Excerpts from my Journal-Kolkata, India

My head hits the pillow with little regard for the color of the sheets and the stains on the walls. Outside I can hear the bustling streets of Kolkata come to a standstill and in the far off distance I can make out the explosion of more fireworks, another festival. The mind turns to the weeks passed and again I can feel the slow process of realization and change occurring. Guilt is an awful feeling and more so when you are unable to identify that which you have done wrong.

The voices of those in the streets plague me as much as the faces and bare feet of their owners. “Please sir, no money, just milk for my baby.” I ignored the advances of another pleading mother. Why? Do I fear the scam of it? Not believe the legitimacy of such a plea? Not care that in her arms there lay a starving child screaming out from the pains of hunger? Or is it I am too overwhelmed to believe I am capable of doing anything in a country this size with a people this poor?

I lay for a long while as the moonlight casts its shadows upon my wall, not quite awake not quite asleep.

I see their waste high faces peering up at me, with no formal education, selling to me, begging me, joking with me. Those who I do speak with paint only the beginning of a picture; a life which I cannot ever fully understand, a life of struggle and hardship which exists to me only in the media and one they only know.

I see them playing cricket in the streets and asking me to join, happy to have a street to play in and a foreigner to practice English with. The simplicity in this humbles me.  As a child I remember hearing bed time stories of men on their travels. Now I am a man on his travels imagining the stories of these children. For the Silo, Joshua Winter.