Calcutta

“If you were a better liberal, you’d save that goat,” Pitt told me as we watched a diminutive, furry black goat receive a blessing of orange powder on his forehead in preparation for his impending sacrifice. I fiercely inhaled heavy air and wondered if I should leave. But, I couldn’t. There were two brown urchins holding onto my legs. I focused on their steaming little bodies holding tight to my legs, little tree huggers, and looked down into their laughing eyes. I tried to ignore the squalls of the goat. But, in retrospect, even if the babes hadn’t latched onto me, I wouldn’t have moved to save him. Instead, I came when Pitt motioned for me to watch from a better vantage point near him. And, steps from the chopping block, the energy building in crescendo, I winced as the goat came undone.

I felt strange about it afterwards—watching him die—so we left immediately, stepping over skinny women in wrinkled, cotton saris on the way out the temple gates. By this time, I had figured out that tickling the little leaches on my legs would make them release their grip, and forget about asking for rupees.

The heat combined with the smell of goat blood, which was all over the ground, along with the thwack of the scythe as it beheaded the goats was sensory overload. We left and went to the waterside for some air at Kalighat, a shrine-filled area with steps that lead down to the water. We were lucky there was no breeze that morning, because the river water was malodorous and filled with brown sludge and plastic trash. But, it was away from the Kali temple, where more than twenty goats had already been killed that morning, and more than twenty more would be killed before the sun reached its zenith.

From Kalighat, a word that a seafaring Brit is said to have mangled, Calcutta got her name. So, a visit to Calcutta is incomplete without paying homage to goddess Kali the Destroyer at her temple and seeing the waterside ghat named after her. In fact, I went twice to the temple during my five days in the city—once, because a nice Indian man I met on the street dragged me there, thinking that I might like to see it; another time, because two newfound friends with Enfield Bullets, casually invited me to join them at the ghat. Never one to miss a motorcycle ride through the chaotic streets of India, I accepted the invitation. They neglected to mention the goat situation.

The day of the sacrifice was my last day in Calcutta and my second to last day in India. The scene at the temple epitomized everything I had imagined I might encounter in India: inhumanly-thin beggars, wiggly children, fanatical Hindu worship, sweat-inducing heat, harsh light, intense colors, nose-wrinkling smells—it was all there. And, yet, after two and half months in India, this was the first time I had experienced all those things at once, in full force. And so, I didn’t stop the goat from being killed, but took it all in as a mark of India, as India-ness. I didn’t judge and I tried not to open my eyes too wide at the spectacle. A temple worker thumbed slick goat blood onto a girl’s forehead; worshippers slid their own heads into the guillotine and said a silent prayer, a tail-wagging puppy licked up the goat entrails. I accepted it all, and left silently, wondering if it had been wrong for me to be there, a curious george, a gawker, a tourist.