so many bits of the city that we feel badass going into it, it’s sad that any woman would probably be unsafe there after dark.  And, ugh, the goddamn urinals.

But what I’m probably going to remember twenty years later about my search for Sudder Street is going to be talking in a Tamil accent, stalking cabs, arguing about the quality of the food cooked on the street, shrieking in the middle of the street and being completely ridiculous with my best friend.