Flight to Kolkata

We nibbled on starchy cakes and tough spicy cookies as the plane cruised northwest along the coast of continental South East Asia. I stuck out like a sore thumb: I was probably the only non-ethnic Indian on board. The middle aged couple beside me turned out to be Singaporean Indians visiting Kolkata for some personal affairs. Like any other kindly Singaporean uncle, the man beside me got a little worried about a (not-so) young boy travelling alone in India for the first time, and lapsed into a series of warnings, of touts, weather, dirt, and diarrhoea.

Below us broad deltas appeared one after another, I was fascinated: was that Salween? Irrawaddy? The landscape culminated in a vast waterlogged delta made up of countless numbers of islets that stretched as far as the eye could see. We are overlooking the great Mouths of the Ganges straddling the apex of the Bay of Bengal. So much water flows out of this mighty delta that undersea river channels extended as far as 2,000 km away.

















Kolkata was near.