this post may or may not contain white angst, but we're all just going to have to deal with it

I've been after my landlady to get an internet connection in my flat, and I texted her a reminder on Monday morning. "Tonight!" she replied, and then to distract me from the fact that no such thing would happen invited me to a dance performance that evening (she reviews such things for a living). I arrived at the venue to meet her 15 minutes late, and she showed up about 45 minutes after that, but all was well because the performance began about an hour and a half after it was scheduled to. Following an extended introductory dance sequence featuring a girl clad in a black unitard carrying a cardboard cut-out of the letter "i" and dancing sexily around with it, a small, shy-looking man resembling Bruce McCulloch climbed onto the stage to welcome us. His head was completely bald, but it looked as though he had dipped all his fingertips in black ink and dragged them from each temple to the nape of his neck, the effect somewhat resembling a tire-track crown. "Welcome to this orange, bubbling dream of mine," he said, his saffron kurta flapping in the breeze of the wind machine. "Welcome to Interface2008." I fell in love with him immediately. Unfortunately he did no dancing but instead began to present lifetime achievement-style awards to various artists in the community whose gratitude ranged from a relatively famous author who admitted that he'd only just arrived, having forgotten about the event entirely, to a woman who was so overcome with emotion that she sang a very enthusiastic rendition of Auld Lang Syne.

I spend most of the last week in the village which has been the primary beneficiary and headquarters of the Society's project in the Sundarban delta. The Sundarbans: where nature is all around us! I've seen a crocodile, a huge black snake, and cockroaches bigger than I knew were possible. Usually I try not to use bug spray, especially after having found a corkscrew, having been left in a shoebox with a leaking container of Off! for a week, with its rubber parts completely disintegrated. Here, I'm practically drinking the stuff. At home I'm uncomfortable using chemical cleaning products, but at my flat in Kolkata I brandish my can of Raygon with glee, shooting streams of poison all around the kitchen. "You want to mess with me?" I asked the roaches who had made themselves at home during my time in the delta. "Haven't you heard of SCIENCE?"

A woman who works in an administrative capacity for the hospital in this village has been designated to show me around the project. Because of my course of study I have been having a very difficult time communicating to just about anyone that I'm not interested in the medical components of the Society's work here, so my days were completely scheduled for me and I was taken around to mobile health clinic sites on multiple islands while I am made to sit inappropriately and awkwardly in rooms with doctors while they are seeing patients. After trying to explain that I wanted to visit the mangrove plantation project I had to settle for being boated around the islands for hours while the woman pointed to every kind of recently planted vegetation around the bank and explained to me that "These are MAN-groves, meaning it is grown BY? The human being itself."

This person is clearly not going to be my key informant and I need to be more assertive about my autonomy during my next visit. I sincerely appreciate the time and energy this woman took to accompany me, and the delta is beyond gorgeous. But these last four days were incredibly frustrating, mostly because I wasn't allowed to move about by myself and was constantly presented by this woman to villagers, children, and the working class as "memsahib." Sahib means "friend" or "master" in Arabic as I understand it and today is used in India as a respectful form of "Mr.", but memsahib is distinctly colonial, being the term Indians used to address female members of the British Raj. I spent the week in this horrible language limbo, not confident enough in my abilities to speak freely in Bengali on my own behalf, but able to understand when she said to a group of schoolgirls "say hello to the memsahib!" as we cycle-vanned past them, and when waiting for a doctor to finish seeing patients at someone's home in a village she said "bring a chair for the memsahib! get a fan for the memsahib! you there, girl! bring the memsahib some bananas from your tree!" I would say to her as best I could to please just call me didi (meaning sister-- it's general practice to address anyone older than you as brother, sister, aunt, or uncle), and to stop making people bring me things, at which she would laugh and tell me how sweet I was. One of the health workers overheard this and found it very funny, trying to reiterate to her in Bengali "not memsahib, didi" after she continued. She turned to me and said "do you hear that? He called you didi. He is our colleague." So basically I spent four days continuously throwing up a little in my mouth while doctors and villagers at the clinic sites looked at me like "what the hell is this person doing here" and I tried to return with some version of a "I DON'T KNOW I'M SO SORRY" face.

I became friendly with the guys that worked on the boat we rode as we visited multiple islands, based on similarity of age, my rudimentary Bengali skillz, and both of them not being completely stressful human beings. They invited this woman and I to their village on a different island, and we went. The village is very small and there was no brick step or anything on the island, meaning in the low tide that we got to walk from the river up the bank through 100 meters of mud, which I found delightful. We sat outside someone's house with most of the people from the village while people served me tea but mostly didn't interact with me as my companion talked the entire time in Bengali about her family, work, adjusting to life in the Sundarban (she is from Kolkata and only moved to the delta two months ago). She would break the conversation to say things to me in English like "they have no electricity here, how do they live? Life is so hard, they really struggle. But even so Shibhani here says that life is peaceful here." I understand enough Bengali to know that this woman had been telling Shibhani how hard her (Shibhani's) life was, to which Shibhani replied that they lead a very peaceful life here. Then my companion would say "You wanted to see village people, no!? Now you see them. They are very simple." To which I can only reply, "Erm."

So basically I got nowhere with my research, felt really uncomfortable, and some other shitty stuff happened, too, resulting with me being sort of beholden to this woman to spend time with her when I return to the delta... if this happens I'm never ever getting anything done. Oy. Puja and friends are coming. I'll focus on that for the next few weeks. Jisshu.