Day 25, Sept. 4

Today is to be an easy day with several choices. The fist choice I made was to attend the funeral Mass of a 77 year old priest who did the day before. In the last few weeks I have felt myself very close to the diocesan priests in India. It is not too much of a stretch to fee the need to pray with the archbishop and priests of Kolkata in their sorrow at losing one of their own.
For the most part the Mass was exactly what we would do in Tennessee. The homilist followed the same outline I have always heard at such occasions including a few funny anecdotes from the priest’s life. There were some differences. The casket was open and remained so through the Mass. At the beginning close priest friends and family put garlands on his open casket. After the final commendation, all us priests passed by the dead body and traced the sign of the cross on his forehead. That was weird as his forehead was warm (another warm and moist day in the big city) and soft.
Aft the funeral, I took a taxi back with a priest and got ready for a foray into the post office. The tea, woolen products and my prized Ghurka knife would have been a burden to carry all over India for the next two months. Mailing them home would be a solution. I checked with my brother and he agreed I should send them to my mother’ house. He’ll pick the package (10 lbs. or 4,25 kilos) up hen it arrives in about 6 weeks. I sure hope so. The local post office was busy. Instead of getting on the end of any of the lines there, I went directly to an old desk with a man who looked like a postal official. He may o may not have been; but he was knowledgeable and repacked my parcel, filled out all the customs info and sewed over the package with some light cloth. It looked professional. Now, all I have to do is hope it arrives before Nov. 1.
All day long heavy rain played tag with the sun. I got caught going to the post office and I got caught big time on my next trip. After lunch (1pm) I decided to visit the home (and museum) of the great Rabindranath Tagore. He was a poet, playwright, artist, and international intellectual. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. He wrote the Indian national anthem. Looking at his ideas as presented in his museum, he really has something to say even to our world. What I saw makes sense of Eastern spirituality in respect to dealing with the relationship of affluence in the midst of abject poverty.
Drenched, I made my way through the unfamiliar streets of a part of town I hadn’t seen before, looking for the subway station. Asking directions is fun but an inexact science. I was consistently directed and eventually reached the station half a mile way from the one I got out of. All the same, the experience of traipsing through sidewalks and streets filled with noise, commotion, business, while avoiding disrupting families living on the sidewalk is exhilarating to an extent. Add to that the ‘pucker’ factor of being 17,000 miles from home in a country where few can understand you. The times I asked directions and was greeted with heroic attempts to give me a right answer lifted my impression of the human race as quite a good group to belong to.