My walk to work - 22nd Jan

It starts, as always, at the chai stall.

While I hear temperatures are holding at well below zero in the UK, blankets of snow, frozen roads, closed schools, summer has started to come to Calcutta - or so I was thinking.

Having a camera in the vicinity does strange things to people.
Men started to amble ever so nonchalantly towards the place where the strange blonde girl was writing and taking pictures. Standing that little bit taller, that little bit prouder. Go on take my picture. Well you had to really.

This girl is always walking around the area, holding her baby to her hip, standing in front of people without needing to say what she is asking for. I don't even know if it's her baby - for all I know it's part of some city-wide use-a-baby-to-get-money scam. I have managed so far to ignore the requests, or actually sometimes the demands, for money, for children, from children but well, what can you do?
I fumbled in my pocket and drew out a flimsy excuse of a worn, ragged bill, which the mother/sister/baby borrower slipped professionally into her bag. One more sucker, I thought. But then a few minutes later I saw her walking back towards me with some food she had bought for the baby - even though it was some horrific sticky orange thing that I'm sure would offer no solution to the child's tiny thin bones she had pointed out to me earlier.

I set off on my 25-minute walk to work. Now those who know me me will know I have one of the worst senses of direction ever. I am phenomenally bad. I am impressively bad. 

Calcutta is not the place to have a bad sense of direction. The streets look the same; they have at least two names each, one ludicrously British - Hungerford Street, Devon Road, Shakespeare Avenue - the other unpronouncably long and neither of which help as no one seems to know where anything is, nor how to get there, anyway. One of the main arteries is bizarrely shaped like an infinity figure of eight that seems to turn itself inside out and be on every part of town all at once. A nightmarish trick of urban planning (or rather lack of) for someone as geographically-challenged as myself. 

My walk to work, however, is blissfully simple. Turn left out the house, turn right at the park, left at the Austin sign and straight. 

Yes Einstein, how right you are.

Now you see what I mean when I say that the pavements have been hijacked, forcing anyone so foolish as to walk to further extend the heights of foolishness by walking on the road. This is what the main stretch of my walk to work looks like.

And conveniently located so while you're picking up your new hubcaps and ratchet....

Today's message from Mother Teresa:

and into the office I go.